If you both want to see the mystery replace 'the real world' with 'noumenon' and read some Immanuel Kant. He wrote awfully lot about the 'supposed mystery' :)

If you both want to see the mystery replace 'the real world' with 'noumenon' and read some Immanuel Kant. He wrote awfully lot about the 'supposed mystery' :) BTW. your parent seems to mistake "inside" with "the brain" which seems like a category error. "It seems obvious that what we're experiencing isn't the world or any so-called "objects" in it, but a structured representation of the whole and its parts." What do you mean by "the whole and its parts"? Do you mean that what we experience for our whole life is just a play of representations created by our mind? Because it seems to be the case. And when you think about it, it is as mindfucky as possible. It may be obvious for you (is it?), but most people act as if it were very far from obvious as in each action most of us attribute real, independent existence to most constructs of our minds that, under scrutiny, are completely arbitrary. Once you understand that you construct the whole world, you also start to understand how many ways to construct it are there (Sapir-Whorf etc.). Once you understand how fundamentally these possible understandings may differ, you start to appreciate how arbitrary 'your world' is. And then you start to wonder WTF is 'real world'? What is 'out there'? Is there anything at all? Just a loose association, but isn't your question a bit like asking "what's wrong with this picture" ? http://personalpages.to.infn.it/~fiorenti/escher/pgallery.gif http://personalpages.to.infn.it/~fiorenti/escher/pgallery.gi... On the other hand I understand your question perfectly. It's even hard to tell whether there is something strange about it or not.