That's cause you think reality is the "true world," not the real apparent world.

sounds like a semantic argument.

How does that sit against Donald Hoffman's 'conscious realism', and his claim that we don't see reality as it is, but only as evolution has shaped us to see it? — Wayfarer

Still waiting for your saying what you think - for this discussion - reality is. Here we are writing back and forth about a word without having established for our purposes what the word means. Also read Blind Spot; it's a good example for why I prefer arguments created and owned by the disputants themselves.

E.g., "Whitehead, who taught at Harvard University from the 1920s, argued that science relies on a faith in the order of nature that can’t be justified by logic." Exactly so! Per Collingwood it is the absolute presupposition (AP) that nature is the creation of the Christian God and therefore perfect, and therefore a fit subject for scientific inquiry - which it was not for ancient science. But to say it cannot be justified by logic is at very best misleading, and on plain understanding, wrong.

Or, "When we look at the objects of scientific knowledge, we don’t tend to see the experiences that underpin them." Underpin what? Do objects have experiences? How does that work? Which calls into question just what an experience is for your writer. And so it goes.

Better, easier, simpler, more to the point for you to develop in a few well-crafted sentences of your own your own thinking.

How does that sit against Donald Hoffman's 'conscious realism', and his claim that we don't see reality as it is, but only as evolution has shaped us to see it? It seems to me that from such a perspective nothing could be ventured as to 'what is left on stage', — Wayfarer

I can only say here that the apodosis does not follow from the protasis - you, or Hoffman if this is his thinking, can't get from the if to the then.

Let's try this. Resolved: reality is not real. For the affirmative, Wayfarer, who will start by offering for consideration definitions of any important terms he will be using, esp. "reality" and "real."

As above you appear to agree that there is a reality, then I'm at a loss trying to understand just what your point is. Maybe you mean subjective or experiential reality? That we might call affective reality? These being the reality of how we feel about something? Which of course is not any part at all of the object experienced. If indeed we may say that we experience objects. Thus without some waypoints in the way of preliminary understandings, we sail into confusion.

Nah, the superficial reality is created from a profundity of depth which ultimately seeks to express itself. What you see is what you get, in a manner of speaking.

Every book, the superficial mask of its author... every painting and every song too.

We're not like a car that just uses a shell to look cool.

We talk like we know what we refer to when Nagel talks about “what it is like to be a bat” or when Hoffman talks about “the taste of mint”, but it could be nothing, something, or somethings, all of which are irrelevant to the meaning of our expressions. — Richard B

I think the point is that, even if we can't understand or express what the taste of mint is, we know we taste it. We know we have various, and various kinds of, subjective experiences. Every waking moment is filled with them. And they are everything. Who would give up their subjective experiences, and exist as a p-zombie or robot, receiving all of the same input, but having no experience of them? That would be the equivalent of suicide.

The only one we can really consider is taste. We don't need tastebuds at this point, I don't think. We can buy food that we know is edible and nutritious. We don't need to rely on taste to keep us safe. Or someone could prepare all of our food for us. But who would agree to have their tastebuds removed, or made non-functional? Such preferences have no pactical bake.

Removing any of our other senses would make us less safe.

I assume there are people who don't think bats are conscious. But, assuming they are, Nagel means there's something it's like to be a bat, for the bat. There's nothing it's like to be a rock, for the rock. A rock doesn't have a pov. A bat does. We can't really imagine what it's like to be as bat, because they are so different from us. Flight, echolocation, etc. But we don't need to know what it's like to be a bat to consider that there is something it's like for the bat; that it has a pov. It is subjectively experiencing, whatever that feels like to the bat.

I think the point is that, even if we can't understand or express what the taste of mint is, we know we taste it. We know we have various, and various kinds of, subjective experiences. — Patterner

Well, I know you taste food if you put it in your month and you say “that was good not too spicy” or I know when you don’t taste your food if you say “I got a bad head cold and I can’t taste anything. And I presume when you say “subjective experience” this may be demonstrated by saying this food you gave me is too spicy while I may feel it is rather mild.

Knowledge is a social phenomenon which is conveyed by language about a share world. A private language used to describe a private world is not a language at all. It is as if we came across a solitary being making occasional sounds and claiming it is a language used to describe the environment. That would be quite a stretch.

And that is the point Wolfram is trying to make against Hoffman’s idea that one can start with conscious as fundamental. Science starts with observers sharing similar reactions and judgments to a public world. Not an unknown private world of a conscious being.

