Very good text by you. I feel addressed, because I fish in similar waters as you. Nagel immediately reminded me of Humberto Maturana and of the systemicists and cyberneticists I met in the course of my research. All of them, of course, via the Internet, initialized by my last training. Where I first heard about eight years ago about systemics and cybernetics (which I thought had something to do with science fiction or robotics, but far from it). Heinz von Förster was one of the better known Germans, a funny old man, you can find a few videos about him. Very exciting interviews. I remember Gregory Bateson and some others I don't mention here.

The idea of us constructing our reality is very logical in my opinion. But only since I heard from it! Laughter! When you think about memories, you notice that they are never really clear and detailed and that memories are in reality only seconds of pictures, sounds or smells, little triggers that give us a certain feeling and an impression. Just as you say, our brain constantly matches its memories: known or unknown, and prefers what it knows.

We don't see gorillas in the middle of a handball playing group!

Such things slowly but surely become general knowledge and so we have to admit for better or for worse that not only the others have prejudices, but oneself. The Buddhists have known this for a long time, even the legendary figures from the occidental tradition.

The world model that's constructed by our minds is strictly personal and mostly fake; we don't experience reality as it is, but how our minds present it to us. As science progresses and dives deeper and deeper and deeper into the basic building blocks of our physical universe, and zooms out further to understand the scope and history of it, it becomes clear that reality would overwhelm us if we were to perceive it as it actually is.

Reality as it "really is" can never be conveyed as such on the whole, because the perspectives of the countless other living beings who share the planet with us do not rank on our scale of perception. That's why I always find it nice to ask people about perspectives like the one of the bat or what the grass on which one walks "thinks"? We will never experience it in our human form.

I hope more people read this blog from you.