Are we living in the Matrix?

[Smart Turtle]

Long before modern science fiction questioned the nature of our reality, the 18th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant explored the fundamental limits of human perception.

In his work, Critique of Pure Reason, Kant argued that human beings can never experience reality exactly as it is. Instead, our brains act as a filter. He divided reality into two distinct concepts:

The Phenomenal World: This is the world as it appears to us. It is the world of objects, colors, sounds, and scientific laws. It is reality filtered through human senses and human cognition (such as our understanding of space, time, and cause-and-effect).
The Noumenal World: This is the world of "things-in-themselves." It is reality as it actually exists, completely independent of our senses or minds. Because we cannot step outside our own brains, we can never truly access or comprehend this realm.

Kant warned that our logical tools (like cause-and-effect) only work within the Phenomenal world. Whenever human beings try to use these limited tools to explain the ultimate nature of the universe or the origin of reality itself, human reasoning breaks down into unresolvable paradoxes. We simply do not have the cognitive equipment to understand the Noumenal world.

In the early 1900s, a biologist named Jakob von Uexküll gave this philosophical idea a biological framework. He created a concept called the Umwelt (German for "environment" or "surrounding world").

Umwelt is the idea that every single animal species lives in its own completely unique, enclosed subjective reality based entirely on its biological "hardware."

A tick is deaf and blind; its entire universe consists only of sensing body heat and the smell of a specific chemical (butyric acid).
A bat experiences the world as a 3D topographic map of echolocated sound waves.
A human experiences the world through our specific spectrum of visible light, our range of hearing, and our capacity for language.

If our brains are already generating a subjective, highly filtered 'virtual' experience of the universe, does that mean that we might be inside a highly advanced simulation?

 

[Lord of the Large Pants]

No.

lmao bottom text

 

[ToroidalBoat]

There cannot be consciousness emerging from a simulation any more than characters in your imagination can have independent consciousness. So if this really were a simulation -- a really crappy and limiting one -- then your point of awareness of consciousness would be independent of the simulation, yet plugged into it and only aware of it. So you couldn't get drunk if you drank a lot, and your mind shouldn't more or less out when you fall asleep. Also, there's things measurable with π (which has infinite decimal #s).

 

[XL xQgg?QcQCaTYDMjqoDnYpG]

Hello
What you are seeing here is the usual Kantian magic trick, which is redefining ignorance as profundity, and then acting impressed with it. It has poisoned epistemology for centuries.
I'll show you how the trick goes.

You start with something trivial (such as the fact that human perception has a structure) and immediately inflate it into something absurd (therefore we cannot know reality as it is). That leap is doing all the work and neither Kant nor any of his cheerleaders has earned it.
The fact that a tool has a design does not make it disconnected from what it measures. That is literally the entire point of a tool. Calling perception a "filter" and then pretending it seals you off from reality is like saying a thermometer can't measure temperature because it only responds to heat.

And if you're looking for particularly arbitrary vacation destinations, may I recommend the noumenal world? It's the famous Kantian black hole where content goes to die.
By definition, it is something you can't perceive, can't describe, can't connect to anything, and can't use in any explanation. So what exactly did Kant introduce? A word, not a thing, a placeholder for "I want there to be more here, but I have nothing to say about it"
In fact, it is even worse than that. "I am literally making up an entire realm of existence that nobody can observe, but you see, it actually explains the things we see and interact with!" It boggles my mind that anyone can respect such utter childish drivel

Consider the allegation that our logical tools "only work" with appearances. The first thing that should stick out to the mature reader is that the statement that has just been made doesn't work either, because it's a claim about the limits of those tools. If your reasoning can't reach reality, then it also can't reach the claim that it can't reach reality. You don't get to issue global verdicts on reason while declaring reason to be locally confined. It's pretty blatant self-erasure, it's not even subtle.

