I don't understand that, can you explain why seeing and taking the world 'as is' should require more energy than relating to it in a symbolic way?
The volume of information captured by our senses is vast; consider by analogy the computer memory and processing power needed to process high definition live streamed multimedia. Brains have at their disposal vast incoming streams of multimedia data captured through eyes and ears and nose and skin etc. Yet they use only a tiny fraction of that data in the construction of conscious experience. Our sense of vision for instance, is mostly a product of inner interaction between visual cortex and the thalamus, which is 'seeded' by novel sensory data on the optic nerve. The brain stores simplified models of what thing look like, textures, colours, shapes, and a trickle of central optical data coming from the eyes is used to generate our inner sense of vision, and most of peripheral vision is constructed through extrapolation.
Brains need to do what they do at minimum cost. A human brain constitutes 2% of the human total body mass but its calorific consumption is around 30% of the body total. Brains come at a very high metabolic cost so they have evolved minimal cost ways of doing things thus in the case of perception, our experience of reality is not reality at all, but a minimum cost iconographic virtual reality representation. If we could ever see reality as it actually is, we probably would not recognise it at all.
