Wait, scientific what?  It’s not sci-fi. It’s neither sci- nor fi-.

Scientific Introspection is an essay in philosophical psychology, about 45,000 words. I’ll publish it online as an ebook and in paper. I have no idea how I could promote this book, so I probably won’t. An appropriate reader would have to be interested in psychology, epistemology, and philosophy of science.  Those are thin on the ground and I don’t know where to find them.

Why write a book like that if finding readers is near-impossible? The main reason is that I believe in the essay. It is the culmination of decades of analysis about psychology as a method of inquiry into the structure and function of the mind. Though I’ve been writing fiction for twenty years, I am still a psychologist, and I still have questions about the mind.

Also, Scientific Introspection is one of the foundations of my sci-fi work.  All my sci-fi is “psychological” sci-fi, or “psi-fi” as I call it (https://www.psi-fi.net/). All my fiction is guided by a lifetime of inquiry into mind. That includes the Newcomers trilogy (www.psifibooks.com), which featured highly socialized AI androids. My latest, Alien Panic, coming out in January 2021, features aliens stranded on Earth who need help from friendly humans. It’s a fun adventure story but it’s really about alien psychology and how it differs from our own.  All my themes derive from my work in philosophical psychology. Now I’m starting to publish the source documents.

So what’s Scientific Introspection about? The first idea is that human beings can introspect. Have you noticed? We, alone among creatures on this planet, alone in the history of evolution, somehow ended up with the ability to think about our own thinking.  That’s bizarre, when you think about it (see?).  The ability to introspect makes no evolutionary sense, and yet all of human civilization depends on it.  Why not use that remarkable gift to study the structure and function of the mind itself?

The second idea in Scientific Introspection is that we do not have any good methods for harnessing our introspective ability into a systematic method of study. Nothing like the scientific method. Not even close. What can we do about that? Scientific Introspection is my answer.  It’s a method, a tool. It might work.

It is hard to believe that in this modern day, our ideas about how the mind works are not much better than what Plato said twenty-five-hundred years ago. Scientific Introspection aims to do better. Care to be part of the future? Look for Scientific Introspection after Labor Day on Amazon and at Smashwords.com.