The Umwelt example is the same confusion, just years later. A tick detects chemicals, a bat detects echoes, a human detects light. What a great insight, different organisms detect different features of the same world. If anyone comes along and insists that that implies three separate sealed realities, I recommend a psychiatric evaluation. What it does imply is one reality with multiple entry points.
The "Matrix" leap is just as ridiculous. "If our experience is filtered, maybe it's a simulation."
To even form that idea, one relies on the exact same conceptual tools one just declared unreliable outside appearances. So now reason simultaneously fails to reach reality and successfully describes what might underlie reality. I guess it depends on which part of the argument needs it?

What Kant did is an insult to intelligence if you think about it. He turns "we don't perceive everything" into "we can't know anything as it is". A contentless "noumenal realm" gets treated like a profound discovery instead of an empty label. And then come along others and add science fiction concepts on the back of concepts that were declared fundamentally untrustworthy.
Now, once you realize that this is fog and not depth, and you clear away that fog, what is left?
Perception is how you make contact with reality, it is not how you're cut off from reality. Different sensory equipment reveals different aspects of the same world, not different worlds. And the moment you try to say anything about what might exist "behind" appearances, you're already relying on the very capacity you were told to distrust.

Ayn Rand, peace be upon her, called Kant the destroyer of morality. I'm willing to upgrade that claim into calling Kant a destroyer of the brain itself, perhaps that is brain rot before the term existed.

As a reward for reading, and to compensate you for the brain cells you lost from taking Kant seriously, I will leave you with what a much greater philosopher, aforementioned Ayn Rand, coined, namely the stolen concept fallacy. I'll give you a quick crash course on it.
Concepts are not all on the same level. There are concepts that depend on an understanding of other concepts first. For instance, "grandfather". To understand what a "grandfather" is, you must first understand what a "father" is, so one can say that the more abstract "grandfather" is above the "father" in the conceptual hierarchy.
Or take "optical illusion". You can't just start with "optical illusion" and only then figure out what "seeing" is. It's the other way around, first you know what it means to see something, and only then can you identify cases where your perception is mistaken.
Now, a "stolen concept" is a logical fallacy that occurs when someone uses a higher-level concept while denying or undermining the more basic concept it depends on.
Consider the proposition "language is meaningless". The very act of making that statement relies on language having meaning. The claim uses the thing it tries to deny, it tries to deny the thing it uses. The statement collapses under its own weight.
Now behold: "reality is an illusion", or "we can't know reality as it is"
What is an illusion? An illusion is a misperception of something that exists. To call something an illusion, you must already have a standard of what "real" is. If nothing can be known as real, then the word "illusion" has no contrast and no meaning. The concept of "reality" is used while trying to deny it.
Likewise, saying "we can't know reality" is itself presented as knowledge about reality. It relies on the very capacity it is attempting to discredit. If the claim were true, you would have no basis for asserting it.
So when you read or hear claims like "everything is just a perception" or "we're trapped behind appearances", now you know that the speaker is quietly relying on the very ideas they're trying to invalidate. That is, what you're confronted with is not a deep insight, but a conceptual collapse pretending to be one.

 

[Fishnumm]

nah i doubt it

 

[The Last Stand]

The Noumenal World: This is the world of "things-in-themselves." It is reality as it actually exists, completely independent of our senses or minds. Because we cannot step outside our own brains, we can never truly access or comprehend this realm.

Kant warned that our logical tools (like cause-and-effect) only work within the Phenomenal world. Whenever human beings try to use these limited tools to explain the ultimate nature of the universe or the origin of reality itself, human reasoning breaks down into unresolvable paradoxes. We simply do not have the cognitive equipment to understand the Noumenal world.

Wait, that doesn't even make sense. According to Kant: in the Noumenal world, reality ceases to exist when we don't think about it? This reminds me of this brain twister question: if a tree falls into a forest and no-one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? What difference would it make if somebody is around to hear it? A falling tree produces sound. Trees exist. Trees can fall.

