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I absolutely agree with the last few things you note here Paul -- I think diversity of viewpoints presents an essential opportunity to make our worlds bigger (and consequently, more "real"). I think that the point I was initially trying to make, and what Elana was suggesting as well, was that everything we know about the brain is based, fundamentally, on a passive construction (we invent concepts and terms to explain the perceived workings of an organ). And every piece of knowledge that we add to our repertoire threatens to push us farther away from the material reality of our brains, and consequently closer to an abstraction. It's based, I guess, on thinking about "paradigms" in science, and how the way that knowledge claims we make about the world are already at least partially determined by the lens(es) we use to examine it.

One way of rephrasing my concern would be to ask very seriously, "What does our knowledge of the brain consist in? What are the kinds of things we know, and how do we know them?"