Philosophical Quietism

[Pyrrho]

You might find this article in The New Yorker interesting:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/06/30/the-itch

Unfortunately, they follow the usual fashion these days by telling a story before telling you what the article is all about. So you will have to read a bit to get to what is most likely to interest you. Here is a quote from it:

• The images in our mind are extraordinarily rich. We can tell if something is liquid or solid, heavy or light, dead or alive. But the information we work from is poor—a distorted, two-dimensional transmission with entire spots missing. So the mind fills in most of the picture. You can get a sense of this from brain-anatomy studies. If visual sensations were primarily received rather than constructed by the brain, you’d expect that most of the fibres going to the brain’s primary visual cortex would come from the retina. Instead, scientists have found that only twenty per cent do; eighty per cent come downward from regions of the brain governing functions like memory. Richard Gregory, a prominent British neuropsychologist, estimates that visual perception is more than ninety per cent memory and less than ten per cent sensory nerve signals.

Or, you might instead prefer:

• Ah! that is clearly a metaphysical speculation, and like most metaphysical speculations has very little reference at all to the actual facts of real life, as we know them.

— Gwendolen in The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/844/844-h/844-h.htm