For centuries, the Western intellectual tradition has pursued a single, seductive dream: that the truth is out there, waiting to be discovered. But what if this quest has led humanity into great danger? In this provocative essay, philosopher Manuel Delaflor challenges the Enlightenment ideal of objective truth, arguing that our models don’t represent reality but rather that they create it. The result is a radical rethinking of knowledge, meaning, and what it means to know anything at all.

Just a few days ago, a colleague cornered me after a talk on the plausibility of artificial consciousness. “But, surely,” she said, “we can at least agree on what we mean by reality?” Her earnestness was touching. It reminded me of my younger self, back when I believed that philosophy's great project, “making sense of it all,” was not only possible but inevitable. We just needed the right facts, better arguments, clearer thinking, more rigorous definitions.

___

The Enlightenment dream, inherited by generations, is that truth can be discovered, reality pinned down, knowledge attained like the summit of a metaphorical Everest and surveyed like a kingdom. It is a lovely dream. It is also the most dangerous fantasy our species has ever invented.

___

How naive I was. How beautifully, tragically naive. All of this was before I began to understand that our very frameworks, the models and concepts we use to understand the world, can’t do what they are supposed to do. This insight would eventually become my way to fly past all doubts and certainties. Model Dependent Ontology says models don’t depict a world, they instantiate it. Change the model and you are, in every meaningful sense, in another universe.

Of course, it took me years to notice it. It was not just that these conversations failed to reach consensus—that would have been merely disappointing. No, it was something more unsettling. Historically unsettling. Through the ages, the harder we worked to establish common ground, the more the ground itself seemed to dissolve. Each new definition spawned more disagreements and more problems. It was as if the very act of trying to pin down meaning caused it to scatter like mercury under pressure. And I was wrestling between countless concepts from completely separate places, both in time and space (Taoism, Zen, Nagarjuna, Socrates, Nisargadatta, Deleuze, Bohr, Wittgenstein), when I realized we weren't failing at philosophy. Philosophy was failing us. And that the tools we'd inherited, the whole magnificent enterprise of truth seeking itself, wasn't broken. It was working exactly as designed. That is the horror of it.

___

But what if every attempt to pin down “reality” or “truth” is not the path to sense, but the prelude to confusion, dogma, nonsense, and, ultimately, violence?

___