It's proven that reality exists and humans are living in this reality. Traffic flows, objects carry permanence, people live their lives under free will. It does not matter if I'm not conscious of everything outside my realm. World keeps on spinning with or without my input or existence.

 

[XL xQgg?QcQCaTYDMjqoDnYpG]

Wait, that doesn't even make sense. According to Kant: in the Noumenal world, reality ceases to exist when we don't think about it? This reminds me of this brain twister question: if a tree falls into a forest and no-one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? What difference would it make if somebody is around to hear it? A falling tree produces sound. Trees exist. Trees can fall.

It's proven that reality exists and humans are living in this reality. Traffic flows, objects carry permanence, people live their lives under free will. It does not matter if I'm not conscious of everything outside my realm. World keeps on spinning with or without my input or existence.

What you're rejecting there is less Kant and more Berkeley
Kant does not say that reality disappears when you're not thinking about it. He does explicitly hold that things exist independently of your mind. The move he made is different and more subtle.
He splits reality into two: the world as it appears to us (what we perceive and think about) and the world "as it is in itself" (which exists, but is supposedly inaccessible to us)
So your intuition that the world keeps spinning is something Kant would agree with. The problem lies in what he added on top of that.
He claims that everything you can know - objects, causation, time etc. - only applies to appearances, and not to reality as it is in itself. Apparently standards must have been lower a few centuries ago...
The thing is, for the sake of argument, let's pretend he's right. Now we end up in a very strange situation.
Kant tells you that there is a real world out there that's independent of your mind... but also that you cannot know anything about it, and that your basic tools for understanding reality (like causation) don't apply to it.
At that point, what does it even mean to say that such a "world" exists?
If you can't describe it, can't connect it to anything you experience, and can't apply any concepts to it, what does it mean for it to "exist"? You are left with something that is being asserted, but cannot enter into any explanation.
Unfortunately, it gets worse.
The claim that "we cannot know reality as it is" is itself presented as knowledge about reality. It is not a statement about appearances, it is a statement about the limits of our knowledge in relation to reality. You know, the thing Kant denies we can reach?
Instead of denying reality, Kant posits a second reality and then cuts every possible connection to it while still making claims about it. Like, "the world exists independently and keeps going" is a fine instinct, Kant accepts that and then he builds a framework where that fact becomes unusable.

 

[dick brain]

Hello
What you are seeing here is the usual Kantian magic trick, which is redefining ignorance as profundity, and then acting impressed with it. It has poisoned epistemology for centuries.
I'll show you how the trick goes.

You start with something trivial (such as the fact that human perception has a structure) and immediately inflate it into something absurd (therefore we cannot know reality as it is). That leap is doing all the work and neither Kant nor any of his cheerleaders has earned it.
The fact that a tool has a design does not make it disconnected from what it measures. That is literally the entire point of a tool. Calling perception a "filter" and then pretending it seals you off from reality is like saying a thermometer can't measure temperature because it only responds to heat.

And if you're looking for particularly arbitrary vacation destinations, may I recommend the noumenal world? It's the famous Kantian black hole where content goes to die.
By definition, it is something you can't perceive, can't describe, can't connect to anything, and can't use in any explanation. So what exactly did Kant introduce? A word, not a thing, a placeholder for "I want there to be more here, but I have nothing to say about it"
In fact, it is even worse than that. "I am literally making up an entire realm of existence that nobody can observe, but you see, it actually explains the things we see and interact with!" It boggles my mind that anyone can respect such utter childish drivel

Consider the allegation that our logical tools "only work" with appearances. The first thing that should stick out to the mature reader is that the statement that has just been made doesn't work either, because it's a claim about the limits of those tools. If your reasoning can't reach reality, then it also can't reach the claim that it can't reach reality. You don't get to issue global verdicts on reason while declaring reason to be locally confined. It's pretty blatant self-erasure, it's not even subtle.