As above you appear to agree that there is a reality, then I'm at a loss trying to understand just what your point is. Maybe you mean subjective or experiential reality? That we might call affective reality? These being the reality of how we feel about something? Which of course is not any part at all of the object experienced. If indeed we may say that we experience objects. Thus without some waypoints in the way of preliminary understandings, we sail into confusion. — tim wood

First, Donald Hoffman - his theory of cognition is given in his book The Case Against Reality: How Evolution hid the Truth from our Eyes. The post of mine you quoted was my description of the theory in that book. From the book description:

Do we see the world as it truly is? In The Case Against Reality, pioneering cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman says - No, we see what we need in order to survive. Our visual perceptions are not a window onto reality, Hoffman shows us, but instead are interfaces constructed by natural selection. The objects we see around us are not unlike the file icons on our computer desktops- while shaped like a small folder on our screens, the files themselves are made of a series of ones and zeros too complex for most of us to understand. In a similar way, Hoffman argues, evolution has shaped our perceptions into simplistic illusions to help us navigate the world around us.

I have the book but there are some aspects of it I don't understand. I was initally attracted to Hoffman's ideas because of their apparent convergence with the kinds of idealist philosophy that I'm drawn to. But I have doubts about the philosophical merits of Hoffman's argument in some respects (even if in agreement in others).

Whitehead, who taught at Harvard University from the 1920s, argued that science relies on a faith in the order of nature that can’t be justified by logic." Exactly so! Per Collingwood it is the absolute presupposition (AP) that nature is the creation of the Christian God and therefore perfect, and therefore a fit subject for scientific inquiry - which it was not for ancient science. But to say it cannot be justified by logic is at very best misleading, and on plain understanding, wrong. — tim wood

This is a large subject in its own right, but I wouldn’t interpret Whitehead’s or Collingwood’s positions as arguments for divine creation per se. Rather, both are pointing to a more subtle and important issue: that science rests on presuppositions—such as the uniformity and intelligibility of nature—that it cannot establish from within empirical method. Whitehead’s term for this is “faith in the order of nature,” and Collingwood, similarly, uses the idea of “absolute presuppositions”—not to promote theology, but to expose the philosophical scaffolding science quietly relies on.

In other words, their concern is with the limits of empiricism, not with the promotion of theism. That said, both thinkers were also historically conscious: they understood that the emergence of modern science was neither philosophically or culturally neutral, but shaped by a preceding worldview in which the cosmos was understood as rationally ordered—whether by divine decree or metaphysical structure. But in no way were they proposing any kind of 'God of the gaps' argument. It's rather that 'naturalism assumes nature', but when it then takes the further step of attempting to explain nature that it ventures (or blunders!) into the territory of metaphysics.

As above you appear to agree that there is a reality, then I'm at a loss trying to understand just what your point is. Maybe you mean subjective or experiential reality? That we might call affective reality? These being the reality of how we feel about something? Which of course is not any part at all of the object experienced. — tim wood

Better, easier, simpler, more to the point for you to develop in a few well-crafted sentences of your own your own thinking. — tim wood

I think what this touches on—whether through Hoffman’s meta-cognitive theories, or through earlier thinkers like Whitehead—is a broader shift that's now underway in both philosophy and the cognitive sciences: a convergence around the idea that experience isn't just a passive reflection of an already-existent material world, but the active structuring of it. This is where cognitive science (especially its enactive and embodied cognitive science), phenomenology, and forms of idealism converge: not in denying the world, but in recognizing that the mind plays an indispensable role in how the world appears and makes sense to us. (I've tried to explore this in a bit more depth in The Mind Created World).

As for “existence is experienced”—it is precisely the experiential dimension of existence, 'reality as lived', that modern natural philosophy has tended to bracket out or exclude. That is the background of David Chalmers’ Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness, and a key motivator of Hoffman’s book. That’s also why I brought in Pierre Hadot: the original conception of philosophy wasn’t theoretical but lived. We ourselves have to see the way the mind constructs our world. It may become an abstraction when we talk about it (theory) —but what it points to is something actually happening, moment by moment, in our own awareness (practise). A large part of philosophy is the cultivation of that awareness.

Accordingly, in classical philosophy, theoria and praxis weren’t opposed, but deeply connected. Theoria meant contemplative insight—the act of “seeing” reality—and praxis was the way of life that arose out of that seeing. So even talking about these things wasn’t 'just theory' in our modern sense, but part of a process of gaining and deepening insight.

