The author is assuming a radical mind-body dualism in which human minds construct an idea of reality, but never actually contact it. This is an idea from Weste

The author is assuming a radical mind-body dualism in which human minds construct an idea of reality, but never actually contact it. This is an idea from Western philosophy whose most famous advocate was Descartes. However, it has some deep philosophical contradictions, as anyone who has taken intro philosophy can tell you. In the last century and a half, a long line of leading Western philosophers, including Wittgenstein, Strawson, the pragmatists James, Dewey, and Pierce, Whitehead, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Derrida, have rejected radical mind-body dualism. And let me add that modern scientists generally assume something like pragmatism, which not a surprise given that two of the founders of pragmatism, namely James and Pierce, were professional scientists, and Dewey took modern sciences as one of his models for knowledge.