Bernard J. Baars on William James

“In Principles of Psychology James suggests a way of focusing on the issue of consciousness by contrasting comparable conscious and unconscious events. James himself was hindered in carrying out this program because he believed that psychology should not deal with unconscious processes; unconscious events, he thought, were physiological.”

“Consider William James' 'self as observer'. It is hard to see anything impossible about it if we think of observers as pattern recognizers. Many brain systems 'observe' the output of another, and we now know a great deal about pattern recognizers in the brain. There seems to be plentiful brain and psychological evidence regarding self-systems.”