you never really connect with someone, just your own mental representation of them

When you see a person and talk to them you're not really interacting with them, you're interacting with a mental representation that your brain has constructed of them, based on sensory input you gather which is filtered, biased and linked together in a way that aligns with a theoretical model in your brain which is made by your biological makeup and experiences throughout your life.

Just take one person and look at how different people see that person, and not just in the sense of "he is smart" or any metric that they consciously hold but also every unconscious judgement, qualities or patterns by which they perceive and experience that person and you will see that their images are vastly different.

There's no other option than to live in your head, every word you ever say isn't to that person it's to a painting that you have in your mind and everyone has a different painting of that person with a different resolution, lighting, clothing, facial expressions its all an illusion.

Even to yourself, behind all your self knowledge and consciousness is a layer of unconscious processes and perception that dominate your vision, you are a computer that tries to build a 3D model of itself but it can't include every transistors or architecture by which it works so it can only work through a severely simplified model and it cannot be conscious because it can only be conscious of the contents from it's consciousness (sorry for that sentence lol)

EDIT: I don't mean that consciousness doesn't exist, just that it's like an HD picture of a galaxy it captures a lot of information but nowhere near the information that's beyond the picture