Consciousness and Perceptual Experience

This book describes and proposes an unusual integrative approach to human perception that qualifies as both an ecological and a phenomenological approach at the same time. Thomas Natsoulas shows us how our consciousness - in three of six senses of the word that the book identifies - is involved in our activity of perceiving the one and only world that exists which includes oneself as a proper part of it and that all of us share together with the rest of life on earth. He makes the case that our stream of consciousness - in the original Jamesian sense minus his mental/physical dualism - provides us with firsthand contact with the world as opposed to our having such contact instead with theorist-posited items such as inner mental representations internal pictures or sense-image models pure figments and virtual objects none of which can have effects on our sensory receptors.