Man is a deterministic rational self-referring relativistic system.
Man is a deterministic rational self-referring relativistic system whose life aquires it peculiar dimension through self-consciousness; ethic and morality arise as comment arises that he he makes on his behavior through self-observation. He lives in a continuously changing domain of descriptions that he generates through recursive interactions within that domain, and which has no other constant element in its historical transformation than his maintained identity as an interacting system.
Man is a rational animal that constructs his rational systems as all rational systems are constructed, that is, based on arbitrarily accepted truths (premises); being himself a relativistic self-referring deterministic system this cannot be otherwise. But if only a relative, arbitrarily chosen, system of reference is possible, the unavoidable task of man as a self-conscious animal that can be an observer of its own cognitive processes is to explicitly choose a frame of reference for his system of values. (BC 91)
This page was last updated on July 11, 1996, by Rob Sable.