That's pretty bog-standard empiricist epistemology: reality is what it is, irrespective of our understanding. But it's very hard for the human mind to fully co

That's pretty bog-standard empiricist epistemology: reality is what it is, irrespective of our understanding. But it's very hard for the human mind to fully comprehend that, because the mind can only operate on ideas, not the reality that those ideas represent. We are incapable of distinguishing the world itself from our understanding of it, except through a kind of cognitive dissonance: tentatively accept certain ideas as "true" in order to apply them to useful ends, while maintaining a conscious skepticism of any of them actually being "true". This is itself a very hard balance to maintain. Many people tend to gravitate toward the polar extremes, becoming either ideologues who thoroughly conflate the entirety of reality with their subjective ideas, or "just the facts" cynics who dismiss anything remotely theoretical.