What's Out There?

[Mudhammam]

This article is a good read, and essentially answers what I was aiming at (though whether or not it answers correctly is open to debate, as made clear by the comments below): http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/reality/looklike

The bottom line, apparently:

The world as we experience it is necessarily a function of the brain.
And even our conceptions of what the world, or “reality”, would be like are themselves in the brain.