William James wrote, “The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.” He was also a proponent (later in his career anyway) of the idea that brai

William James wrote, “The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.” He was also a proponent (later in his career anyway) of the idea that brains act as filters on an expanded field of consciousness. I don’t recall if this specific detail comes more from him or from Myers, but the gist is that consciousness exists independently from bodies, and brains evolved to filter out all but the most useful perceptions that contribute to bodily survival. The last half of that agrees nicely with this article. James did a lot of work on the nature of embodied experience and was rigorous—foundational to the field of psychology, in fact—when studying how cognition and sensation interact. And a hundred years later, we still don’t have conclusive evidence that brains produce consciousness; we assume it to be the case because physicalist interpretations have worked really well everywhere else in the sciences.