En Lin Wei writes:
<(1)  The intimate essence of the universe is not of the
  same nature as our own consciousness.
  (2)  Our own consciousness is incapable of having produced
  the universe.
  (3)  God, therefore, exists.  That is to say, there is no
  reason for not applying the term God, Theos, to the
  intimate essence
    (S.P., 49).

Where does this fit in the history of Western rationalism?>

Let me play a bit of the icnoclast here. Pound's quotes above fit quite
nicely into the Western pattern if you consider the seamless
substitution of a godhead by the idea of the 'object' or the 'other' or
what Kant, returning a certain amount of mystery to the discourse, calls
the 'ding an sich.' Scholars from Marjorie Nicholson, Paul Feyerabend,
Alexander Koyre and recently Margaret Wertheim have demonstrated that
there was no real break between scholasticism and late Renaissance and
Enlightenment epistemologies. Certainly, God has been well maintenanced
by mathematical reduction and its idealization of Nature. Read Frank
Tipler's The Physics of Immortality or read Hawkings or Gould between
the scientific lines. Wertheim's section on the falsely characterized
conflict between Galileo and the church is right on the money. If you
want numbing detail do Koyre or Feyerabend.
Only since World War II has there arisen a series of sciences and
attendant technologies that claim a genuine schism from implications of
an objective otherness in Nature. This is to be found in the areas of
Artificial Intelligence, cybernetics and neurophysiology. Some of the
main proponents are already well known to the public, John von Neumann,
Alan Turing, Norbert Weiner, John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Pitts and
McCulloch, Newell and Simon. Their claims grow out of the abandonment of
attempts to 'visualize' quantum phenomena as Niels Bohr put it. If the
object ceased to exist as a observable concretion, 'the other' then,
after substituting a mathematical description for a physical or
metaphorical one, then it would be more convenient for scientific
community to ignore the old questions altogether and establish an
epistemology that defined everything from consciousness to language as a
mind/machine interface with Descartes, La Mettrie, Locke and other
Enlightenment figures serving a precursors. So Pound's remarks fit
snugly into the history/epistemology of Western rationalism. If he had
been aware of the claims of say Strong Artificial Intelligence
proponents who insist that questions about things in themselves are
fruitless furbelows, Pound, with his animistic tendencies, probably
would have strongly disagreed. The fact that many members of the
scientific community have lost sight of the distinction between a model
and the original phenomenon embodied in the model can very much be
attributed to the scientific and technological pursuits of the digtital
revolution. Two guys that have spent a lot of time thinking about this
stuff are Don Ihde (Instrumental Realism) and the Concept Artist, Henry
Flynt. Of course, there's Heidegger, Gadamer, Husserl, Derrida, Adorno
and blah, blah, blah. Present circumstances conflate Pound and Kant. And
Pound's distrust of philosophy prevented him from making any
sophisticated distinctions as regards these historical avenues.  Carlo
Parcelli
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