[jamesrcole]

I think the reason for this (common) error is that we can only imagine the world through what it's like in our conscious experience of it. So when we think of some system processing information "about" the world, we're imagining what it is about in conscious-experience terms, which tends to hide what is difficult to explain.

What is it that is difficult to explain? We don't (currently) know of any phenomenon that is like (for example) what a sound sounds like to us.