The Umwelt example is the same confusion, just years later. A tick detects chemicals, a bat detects echoes, a human detects light. What a great insight, different organisms detect different features of the same world. If anyone comes along and insists that that implies three separate sealed realities, I recommend a psychiatric evaluation. What it does imply is one reality with multiple entry points.
The "Matrix" leap is just as ridiculous. "If our experience is filtered, maybe it's a simulation."
To even form that idea, one relies on the exact same conceptual tools one just declared unreliable outside appearances. So now reason simultaneously fails to reach reality and successfully describes what might underlie reality. I guess it depends on which part of the argument needs it?

What Kant did is an insult to intelligence if you think about it. He turns "we don't perceive everything" into "we can't know anything as it is". A contentless "noumenal realm" gets treated like a profound discovery instead of an empty label. And then come along others and add science fiction concepts on the back of concepts that were declared fundamentally untrustworthy.
Now, once you realize that this is fog and not depth, and you clear away that fog, what is left?
Perception is how you make contact with reality, it is not how you're cut off from reality. Different sensory equipment reveals different aspects of the same world, not different worlds. And the moment you try to say anything about what might exist "behind" appearances, you're already relying on the very capacity you were told to distrust.

Ayn Rand, peace be upon her, called Kant the destroyer of morality. I'm willing to upgrade that claim into calling Kant a destroyer of the brain itself, perhaps that is brain rot before the term existed.

As a reward for reading, and to compensate you for the brain cells you lost from taking Kant seriously, I will leave you with what a much greater philosopher, aforementioned Ayn Rand, coined, namely the stolen concept fallacy. I'll give you a quick crash course on it.
Concepts are not all on the same level. There are concepts that depend on an understanding of other concepts first. For instance, "grandfather". To understand what a "grandfather" is, you must first understand what a "father" is, so one can say that the more abstract "grandfather" is above the "father" in the conceptual hierarchy.
Or take "optical illusion". You can't just start with "optical illusion" and only then figure out what "seeing" is. It's the other way around, first you know what it means to see something, and only then can you identify cases where your perception is mistaken.
Now, a "stolen concept" is a logical fallacy that occurs when someone uses a higher-level concept while denying or undermining the more basic concept it depends on.
Consider the proposition "language is meaningless". The very act of making that statement relies on language having meaning. The claim uses the thing it tries to deny, it tries to deny the thing it uses. The statement collapses under its own weight.
Now behold: "reality is an illusion", or "we can't know reality as it is"
What is an illusion? An illusion is a misperception of something that exists. To call something an illusion, you must already have a standard of what "real" is. If nothing can be known as real, then the word "illusion" has no contrast and no meaning. The concept of "reality" is used while trying to deny it.
Likewise, saying "we can't know reality" is itself presented as knowledge about reality. It relies on the very capacity it is attempting to discredit. If the claim were true, you would have no basis for asserting it.
So when you read or hear claims like "everything is just a perception" or "we're trapped behind appearances", now you know that the speaker is quietly relying on the very ideas they're trying to invalidate. That is, what you're confronted with is not a deep insight, but a conceptual collapse pretending to be one.

What you're rejecting there is less Kant and more Berkeley
Kant does not say that reality disappears when you're not thinking about it. He does explicitly hold that things exist independently of your mind. The move he made is different and more subtle.
He splits reality into two: the world as it appears to us (what we perceive and think about) and the world "as it is in itself" (which exists, but is supposedly inaccessible to us)
So your intuition that the world keeps spinning is something Kant would agree with. The problem lies in what he added on top of that.
He claims that everything you can know - objects, causation, time etc. - only applies to appearances, and not to reality as it is in itself. Apparently standards must have been lower a few centuries ago...
The thing is, for the sake of argument, let's pretend he's right. Now we end up in a very strange situation.
Kant tells you that there is a real world out there that's independent of your mind... but also that you cannot know anything about it, and that your basic tools for understanding reality (like causation) don't apply to it.
At that point, what does it even mean to say that such a "world" exists?
If you can't describe it, can't connect it to anything you experience, and can't apply any concepts to it, what does it mean for it to "exist"? You are left with something that is being asserted, but cannot enter into any explanation.
Unfortunately, it gets worse.
The claim that "we cannot know reality as it is" is itself presented as knowledge about reality. It is not a statement about appearances, it is a statement about the limits of our knowledge in relation to reality. You know, the thing Kant denies we can reach?
Instead of denying reality, Kant posits a second reality and then cuts every possible connection to it while still making claims about it. Like, "the world exists independently and keeps going" is a fine instinct, Kant accepts that and then he builds a framework where that fact becomes unusable.

