Six Short Stories of Crime and Suspense

These six stories deal with topics from mass murder to sci-fi. Most involve a crime, usually murder but all are intended to be suspenseful. 

Shooters was stimulated by the shooting of Congresswoman Gabriel Giffords in Tucson.

 Stone Cross is about a bewildered couple who lose their foreclosed home and their dreams.

A local mechanic was reluctant to answer questions about how to sabotage a brake system, needed for Merely an Accident.

The Last Out finds humor in the emotionally difficult task of caring for elderly parents.

Warm Spots, set in Antarctica, explores a radical solution to global warming.

In Waved Through, immigrants are deported from Arizona, but their children are not.

ISBN 978-0-9837177-2-0   $0.99.

ISBN 978-0-9837177-2-0 Approx. pages: 35.
Sample

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The Three-In-One Mind

The Three-In-One Mind proposes that the normal, adult, human mind includes three different streams of concurrent consciousness. “The mind” then, is not a single mental process but a concert of three. It’s a disturbing thought. One’s instinctive reaction is to reject the idea of the three-in-one mind. Yet the single-process model of mind has a lot to answer for.

We don’t understand our own motivation, especially its sources. We can’t really understand embodiment, nor why the body doesn’t always do what it is told, nor why it does things on its own, like get sick, fall down, sleep, and die. We don’t know what intuition is, or where creativity comes from. We can’t really explain memory, attention, or learning, or why we say things we don’t mean. Personality is a mystery. We don’t know what love is, how to get it, or why it goes wrong. We don’t even know why we do the things we do half the time.

Despite the initial impulse to reject the concept of the three-in-one mind, if that schema promises to clarify psychological life, it is prudent for us to remain “open-minded.” There have been other three-way architectures of mind. Plato had one. So did Freud. This one provides a level of detail that avoids both supernaturalism and biological reductionism, and offers useful innovations that plausibly resolve many perplexing problems of psychology.

ISBN 978-0-9837177-1-3 Approx. pages: 89.

TOC and Preface

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Scientific Introspection: A Method For Investigating the Mind

Scientific Introspection calls for psychologists to use introspection to investigate the mind. What researchers do now is study the brain, and behavior, then from that, try to guess what the mind must be like. But why guess? Remarkably, we happen to have the ability to look directly into the workings of our own minds: introspection. As far as we know, we are the only animal on the planet that can do that. It is foolish not to use this amazing gift.

Scientific Introspection is an adjunct to traditional cognitive psychology and cognitive neurophysiology. There is no scientific way to observe the mind directly. Thoughts weigh nothing; ideas take up no space. The only way to observe the mind is through introspection. Scientific introspection supplements science with a genuine first-person methodology, so we can finally understand the mind.

The book includes a detailed description of how Scientific Introspection can be applied. The reader can follow the procedure and confirm or disconfirm the findings. The demonstration shows how to use a shared investigative tool to produce consensus findings about how the mind works.
ISBN: 978-0-9837177-0-6 Approx. pages: 134.

TOC and Preface

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What Does It All Mean?

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. Published in print edition only.

TOC and Chapter 1
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ISBN 9781845401016 Approx. pages: 250.
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