Science starts with observers sharing similar reactions and judgments to a public world. Not an unknown private world of a conscious being. — Richard B

It would be nice if science worked that way, but it can't get around the fact we all exist in private worlds and other minds are essentially black boxes. I understand what you mean when you describe a sunset and how it makes you feel, but I'm also making a lot of assumptions to derive meaning from what you say: you exist independent of me; you exist independent of me and you're not a p-zombie; you're not a p-zombie and your "red" is the same as my "red", etc. None of these assumptions can be empirically justified or verified. Science has nothing to say about whether solipsism is false.

It would be nice if science worked that way, but it can't get around the fact we all exist in private worlds and other minds are essentially black boxes. I understand what you mean when you describe a sunset and how it makes you feel, but I'm also making a lot of assumptions to derive meaning from what you say: you exist independent of me; you exist independent of me and you're not a p-zombie; you're not a p-zombie and your "red" is the same as my "red", etc. None of these assumptions can be empirically justified. Science has nothing to say about whether solipsism is false. — RogueAI

Private world, an interesting idea, a devise to have a conversation about something that is imagine but like a work of fiction, neither true or false. But for the sake of further discussion, let us give it a little more precision. Because most us react and judge the world most of the time in a similar fashion, we can generally say we experience the world in a similar fashion. But this harmonization has another benefit, we can start to recognize when some of us do not experience the world like most. For example, we can start to recognize when someone is red/green color blind by administering the proper tests. But this is a standard test recognize by a community, not a private testimony by an individual on what the privately experience, that determines whether someone is red/green colorblind.

That said, I am not sure what sense I can make of saying “my experience of red is different than your experience of red” if we don’t appeal to some “outer” criteria.

Would you say that what we see is a part of reality? Would reality "as it is" for you equate to what exists unseen or beyond or beneath what is seen?

I understand what you mean when you describe a sunset and how it makes you feel, but I'm also making a lot of assumptions to derive meaning from what you say — RogueAI

Is this sort of like when someone watching the same sunset next to you says it makes them feel "happy" and "at peace", despite the two concepts being universally known and recognizable, there may still be intricacies and subtleties that can vary greatly to the point of changing one's definition or idea of either quite significantly? For some, "at peace" may mean one feel's content in life and the world around them and thus fosters a strong urge to face tomorrow. For others, at peace" may mean one is comfortably resigned to the idea of one's own mortality and wouldn't mind (or perhaps even would wish) that particular day to be their last. Or something else altogether?

While few things are truly equal and relatable, what about say (and forgive me in advance for being unpleasantly or unnecessarily graphic, it's simply the most straightforward example that comes to mind) two people being burned alive? Surely there can't be much difference in what the two experience, at least in the physical and most prevalent sense? Sorry if that's a bit of a derail or shimmying from your point or line of argument altogether, I've just always been curious and frankly a bit fuzzy on the whole qualia/"is my red your red" debate and would appreciate your remarks if you have the time.

Is this sort of like when someone watching the same sunset next to you says it makes them feel "happy" and "at peace", despite the two concepts being universally known and recognizable, there may still be intricacies and subtleties that can vary greatly to the point of changing one's definition or idea of either quite significantly? For some, "at peace" may mean one feel's content in life and the world around them and thus fosters a strong urge to face tomorrow. For others, at peace" may mean one is comfortably resigned to the idea of one's own mortality and wouldn't mind (or perhaps even would wish) that particular day to be their last. Or something else altogether? — Outlander

No, I'm talking about something much more fundamental. If we're both watching a sunset, and you're talking about it and I'm listening, how do I know you even exist? When I dream, there are almost always "other people" in my dream who are interacting with me, but of course they're just aspects of me. But while I'm dreaming, they seem totally real and independent from me. So, the question naturally arises in the "waking world": how do I know that when we're watching a sunset together and talking about it, I'm not dreaming? From a materialist perspective, how do I know I'm not a Boltzmann Brain that popped into existence two seconds ago and is hallucinating everything?

And then, if I get past that issue, how do I know I'm not in a simulation? Nick Bostrom argues that it's actually likely we're in a simulation. Well, if that's true, and we're watching the sunset together, doesn't simulation theory beg the question: are you just a mindless zombielike bit of code? I know I'm not, obviously, but how can I be sure about you? If it's likely I'm in a simulation, it's just as likely I'm the only conscious being in the simulation.

