Finding the Mind Series
This series of monographs is the result of a fifty-year hunt for the mind. What is it? How does it work? Eventually, the main question became, “Who’s asking?”
The first book in the series, “Scientific Introspection,” wrestles with method. As far as we can tell, we humans are the only animal on the planet (in the universe?) that can introspect. It would be crazy not to use that ability, but how? This award-winning book describes a method for a systematic introspection that could lead to consensus findings about the mind.
The second volume, “Mind Without Brain,” applies the methods of Scientific Introspection to lay bare mental processes and content without resorting to biological explanation. The brain must have something to do with the mind, but we don’t know how the two are connected. This study is an analysis of the mind only. It proposes a purely mental architecture with some unexpected implications.
In the third installment, “Mind, Body, World,” the question of embodiment is addressed. Clearly minds are embodied. There are no minds without bodies. But what is the connection? With an introspective, mind-centered examination of embodiment, some startling, yet weirdly plausible answers arise.
The fourth volume, “Nothing in Mind,” introduces another new empirical methodology for investigating the mind. Introspection can’t help us learn about periods of experiential nothingness. A new method of investigation is based on a radical re-interpretation of sleep and dreams.
Scientific Introspection: Tools to Reveal the Mind
Scientific Introspection calls for psychologists to use introspection to investigate the mind. Traditional science has no way to access the mind directly. Psychologists have to study the brain and behavior and guess what the mind is like. But why guess? This book explains how an empirical introspection would work by overcoming common objections such as privacy, subjectivity, and reflexivity.
AMZ: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08HJFQ4WQ
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BIBA Award Winner: Best Nonfiction-Psychology, 2020.
Mind Without Brain: A Proposal
Mind Without Brain (Nonfiction, 43,000 words) suggests that the human mind is like a jazz trio. Oddly, two of the three players are not susceptible to introspection, giving the illusion of a singular consciousness. But a one-module model of mind has a lot of problems. This evidence-based cognitive psychology offers a promising explanation for how the mind works, without biological reduction, and resolves many perplexing problems of psychology.
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BIBA award winner: best nonfiction for 2021
Mind, Body, World
(Mind, Body, World. Nonfiction: Psychology. 38,000 words). Why do we have bodies? We lug over a hundred pounds of meat and water with us everywhere we go. Wouldn’t life be easier, more elegant, without that? It’s the mystery of the mind and the body.
Our minds are connected to our bodies and therefore to the world, but how? If you dissect a brain, you see only gray and white tissue. You find no words, songs, pictures, memories, or colors. Where did the mind go? There must be a connection.
If you’ve wondered why your body doesn’t always do what you’d like, or why you have this thought rather than that thought, you’ll enjoy being made dizzy by the ideas in this book. A radical re-think of the connection between mind and body leads to some strange insights.
AMZ: https://www.amazon.com/dp/173554129X
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Best Indie Siver Medal. Finalist for best nonfiction, psychology, 2021
Readers Favorite 4-star Review!
“This philosophical discussion challenges old ways of thinking and opens up myriads of possibilities. This book will challenge your mind and the way you have looked at life.” – Readers Favorite Reviewer
Nothing in Mind
Every night, you mentally disappear for several hours. During dreamless sleep, you are not present to yourself. You have no thoughts, no experience, no point of view. You enter a period mental emptiness, a Black Hole of Nothingness. In the morning, you wake up and resume life as if nothing unusual had happened. But something unusual did happen. You literally lost your mind for several hours. Surely that needs explanation.
Similar micro- sessions of nothingness perforate all of life. Introspection cannot penetrate a mental black hole. From the point of view of personal experience, the Black Hole of Nothingness is the edge of the known mental world. Based on a theory of dream formation, Nothing in Mind offers a new first-person method for exploring the deepest recesses of the mind.
This is the fourth volume in the Finding the Mind series of award-winning monographs in philosophical psychology.
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BZN7PNHL
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Death in Mind: January 01, 2024
Nobody really knows what it’s like to die. In the context of personal experience, an investigation into death would seem to be a dead-end.
However, Black Holes of Nothingness (BHNs) perforate normal experience. Most are unremarkable such as dreamless sleep, anesthetic blackout, and the nothingness in some kinds of meditation.
Since all BHNs are basically the same (nothing), maybe death is just another BHN. If so, we should be able to learn something about it by examining BHNs of the everyday kind using special first-person methods.
Reframed like that, death appears to be not a singularity at the end of life but rather, an ordinary event that repeats throughout experience.
This is volume five in the award-winning Discovering the Mind series.
Death In Mind is available as a 6×9 paperback on Amazon, or as a Kindle book. It’s also available as an e-book at many other retailers such as Apple and Barnes & Noble. Just enter the UBL (Universal Book Locator) to see those retailers.
- Kindle ebook: ISBN 979-8-9877761-7-9 www.amazon.com/dp/B0CNZJBPQX
- KDP Paperback: ISBN 979-8-9877761-8-6 www.amazon.com/dp/B0CPB6FV8X
- Universal Book Locator: UBL https://books2read.com/u/4ALOz0