The competence of humans to create and apply constructs of reality far exceeds that of any other animal species. Their ability to consciously manipulate such models seems unique, but it remains unknown how these abilities were initially acquired and then developed. Most individuals hold strong, culturally-anchored beliefs that their particular reality is true, a viewpoint challenged by the observation that all such constructs are different. They reflect not reality, but each individual’s life experiences. Collectively they facilitated the development of hominins to unprecedented cultural and cognitive complexity. However, it remains entirely unknown how the human brain manages to create a model of the external world from the signals provided by sensory equipment and proprioceptors. This paper examines the roles of exograms in this development, as they are considered to be the only tangible connection between the brain, the faculties of sentience and the external world. Competency in exogram use became a crucial natural selection factor for humans and even overcame the human brain atrophy of the final Pleistocene and the Holocene. Under favourable conditions, some forms of exograms are capable of surviving from the deep time of human evolution. The paper follows their trail back in time to gain some insights into the developments that gave rise to human awareness, self-consciousness and Theory of Mind as we understand them. Specific archaeological finds and notions about sentient capabilities of hominins are presented in a search for exogram use in the course of human evolution. It results in a model that explains with clarity not only the course of the human journey but also the underlying reasons for the human condition as such: why we are the way we are.

Key words: human evolution, ontology, representation of reality, external memory trace, exogram, palaeoart, autopoiesis.

Open peer commentary on the article “Missing Colors: The Enactivist Approach to Perception” by Adrián G. Palacios, María-José Escobar & Esteban Céspedes. Upshot: Palacios, Escobar and Céspedes consider misrepresentation and comparability in the context of the enactivist approach of colour perception. This consideration leads them to propose the introduction of a weak form of representationalism to account for internal representation of “reality” and “shared experience” and to accommodate the Bayesian principle of prior information used in machine vision. The weak representationalism is not limited to brain states but may include embodied factors to be compatible with the enactivist framework. My commentary will essentially consider the misrepresentation and comparability arguments used by the authors to introduce the notion of representation.

Building on methodical constructivism and based on the distinction between (1) trans-subjectively founded (objective) reality, merely intersubjectively agreed (social) reality and subjective reality in the narrow sense, and (2) between (well-founded) facts, possible facts, fictitious facts and simulated facts the maintainability of the social–constructivist view is examined, according to which every representation of reality only offers a distorted image of reality, so that all representations of reality stand side by side on an equal footing. The fact that socially constructed reality is necessarily selective and therefore an interpreted (meaningful) reality is not questioned, but the conclusions that social constructivism draws from it are: (1) The concept of an “external reality” and its “representation” cannot be sustained. (2) In contrast to facts, which can be verified trans-subjectively, meanings lack a trans-subjective basis. Hence statements about the meaning of a fact are neither true nor false. (3) Nevertheless, not every meaningful construction of reality can raise the same claim to validity. (4) At least “alternative facts” can be identified as such. (5) Truth vs. falsehood of alleged facts is not the only criterion by which a construction of reality can be measured. (6) Although the discourse about meanings cannot be a discourse about whether they are true or false, constructions of reality can nonetheless be questioned for their appropriateness. And depending on what we orient our actions towards, they can prove to be appropriate or inappropriate.

Key words: methodical constructivism, facts and meanings, objective reality, social reality, subjective reality.