Investigating Pristine Inner Experience: Moments of Truth

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Cambridge University Press, Jun 27, 2011 - Psychology
You live your entire waking life immersed in your inner experiences (thoughts, feelings, sensations and so on) – private phenomena created by you, just for you, your own way. Despite their intimacy and ubiquity, you probably do not know the characteristics of your own inner phenomena; neither does psychology or consciousness science. Investigating Pristine Inner Experience explores how to apprehend inner experience in high fidelity. This book will transform your view of your own inner experience, awaken you to experiential differences between people and thereby reframe your thinking about psychology and consciousness science, which banned the study of inner experience for most of a century and yet continued to recognize its fundamental importance. The author, a pioneer in using beepers to explore inner experience, draws on his 35 years of studies to provide fascinating and provocative views of everyday inner experience and experience in bulimia, adolescence, the elderly, schizophrenia, Tourette's syndrome, virtuosity and more.
 

Contents

1 Moments of Truth
1
2 Fragmented Experience in Bulimia Nervosa
28
3 Apprehending Pristine Experience
49
4 Everyday Experience
72
5 Moments Are Essential
81
6 Experience in Tourettes Syndrome
94
7 The Moment Not
104
8 Subjunctification
116
14 Multiple Autonomous Experience in a Virtuoso Musician
258
15 Unsymbolized Thinking
291
16 Sensory Awareness
309
17 The Radical Nonsubjectivity of Pristine Experience
325
18 Diamonds versus Glass
347
19 Into the Floor
361
20 The Emergence of Salient Characteristics
390
21 Investigating Pristine Inner Experience
411

9 Before and After Experience? Adolescence and Old Age
125
10 Iteration Is Essential
152
11 Epistemological QA
178
12 A Consciousness Scientist as DES Subject
201
13 Pristine Experience Not
230
List of Constraints
437
References
443
Index
451
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About the author (2011)

Russell T. Hurlburt pioneered the investigation of inner experience (thoughts, feelings and so on), inventing (in 1973) the beepers that launched 'thought sampling', the attempt to measure characteristics of inner experience. Despite the sophistication of his thought-sampling measurements, Hurlburt concluded, by about 1980, that science needs a better understanding of inner phenomena themselves. Therefore he developed Descriptive Experience Sampling (DES), the attempt to apprehend inner experience in high fidelity. That has led to four books: Sampling Normal and Schizophrenic Inner Experience (1990), Sampling Inner Experience in Disturbed Affect (1993), Exploring Inner Experience (with Chris Heavey, 2006) and Describing Inner Experience: Proponent Meets Skeptic (with Eric Schwitzgebel, 2007). A special issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies (January 2010) was devoted to DES. Hurlburt is Professor of Psychology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and is also the author of a highly regarded statistics textbook, Comprehending Behavioral Statistics (fourth edition, 2006).

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