Your posts across this board singlehandedly dissuade me from studying philosophy.

 

[No-Eyed Square Guy]

We're in the gay porn parody of the Matrix where we get "gaped" by infinite Agent Smiths.

 

[XL xQgg?QcQCaTYDMjqoDnYpG]

Your posts across this board singlehandedly dissuade me from studying philosophy.

Rightfully so, much of academic philosophy poisons you with so much bad knowledge that it's actively detrimental. It's centuries of institutionalized confusion where the more delusional and less informative you are, the more prestige you earn. If your takeaway is that you should avoid that, you're already ahead of most students.
I strongly recommend independent study, starting from reality. No appeal to authority, no reverence for names, no tolerance for claims that collapse under their own weight. That does rule out large parts of academic philosophy, but that's their problem.

 

[dick brain]

Rightfully so, much of academic philosophy poisons you with so much bad knowledge that it's actively detrimental. It's centuries of institutionalized confusion where the more delusional and less informative you are, the more prestige you earn. If your takeaway is that you should avoid that, you're already ahead of most students.
I strongly recommend independent study, starting from reality. No appeal to authority, no reverence for names, no tolerance for claims that collapse under their own weight. That does rule out large parts of academic philosophy, but that's their problem.

You misunderstand, I meant that I don't want to study it because I'm worried I'll turn out like you.

 

[The Last Stand]

If our brains are already generating a subjective, highly filtered 'virtual' experience of the universe, does that mean that we might be inside a highly advanced simulation?

If our brains are trained to do so, my "virtual" experience would have a 1950s era woman in my life at my will.

The claim that "we cannot know reality as it is" is itself presented as knowledge about reality. It is not a statement about appearances, it is a statement about the limits of our knowledge in relation to reality. You know, the thing Kant denies we can reach?
Instead of denying reality, Kant posits a second reality and then cuts every possible connection to it while still making claims about it. Like, "the world exists independently and keeps going" is a fine instinct, Kant accepts that and then he builds a framework where that fact becomes unusable.

Kant must be a god among mortals then, because that assertion loses credibility the moment he claims that the second supposed reality in unreachable yet he can make claims of something that does not exists but does at the same time.

 

[Do Not Touch Me Pls]

You are not in the Matrix.

 

[Gravityqueen4life]

Take your meds. i promise you, you feel alot better.

 

[analrapist]

We're not "in the Matrix". What you sense is just that Jesus is coming soon. Get right with Him while you have the chance!

 

[Smart Turtle]

The fact that a tool has a design does not make it disconnected from what it measures. That is literally the entire point of a tool. Calling perception a "filter" and then pretending it seals you off from reality is like saying a thermometer can't measure temperature because it only responds to heat.

A thermometer measures temperature, but it doesn't know it's in a room, and it doesn't know what a room is. By reducing reality to a single 'measurement,' perception doesn't connect us to the world; it simplifies the world into a survival-friendly caricature. We aren't looking through a window; we are looking at a screen that tells us where the 'food' and 'predator' icons are.

What Kant did is an insult to intelligence if you think about it. He turns "we don't perceive everything" into "we can't know anything as it is". A contentless "noumenal realm" gets treated like a profound discovery instead of an empty label. And then come along others and add science fiction concepts on the back of concepts that were declared fundamentally untrustworthy.
Now, once you realize that this is fog and not depth, and you clear away that fog, what is left?
Perception is how you make contact with reality, it is not how you're cut off from reality. Different sensory equipment reveals different aspects of the same world, not different worlds. And the moment you try to say anything about what might exist "behind" appearances, you're already relying on the very capacity you were told to distrust.

