...there is a real, external, physicist's universe, one of objective fields, waves, particles, forces, matter/energy, space/time. It is of interest to no one but the physicist. But we all must live in a subjective universe, the model or simulation our consciousness constructs on the basis of what it perceives. It is our mind's way of creating an abstract of reality it can deal with.

We don't all create the same subjective universe, we all build different ones, and natural selection determines which ones work best for any given situation. The successful ones survive, they are memes passed on with a life of their own.

The courtier in the palace and the fisherman on his boat live in different universes, neither could survive long in the other's world. Which one is real and which is artificial? If you are still asking that question, you're not really catching on.

By evolving minds capable of divising varied subjective responses to the same objective external universe, DNA maximizes the probability that some subjective model of reality has survival value, and the race, and culture, evolves.