I don't agree that a higher level of consciousness necessarily correlates with a more accurate or complete perception of reality.

Perception doesn't require consciousness, and I think ants are probably not conscious, but we know they can perceive the world around them. Not exactly as humans do, but with various sensory organs.

Why then, would consciousness bring us closer to reality? How often does our conscious mind lie to us? We know that each time we recall a memory it gets modified before we move on... We know that our subconscious mind can even perceive stimuli better than our conscious mind (there's a reason you pull your hand off a hot burner without even thinking about it).

I posit that consciousness is a beautiful lie our bodies tell us, and that if we are to look for a living being on earth that experiences "reality" as closely as possible, it's going to be something that doesn't have sentience as a misleading bottleneck.

What Lawson gets at with "openness" being all that possible ways in which a thing can be perceived reminds me of the quantum cosmological idea that reality is inherently probabilistic, and that all the different "options" available in a wave function never truly collapse, but collapse for each reference point in potentially different ways.

But where there's a difference is the idea that we're "always infinitely distant from the true open nature of things." The thought school of quantum mechanics that I'm thinking of suggests that there is NO "God-eye-view" of reality, and thus every reference frame is equally legitimate, since no one or no thing can experience multiple reference points simultaneously.

So when Lawson says that reality is a bunch of homogenous stuff that only appears to have differentiation when we using a closing tool like language, that's not far off from what quantum theorists have to say about reference frames and observation (or interaction).

Edit: a word

Can't tell if art aficionado or horndog