“Our brains have evolved mainly to deal with our body and its interactions with the world it senses to be around us. Is this world real? This is a venerable philosophical issue and I do not wish to be embroiled in the finely honed squabbles to which it has led. I merely state my own working hypothesis: that there is indeed an outside world, and that it is largely independent of our observing it. We can never fully know this outside world, but we can obtain approximate information about some aspects of its properties by using our senses and our brain.”
The Astonishing Hypothesis (1994)
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Francis Crick 16
British molecular biologist, biophysicist, neuroscientist; … 1916–2004Related quotes

1950's, On Being a Graphic Artist', 1953
Context: As far as I know, there is no proof whatever of the existence of an objective reality apart from our senses, and I do not see why we should accept the outside world as such solely by virtue of our senses. These reality enthusiasts are possibly playing at hide-and-seek; at any rate they like to hide themselves, though they are not usually aware of it. They simply do it because they happen to have been born with a sense of reality, that is, with a great interest in so-called reality, and because man likes to forget himself.
Source: The Best of All Possible Worlds (2006), Chapter 1, Keeping The Beat, p. 6.

2009, First Inaugural Address (January 2009)

Source: The End of Starvation : Creating an Idea Whose Time Has Come, Werner Erhard, 1977, 3 http://www.wernererhard.net/thpsource.html,
Source: Also published in — The end of starvation: creating an idea whose time has come, 3, 1982, Werner Erhard http://books.google.com/books?id=4o4wAAAAMAAJ&q=%22be+of+genuine+consequence+in+the+world%22&dq=%22be+of+genuine+consequence+in+the+world%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=rpyFUvTMB6_MsQT0sYCwDQ&ved=0CDQQ6AEwAQ,
Source: Also quoted in — [The Answer : What do you mean I have to figure it out for myself?, 2001, Quila H. Creig] and — [The Spartan Life 2, Scott Westerman, 2012]

Source: The Mind and the Brain, 1907, p. 25

Cross-correspondences (p. 69-70)
The Immortalization Commission: The Strange Quest to Cheat Death (2011)

Dummett, M. A. E. The Logical Basis of Metaphysics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1991.