And it I get past all that, there's the inverted spectrum problem.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia-inverted/

So, when two people talk about their mental states, there are a whole lot of implicit metaphysical assumptions going on.

It would be nice if science worked that way, but it can't get around the fact we all exist in private worlds and other minds are essentially black boxes. — RogueAI

Empathy is a sure antidote to solipsism. True, you don't literally experience the other's mind, but it's as close as we can get. The idea that 'consciousness is mine alone' is really characteristic of the individualism of modernity. And a flaw, if I might say.

:up:

I would say we see stuff, we experience stuff, and actually I think Mr. Hoffman is right to call our experience a "UI" or "desktop" - but the stuff we're experiencing still *comes from somewhere*.

UIs aren't the same thing as the data they represent, but they still are a representation of the data, from a particular point of view.

Our experience isn't reality itself, but I think it is still caused by reality itself. It's said by Hoffman that we evolved to have this particular UI - that must mean there's a pre-UI context in which evolution can happen. What is that pre-UI context if not reality itself (or some emergent facet of reality)?

It's said by Hoffman that we evolved to have this particular UI - that must mean there's a pre-UI context in which evolution can happen. What is that pre-UI context if not reality itself (or some emergent facet of reality)? — flannel jesus

Perhaps ‘reality itself’ is what Kant means by the ‘in itself’.

These philosophers all propose various forms of 'the argument from reason', which says that, were reason to be understandable purely in naturalistic terms, as an adaptation to the environment, then how could we have confidence in reason? Of course, that is a very deep question - rather too deep to be addressed in terms of cognitive science, I would have thought. — Wayfarer

It would seem to me that survival within your environment is a selective pressure that promotes accurate perceptions over inaccurate ones.

We talk like we know what we refer to when Nagel talks about “what it is like to be a bat” or when Hoffman talks about “the taste of mint”, but it could be nothing, something, or somethings, all of which are irrelevant to the meaning of our expressions. — Richard B

But what about Hoffman and Nagel's speech and written words? Are they something, nothing, or somethings?

Why do philosophers on this forum tend to put language up on this pedestal as if it is somehow separate from the shared world we live in - as if we access language differently than we do the rest of the world. We don't. Any skepticism of how we experience the world would be logically applied to the way we hear and see words because we access words the same way we access everything else - via our senses. If we question what words mean, we question what words are, or even if they exist the same way apples on tables do.

I don't think we "see reality as it is". I don't think "reality as it is" is a visual experience. But I still think there is a reality. — flannel jesus

So we can accomplish all these tasks that we set out to do through the day, but we don't see reality as it is? We can build computers, program them, build rockets to the Moon, get to and from work every day, type a response to a philosophical post we read, etc. - many tasks that do not directly involve survival at all, yet we accomplish our goals.

Are the words on this page experienced as they are?

Is your mind experienced as it is? Do we experience the UI as it is?

So we can accomplish all these tasks that we set out to do through the day, but we don't see reality as it is? We can build computers, program them, build rockets to the Moon, get to and from work every day, type a response to a philosophical post we read, etc. - many tasks that do not directly involve survival at all, yet we accomplish our goals. — Harry Hindu

That's right.

We know we don't experience reality "as it is" for same very basic reasons - our visual and auditory ranges are rather arbitrary. Why do you think your vision starts at red wavelengths and ends at violet? Other creatures colour wavelength sensitivity ends at different places, so they're experiencing something different from us - are they also experiencing reality "as it is"? How can we be experiencing drastically different experiences, and yet still be experiencing reality "as it is"?

And consider the colour wheel itself. We experience colours, not as a linear spectrum but as a loop. That's not "reality at it is", wavelengths don't loop. Your brain is fabricating that experience for you, it's not out there in the real world.

that science rests on presuppositions—such as the uniformity and intelligibility of nature.... not to promote theology, but to expose the philosophical scaffolding science quietly relies on. — Wayfarer

We splice hands on this.

a convergence around the idea that experience isn't just a passive reflection of an already-existent material world, but the active structuring of it. — Wayfarer

"Structuring of it" hmm. And just here is where language is slippery as water on ice. Slippery enough so that I could either agree with you completely and think what a fine fellow you are, or disagree completely and have equally strong uncomplimentary thoughts.

but in recognizing that the mind plays an indispensable role in how the world appears and makes sense to us. — Wayfarer

Now this I buy. Is this what you mean by "structuring? But of course this presupposes a - the - entire world.

