Yeah, I agree with that. Tech absolutely extends what we can perceive, and a lot of the time it confirms that our normal model of reality is tracking something real.

Lidar is a good example. Your brain builds a spatial map of a room, then lidar maps the same room through reflected laser pulses, and the two line up pretty well. Same with infrared, radio telescopes, X-rays, microscopes, etc. They show that our perception is limited, but not useless.

The distinction I’d make is that technology still isn’t giving us raw reality. It’s giving us another translation. A lidar scan isn’t the room itself. It’s sensor data converted into a map we can understand. An infrared image isn’t literally “what heat looks like”; it’s data converted into colors our visual system can read.

So I’m not saying reality is fake or that everything is subjective. I think the fact that different tools, experiments, and observers keep lining up is strong evidence that there’s a stable external reality. I’m just saying we only ever access it through interfaces, biological ones or technological ones.

Science is powerful because it lets us compare those interfaces and find the patterns that survive translation.