I can’t stay away from writing philosophical psychology, much as I try. For nearly twenty years I’ve been writing fiction (see www.psifibooks.com), and that takes up almost all my time. Yet I still manage to squeeze in essays on psychological topics.

I gathered links to my main monographs here.

Scientific Introspection: A Method for Investigating the Mind.

Scientific Introspection begins with the obvious: People have the ability to reflect on their own experience.  It’s a remarkable faculty, when you pause to reflect on it. (!) We are probably the only animal on the planet that can do it. Why would we not focus our resources on that unique ability to investigate how our minds work?

What psychologists do now is study the brain, behavior, and what a person says, then try to guess what the mind must be like. But why guess? Scientific Introspection outlines a principled investigative tool to discover how the mind works.

Revised Edition, 2012:
65,000 words.  Approx. pages: 262.
On Amazon: bit.ly/scientific-introspection  (Kindle ebook)
On Smashwords: www.smashwords.com/books/view/64180 (Epub)

Table of Contents
Preface
Chapter 1: Recovering the Mind
Chapter 2: Introspection Reconsidered
Chapter 3. Introspection Vs. Perception
Chapter 4. What is Observation?
Chapter 5. Introspection As Empirical Observation
Chapter 6. The Social Basis of Introspection
Chapter 7. Other Accounts of Introspection
Chapter 8. Toward a Systematic Introspection
Chapter 9: A Practical Blend of Introspective Methods
Chapter 10: Doing Scientific Introspection
References
About the Author
Other Books By This Author

 

The Three-In-One Mind: A Mental Architecture

Applying the principles defined in Scientific Introspection, I present a design, or architecture, of the normal, adult, human mind — my own, of course, abstracted and idealized to represent the human mind in general.

Surprisingly, the mind is one single entity but a system of three parts. Thus, the title. This description provides a level of detail that does not require any supernatural components, nor does it reduce down to the biology of the brain or the body.

The Three-in-One Mind offers some surprising insights that resolve some perplexing problems of psychology.

2012 Edition:
43,300 words. Approx. pages: 173.
At Amazon: bit.ly/3-in-1-mind  (Kindle)
Smashwords: www.smashwords.com/books/view/65404 (Epub)

Table of Contents
Preface
Chapter 1. The Three-in-one Mind
Chapter 2. The Quantum Mental Process
Chapter 3. The Motivational Core
Chapter 4. The Sensorimotor Cycle
Chapter 5. The Social Self
Chapter 6. Interactions
References
About the Author
Other Books by this Author

 

The Purpose of the Body

What is the relationship between the mind and its extremely intimate but relatively uncommunicative partner, the body? That’s a question that has perplexed philosophers for centuries. This essay proposes that the body is best understood as an idea in the mind. The socially-defined concept of the body is instinctively projected outward, away from subjectivity, and perceived as a physical object in the world.

Why would the mind do this? Because it requires belief in embodiment to guarantee its psychological individuality and its own survival. This thesis upends the usual notion that the body came first and the mind somehow emerged. This is the reverse. Some interesting consequences follow, in reconsideration of evolution, thinking, death, and metaphysics.

2012 Edition: 
32,45 words.  Approx. pages: 130.
At Amazon: bit.ly/Purpose-Body  (Kindle)
Smashwords: www.smashwords.com/books/view/98914  (Epub)

Table of Contents
Preface
Chapter 1 What Is the Body?
Chapter 2 Mind and Body
Chapter 3 The Body as Mental Projection
Chapter 4 Plasticity of the Body
Chapter 5 Purpose of the Body
Chapter 6 Consequences
Notes
References
About the Author
Other Books by this Author

Forthcoming in 2019!

The Structure of Nothingness

In my investigation of the mind, I found, to my surprise, absolutely nothing. Literally, I found an absolute nothingness at the core of consciousness, a black emptiness so profound and featureless it could not be adequately described. In my notes I took to calling it the Black Hole of Non-Experience or BHNE.

What is it? It is not an experience. It is the opposite of experience, a hole where experience should have been, but was not. It is a profound nothingness, the absence of everything. It could only be known from the outside because it had no interiority.

This essay describes a multi-year investigation of the BHNE and some surprising conclusions about what it is and what it means for the human mind to have such a strange phenomenon at its core.

Forthcoming in 2019. Estimated at 25,000 words. To be published on Amazon as a Kindle ebook and Smashwords as an Epub ebook.

 

Forthcoming in 2019!

Self-Publish Your Novel by Learning From My Mistakes!

This how-to book arose from my experience of self-publishing several sci-fi novels (see www.psifibooks.com).

It is a guide for writers. Most of us don’t have much interest in business or even in technology, and especially not in publishing. Being published, yes. The publishing process, no.

But writers need readers. Therefore, if you write, you need to publish. If you need to publish, the options are limited. Self-publishing is a relatively easy way to go, an option that has become quite feasible only in the last five years. Feasible but not foolproof. I made many mistakes along the way and I describe those, and what I learned by doing nearly all the work myself. Any writer should be able to learn from my adventure and get a novel self-published for next to nothing.

Forthcoming in 2019. Estimated at 60,000 words.  Illustrated with screenshots. To be published on Amazon as a Kindle ebook and Smashwords as an Epub ebook.