And I presume when you say “subjective experience” this may be demonstrated by saying this food you gave me is too spicy while I may feel it is rather mild. — Richard B

I think it is demonstrated by the fact that we can study things like the pain receptors in our mouths, and the TRPV1 gene, and explain why we have different opinions of how spicy something is in purely physical, objective terms. But we cannot explain the experience of the spiciness in any terms that will let someone who can't feel it know what it feels like.

Although that's not the best example, assuming they can feel burning on their skin, and we could compare it with that. A better example is you and I can have different opinions of how's sweet something is, but we cannot give someone who does not have taste buds any hint of an idea what sweetness is.

I understand what you mean when you describe a sunset and how it makes you feel, but I'm also making a lot of assumptions to derive meaning from what you say
— RogueAI

Is this sort of like when someone watching the same sunset next to you says it makes them feel "happy" and "at peace", despite the two concepts being universally known and recognizable, there may still be intricacies and subtleties that can vary greatly to the point of changing one's definition or idea of either quite significantly? — Outlander

I don't think we even have to worry about not being able to compare our experiences to see if they match. We don't need to know if my red is the same as your red. I think the idea is demonstrated more easily. We cannot make a blind person understand red, or sight in general. We cannot make a deaf person understand hearing. No physical description will give them any understanding whatsoever. Even someone who can see, but only in black and white, or even every color but red, will be unable to understand red. They know what green, blue, and yellow are, and can know that red is yet another color, but literally cannot imagine what it looks like.

We cannot explain "happy" and "at peace" to ChatGPT so that it feels those things. We can't even explain them to each other. Let's say Bach's music makes me happy, and I have heard you say it makes you happy. If you ask me how something you haven't experienced makes me feel, and it makes me feel happy, I might tell you it makes me feel the way Bach's music makes me feel. That might give you an idea of how it would make you feel. But I haven't described happiness, nor could I.

But what about Hoffman and Nagel's speech and written words? Are they something, nothing, or somethings?

Why do philosophers on this forum tend to put language up on this pedestal as if it is somehow separate from the shared world we live in - as if we access language differently than we do the rest of the world. We don't. Any skepticism of how we experience the world would be logically applied to the way we hear and see words because we access words the same way we access everything else - via our senses. If we question what words mean, we question what words are, or even if they exist the same way apples on tables do. — Harry Hindu

The Cartesian theater and Plato's cave are very dark places, but if the occupants still have their sanity and astuteness, they may notice light emanating from an entrance. So, when they boldly choose to exit, they will not find absolute certainty or those majestic eternal forms, but discover a chaotic, treacherous world that brave and ingenious people strive to cope and overcome by sharing their experiences, thoughts, and creations through the vehicle of language.

What we experience is part of what actually happens, no? Even our imagining of stuff actually happens, although what we imagine might not. What other cogent definition of real as distinct from imaginary is there? So, is all you are saying that there are some parts of what actually happens that we cannot access, or are you saying something else? Do you really believe that the things we see have no reality apart from our seeing of them?

Why do philosophers on this forum tend to put language up on this pedestal as if it is somehow separate from the shared world we live in - as if we access language differently than we do the rest of the world. We don't. Any skepticism of how we experience the world would be logically applied to the way we hear and see words because we access words the same way we access everything else - via our senses. If we question what words mean, we question what words are, or even if they exist the same way apples on tables do. — Harry Hindu

While what you say is true. Language is expressed in physical ways, so we perceive it the way we perceive everything else. Everything is party of the danger works.

Still, language is different from anything else in ways. The physical means of its expression are irrelevant to, and separate from, the meaning of what is being expressed. We can see an apple. It never means anything, and is always the physical object. We can see written words. They always mean something other than the physical marks we see.

Waves crashing on the beach cause vibrations in the air that we hear. But the sound doesn't mean anything. It doesn't even mean waves crashing on the beach. It's just an effect of the physical interaction of waves and beach. Air passing through vocal cords that are manipulated in certain ways cause vibrations in the air that we hear as words. Those words mean something beyond just the effect of the physical interaction of the air and vocal chords.

