The human mind can grasp only an infinitesimal fraction of what there is, for reality is infinitely too complex to be fully apprehended. Our experience of the external world is always mediated by the mind. Everything we experience—colors, sounds, shapes, objects—is filtered through our senses and interpreted by the brain. We never encounter the world “raw” or “in itself”; instead, the mind constructs a mental representation from sensory input, prior knowledge, and cognitive structures. Therefore, the subject has only indirect access to the world. The world is not as it is in itself, but as a representation: the world is my world.

Any attempt to step outside this representational interface inevitably produces another construal. Even the postulation of an external, mind-independent reality is itself part of the representational interface itself. All efforts to escape representation are thus incoherent: when we try to posit a reality “beyond” appearances, we do not leave representation behind but merely generate a new representation within it.

« Hence the external physical world that is the subject
of empirical scientific inquiry—the material domain that includes
the physical body and brain—is only available to us as a mental
construct or representation. Any attempt to step outside of this
representation—to imagine a world existing apart from our construal of it—can only yield another construal. This line of thought takes us down the path to idealism; to the view that there is nothing beyond our mental representations »

This is why the very idea of an unconceptualized world proves incoherent. We cannot step outside our language, conceptual schemes, or perspectives in order to compare our beliefs with reality “as it is in itself.” Our conceptual frameworks interpenetrate reality so deeply that the notion of a pre-schematized world—one entirely independent of any mode of representation—loses its intelligibility.

Reality is therefore neither simply mind-independent nor merely a mental construction; it can only be approached within the conditions of representation that make experience possible at all.

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Thus, there is no way the world is in itself, independently of our perception of it. Any attempt to describe reality “as it really is” would already be filtered through our systems of representation (e.g. sensory perception, language, scientific models, etc.). However, this claim immediately turns back on itself: if it is true, then the world must at least be the way described by that very statement. In asserting that there is no truth about reality, one seems to affirm a truth about it. The denial of an ultimate reality paradoxically presupposes one.

If « the world is my representation » is true, then this thesis itself is also part of my representation. But then the claim that “this thesis itself is part of my representation” is itself another representation, and so on ad infinitum. Self-reference leads thus to infinite regress; it’s representations all the way down.

This creates a paradox. We cannot speak of the external world without stepping outside representation—but in asserting its unknowability (or its nonexistence), we seem to do just that. The external world thus becomes a dialetheia. The nonexistence of the external world, like the truth of idealism, is ultimately ineffable. Realism and idealism are not opposed but coincide.

There is a contradiction: one cannot anything about the external world, without stepping outside the (representational) interface, the veil of percepion.