Immanuel Kant’s philosophy centers on a fundamental distinction that changed how we think about reality. He argued that we never actually perceive "things as they are, He didn't insult your intelligence, He just said that it is limited.

Our senses ignore the vast majority of information. For example, humans cannot see ultraviolet or infrared light, nor can we hear ultrasonic frequencies. If reality includes these spectra, we are effectively "blind" to those aspects of the world.

Because we can't see things like X-rays or magnetic fields, we are actually "cut off" from large parts of the world. We are seeing a limited version of reality, not the whole thing.

Some cultures have different numbers of words for colors. In languages that don't distinguish between blue and green, speakers may take significantly longer to perceive the difference between the two, even though their eyes are physically receiving the same light wavelengths.

I’ll simplify it instead of speaking in meaningless circles

For a cat, "knowing" reality is entirely different:

A cat knows that if it stands by the door and meows, the human opens it. But the cat possesses no concept of mechanics (how the doorknob works) or mind-reading (the human's motives). It simply knows the sequence: A happens, then B happens.

It does not understand the mechanics of metal yielding to pressure, nor the concept of a vacuum seal preserving meat. It simply knows the sequence: Click-hiss = food.

Lack of Abstraction: A cat has no concept of "Tuesday," "mortgages," or "death." Its reality is fiercely anchored to the eternal present.

 

[XL xQgg?QcQCaTYDMjqoDnYpG]

A thermometer measures temperature, but it doesn't know it's in a room, and it doesn't know what a room is. By reducing reality to a single 'measurement,' perception doesn't connect us to the world; it simplifies the world into a survival-friendly caricature. We aren't looking through a window; we are looking at a screen that tells us where the 'food' and 'predator' icons are.

The example actually shows the opposite of what you're trying to show.
Correct, a thermometer doesn't "know" it's in a room, but that's not its function. Its function is to measure temperature, and it accomplishes that by being causally connected to what it measures. The absence of a higher-level awareness does not make the measurement a caricature. It just means you're dealing with a measurement, not a full conceptual model.
The same distinction applies to perception.
Perception is not meant to deliver a complete, exhaustive account of reality. It is merely the first level of contact with it. From there, this contact is extended by higher-level cognition (concepts, science, instruments etc.). The fact that unaided perception has a limited range does not imply that what it does present is distorted or unreal.

The step from "we don't perceive everything" to "what we perceive is just a simplified interface" simply does not follow.
Not seeing infrared does not mean that visible light is a "caricature", all it does mean is that it's a subset. The same applies to sound, color, or any other modality. A subset of reality is still reality. It doesn't become a screen or a symbolic overlay just because it's not exhaustive.

The "icons on a screen" analogy is circular. It assumes without proving that perception is not directed to reality but instead it encodes it arbitrarily. In every single example you gave, the connection is causal and lawful, not arbitrary. The limitation is in range, not in kind.


Now, on Kant specifically. To say that our knowledge is limited is not controversial. The issue is what Kant does with this. Kant's move is not to say "we don't perceive everything", instead he says "what we perceive is structured in such a way that we cannot know reality as it is independently of that structure". It is a much much stronger claim and that's also where the problem is.
Once you say that, you are no longer just pointing out missing information, you are actively asserting a divide between appearance and reality that you then proceed to describe (while claiming it cannot be known)
All your examples show range limitations or processing differences, not a fundamental separation between perception and reality.
The question is what justifies moving from "we detect a subset" to "we are cut off from reality as it is".