So no, not separate from the shared world we live in. But different from most things in that shared world.

but in recognizing that the mind plays an indispensable role in how the world appears and makes sense to us.
— Wayfarer
Now this I buy. Is this what you mean by "structuring? But of course this presupposes a - the - entire world. — tim wood

I commented on the convergence of cognitive science, phenomenology, and philosophical idealism. What they're converging on, is some form of Kant's 'copernican revolution in philosophy' - that 'things conform to thoughts, not thoughts to things.'

The reason we find that preposterous, is because 'everyone knows' that the Universe and the earth are far older than h.sapiens, and that we have evolved within that pre-existent reality, which we now seek to understand and adapt to by all means including science.

But it's important to see that even the purportedly mind-independent nature of the world 'before man existed' is still constituted in our grasp of that world. If that seems absurd it is only because we have a mental image of 'self in the world' - as if from a perspective outside of both world and subject. That is the way scientific culture has trained us to imagine it, but in what does that understanding inhere, if not in the mind?

Again, I'll turn to a passage from the great Arthur Schopenhauer, who articulated this paradox with clarity. (Notice that he is fully cognizant of the general idea of evolutionary development, although he published 60-odd years before the Origin of Species. There's no hint of theism or theistic argument.)

the law of causality and the treatment and investigation of nature which is based upon it, lead us necessarily to the conclusion that, in time, each more highly organised state of matter has succeeded a cruder state: so that the lower animals existed before men, fishes before land animals, plants before fishes, and the unorganised before all that is organised; that, consequently, the original mass had to pass through a long series of changes before the first eye could be opened. And yet, the existence of this whole world remains ever dependent upon the first eye that opened, even if it were that of an insect. For such an eye is a necessary condition of the possibility of knowledge, and the whole world exists only in and for knowledge, and without it is not even thinkable. The world is entirely idea, and as such demands the knowing subject as the supporter of its existence. This long course of time itself, filled with innumerable changes, through which matter rose from form to form till at last the first percipient creature appeared,—this whole time itself is only thinkable in the identity of a consciousness whose succession of ideas, whose form of knowing it is, and apart from which, it loses all meaning and is nothing at all. — Arthur Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation

It seems paradoxical, and in the next paragraph, Schopenhauer acknowledges this:

Thus we see, on the one hand, the existence of the whole world necessarily dependent upon the first conscious being, however undeveloped it may be; on the other hand, this conscious being just as necessarily entirely dependent upon a long chain of causes and effects which have preceded it, and in which it itself appears as a small link. These two contradictory points of view, to each of which we are led with the same necessity, we might again call an antinomy in our faculty of knowledge… The necessary contradiction which at last presents itself to us here, finds its solution in the fact that, to use Kant’s phraseology, time, space, and causality do not belong to the thing-in-itself, but only to its phenomena, of which they are the form; which in my language means this: The objective world, the world as idea, is not the only side of the world, but merely its outward side; and it has an entirely different side—the side of its inmost nature—its kernel—the thing-in-itself… But the world as idea… only appears with the opening of the first eye. Without this medium of knowledge it cannot be, and therefore it was not before it. But without that eye, that is to say, outside of knowledge, there was also no before, no time. Thus time has no beginning, but all beginning is in time.

The mistake we make is to understand ourselves as a result of an unguided and unintended process of change, as if the mind is a latecomer to the grand spectacle, somehow thrown up by it, by means as yet unknown, without seeing that in another sense, the mind is the means by which the whole process is coming to understand itself. Even Julian Huxley, no friend of theism or idealist philosophy, for that matter, came to a similar realisation:

Man is that part of reality in which and through which the cosmic process has become conscious and has begun to comprehend itself. His supreme task is to increase that conscious comprehension and to apply it as fully as possible to guide the course of events. In other words, his role is to discover his destiny as an agent of the evolutionary process, in order to fulfill it more adequately. — Julian Huxley

(Although personally I'm more drawn to the philosophical attitude of his brother, Alduous.)

I'm saying our conscious experience is constructed by our brains. We aren't just raw experiencing reality as it is, we're experiencing a fabricated interface - fabricated from real events, yes, but the experience should never be confused for the real events themselves.

Even our experience of time and the chronological order of events is constructed in our brains: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2866156/

So our brain processes are not real according to you...not a part of reality? Experiences are not real events?

no, I didn't say our brain processes aren't real.

So our brain processes and hence our experiences are parts of reality then?

If you don't understand the difference between naive realism and indirect realism, the questions you're choosing to ask aren't going to help you

That's not an answer. I understand the difference between direct realism and indirect realism well enough.