The first ‘virtual’ tool invented by Man, language made it possible for humans to become conscious.
By sharing information among them, individual human beings learned to speak to themselves. To think. To evaluate their activity. To evaluate themselves. Their own selves.
Speaking to each-other, people have developed self-awareness.

The process is a work in progress.

Words are ‘stamps’.
Images.
‘Commodified snapshots’ of the thing we call reality.

Which reality is simultaneously a word and the place we live in.

A word/concept into which – like in all other words – we’ve crammed everything we know about the thing itself. Which everything is nowhere near enough to actually cover the entire thing.

Reality, the word, covers everything we know about the thing but the thing itself, the thing we call reality, is far wider/deeper than that.

Hence the problem we’re stuck with.

We instinctively consider that words are apt representations for the things we attempt to describe using those words. Which, most of the time, isn’t exactly true.
We – most of us, most of the time – consider that those of us we talk to understand the words we share in the same way we understand them. Which is never the case!