 

[XL xQgg?QcQCaTYDMjqoDnYpG]

a cat

Again you are using an example that does not support the point you want to make.
A cat does have knowledge, it just happens to be at a very low level of abstraction. A cat recognizes patterns, forms associations, and acts on them. "Meow -> door opens" or "click-hiss -> food" are not arbitrary icons on a screen. They are regularities in reality that the cat is responding to.
Now, what the cat does lack is conceptual integration of the things it perceives, it does not lack contact with reality. The cat does not understand mechanisms or causes in the abstract sense, but that doesn't mean its experience is a caricature or disconnected. All it means is that its cognition doesn't go (much) beyond immediate associations.

Where humans differ is that we are capable of building on perception. After perceiving objects, we identify objects, we form concepts, we investigate mechanisms (like how a door works or why a container is sealed by pressure).
The progression is not "perception -> interface -> disconnection".
What it actually is is "perception -> increasing levels of abstraction -> deeper understanding"
Your earlier point was not just that we have limits, but that perception reduces reality to something like a symbolic overlay or survival interface. Like I said earlier, the cat example does not support that. The cat example shows a simpler form of cognition operating on real inputs, and not a different kind of "screen". Not having a concept of "Tuesday" or "mortgage" does not mean that the cat is cut off from reality, all it means is that those concepts are beyond the cat's cognitive range. The same applies to us with things like ultraviolet light or magnetic fields. Not directly perceiving something does not turn what we do perceive into a caricature.

Again, what justifies the move from "different levels of cognition" to "what is perceived is only an interface, rather than reality"? So far all examples do not point to a disconnection from reality.

 

[Smart Turtle]

Where humans differ is that we are capable of building on perception. After perceiving objects, we identify objects, we form concepts, we investigate mechanisms (like how a door works or why a container is sealed by pressure).

Someone (like Hoffman) would argue that your "deeper understanding" is simply a more complex interface.

For example

The Desktop Metaphor: If you click an icon on a computer, you see a file. If you right-click and look at "Properties," you see more data. If you open the code, you see more still.

The Trap: You might feel like you are getting closer to the "truth" of the computer, but you are still looking at pixels on a screen. You aren't seeing the flow of electrons through transistors or the literal silicon.

 

[XL xQgg?QcQCaTYDMjqoDnYpG]

Someone (like Hoffman) would argue that your "deeper understanding" is simply a more complex interface.

For example

The Desktop Metaphor: If you click an icon on a computer, you see a file. If you right-click and look at "Properties," you see more data. If you open the code, you see more still.

The Trap: You might feel like you are getting closer to the "truth" of the computer, but you are still looking at pixels on a screen. You aren't seeing the flow of electrons through transistors or the literal silicon.

Again you use an analogy that does not establish what you think it does. This time, the analogy quietly assumes the opposite.
When you click an icon, you are not merely "seeing pixels". You are interacting with a real system through a level of abstraction that is built on the underlying hardware. The icon is a structured way of accessing and manipulating something that exists, it is not a disconnected fiction.
If, however, it were merely a "screen" in your sense, detached from reality, then clicking the icon would have no consistent effect. However, it does. The file opens, data changes, processes run. The interaction works precisely because there is a lawful connection between what you perceive and what exists underneath.
So the situation is that you are not directly observing electrons, but that you are interacting with a system whose behavior is determined by those electrons. It is plainly false to label this a disconnect, this is clearly access at a different level of abstraction.
And the same applies to perception.

You are treating "not seeing the most fundamental layer" as if it implies "not being in contact with reality", but those are not the same claim.
Literally every example that you have given shows increasing levels of access to the same system, not a departure from it. None of those layers floats free from the underlying reality, they all depend on it and correspond to it.

Now, if the analogy were accurate to your conclusion, then clicking an icon could open random files, code inspection would have no relation to execution, and higher-level descriptions would not reliably correspond to lower-level processes. The analogy demonstrates layered access, it does not demonstrate a sealed interface.

The step I called out remains unresolved. What justification is there to move from "our access is mediated and limited" to "our access is only to an interface and not to reality"? So far literally every single example you gave still presupposes a stable connection to the thing it's supposedly replacing.