I'm attacking myself as much as you, I have this problematic tendency to latch onto interesting sounding ideas.

universe is infinite, brains are finite. ergo, brains find compression irresistible, to the point of self-dosing reward juice when a delightful morsel of smartly collapsed reality is encountered.

even our signal processing wiring, with each lopsided neuron merging many inputs into a single output, is biased toward obligate compression.

I believe saying that our mental models are mere models and not reality would be a bit shorter, profound and usefull :)

maybe, but I try to avoid (or at least subordinate) phasing that implies a dualist distinction between the real and the mental. even the 'merest' of mental models is also part of reality, right?

such contextualization does indeed impair portability...

>> even the 'merest' of mental models is also part of reality, right?

That's quite materialistic take - I think the jury is still out on whether mind is inseparable from material reality (even if we treat it only as an emergent phenomena)

(speaking for myself here) s/materialist/monist, in which everything is considered, not material as such, but rather as emergent phenomena of differentials in causality feedback cycles.