I think you'd find the philosopher Jean Baudrillard really interesting [0]. He wrote extensively about how humans create structure/models/frameworks around everything that approximate the "real" world into something we can work with. He calls them simulations, and i think he goes as far as to argue that it is in fact the "real world" underlying those simulations that doesn't exist; or ceases to exist once it's been simulated.

0: Excerpt from his book Simulacra and Simulation - https://web.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Baudrilla...