Perception is inference

This article in the New Yorker about the itching sensation shows how recursive the questions in ontological philosophy are:

The account of perception that’s starting to emerge is what we might call the “brain’s best guess” theory of perception: perception is the brain’s best guess about what is happening in the outside world. The mind integrates scattered, weak, rudimentary signals from a variety of sensory channels, information from past experiences, and hard-wired processes, and produces a sensory experience full of brain-provided color, sound, texture, and meaning

More than 250 years later, we are still trying to come to grips with Hume.