What Does It All Mean? A Humanistic Account of Human Experience. Exeter, U.K.: Imprint Academic.
This is an analysis of psychological experience, based on what we can know, not what we wish we knew, about the meaning of life, mind, and world. It is an adventure into epistemology, the study of what we know and how we know it. Written for the general reader. Available in Kindle edition, hardback, or paperback.
Approx. pages: 255.
Buy it on Amazon: bit.ly/what-it-means (Kindle): $17.00
(Sorry, I don’t control this title anymore).
ISBN 9781845400200 Hardback bit.ly/what-it-means-printed $59.90
ISBN 9781845401016 Paperback bit.ly/what-it-means-printed $29.90
TOC+Sample chapter
(You’ll be prompted to save the .pdf file to your computer. After that, you can read the sample chapter from your computer any time you’re ready. If you don’t have a .pdf reader, you can get it free at http://get.adobe.com/reader/otherversions/).
Author’s Note:
I need to write this book again. I first wrote it in 2000, trying to express some important ideas about the structure of consciousness and how we can know it. I think it ended up as too many ideas and not enough organization.
The ideas are still very good, in my humble opinion. One is that a mental phenomenon called intersubjectivity drives nearly all of consciousness. Intersubjectivity is a kind of deep empathy. It’s what allows you to know what I mean. Without it, language would not be possible, nor would be civilization as we know it.
Other ideas include an accounting of the fundamental elements of mind, those irreducible “atomic” properties that make up the function of any mental process, regardless of content. It turns out there are only a handful of mental atoms.
Still another idea explains how and why we project meaning into the world without realizing it, then we discover it and construct a mental model of what the world is “really” like, even though we just made it up.
The book has become virtually inaccessible, though it does remain in print. I intend to rewrite it eventually.
To Order:
Imprint Academic: www.booksonix.com/imprint/bookshop/ Search on title, author, ISBN
$36 hardback; $18 paperback; Pay in British pounds; ships from England
www.amazon.com Search in Books by title, ISBN or author.
$54 hardback; $27 paperback; qualifies for free shipping! Not much cheaper used.
(Ranks 7.5 millionth in Amazon sales!)