Religion and Radical Empiricism

[DavidM58]

I recently finished reading what I feel is an important and well-written/well reasoned book from 1987, Nancy Frankenberry's Religion and Radical Empiricism.

A couple of quotes that really jumped out at me (esp. the bolded parts). I would enjoy hearing responses from others. 

“From the perspective of radical empiricism, the basic criticism of Kan’ts philosophy is that it neglected the role of what Whitehead calls “physical feelings,” which form the nonconceptual element in experience. Although radical empiricists can agree with Kant that “intuitions without concepts are blind,” they want to add, with Whitehead, that this is so for a different reason: there are objects for knowledge in every act of experience, but knowledge arises only when intellectual functioning is included in that act of experiencing, and such inclusion is not always the case. For Kant there was nothing to know apart from concepts, since it was intellectual functioning which introduced order into what was otherwise a mere spatio-temporal flux of sensations. Mental operations were the foundation rather than the culmination of experience in Kant’s system.

By contrast, radical empiricism involves an important inversion of Kant’s philosophy…For Kant, the world emerged from the subject; for radical empiricism, the subject emerges from the world.”

-          P. 172, Nancy Frankenberry, Religion and Radical Empiricism

For context, read more excerpts at Google Books here

Here's an example of a "radical empiricist" displaying the above positition.  Bernard Meland, from his last book Fallible Forms & Symbols (1976):

“Much of the meaning we appear to find in life, we bring to it, as Kant observed, through our own forms of sensibility and understanding. But, as James and Bergson were later to remark, countering the stance of Kant and Hume in one basic respect, the nexus of relationships that forms our existence is not projected, it is given. We do not create these relationships; we experience them, being given with existence…thus I am led empirically to speak of God as the Ultimate Efficacy within relationships.”

-          Bernard Meland, quoted by Frankenberry, p. 134

For context, read more excerpts at Google Books here

[DavidM58]

Layman,

2 questions:

1) Is "pre-sapient levels of consciousness" related at all to panpsychism or pansemiotism (ref. Tim Winton's 2013 ITC paper).

2) Who is Joshu and why does he have a gate?

[Layman Pascal]

Joshu is a toothless old woman who gives gritty but compelling blowjobs. Either that or the Zen Master whose claim that dog's certainly DO NOT (Mu!) have the buddha-mind formed the introductory koan -- until Hakuin invented the sound of one clapping hand. He has a gate because he lives in a castle with a solid stone wall surrounding it on all sides. Or he has a gate because because the trans-rational yes/no opens in two directions simultaneously... and only one of them admits you to the fortress of Zen.

Pre-sapient consciousness can easily be related to panpsychism and pansemiotism. My (unfolding) definitions are alluded to in the Christmas Wiki. Sentience is "pre-sapient" and is expressed by any organism that can experience positive or negative reactions to what happens to "its" body. They "sense" but do know "know" their existence. Then we might talk about pre-sentient consciousness... which must descend by levels all the way to "pure cognitive potential" that is present even in the mutual trace left upon two quarks colliding in the blackness of space.  Mutual detectability is "panpsychic" in the usual sense of that world.  It is enfolded in sentience which is enfolded in sapience which is enfolded in what I would call salience.