You were perfectly right to criticize the superficial notion of "representation"...
It is already in Schopenhauer reading Goethe and the Veda, thinking about the dead road of Kantism and Cartesianism...
But the representation theory so wrong when it want to explain perception, come from an history and from the evolution of consciousness with language...This must be explained but not here for sure...
Your Darwinian direct "participation" cannot explain perception either...
The truth is more complex....
There is no interface between us and the world you are right, but the "world" itself appear like an interface between "us" and us...Man is double, from evolution come history and these 2 are the 2 faces of man...History is cultures and civilizations, it is is a "symbolic form" related to the history of consciousness...
It is not the world which is divided in two...
It is us who are double: an animal body and his embryonnic ego and a spirit.....
The world is not double but it cannot be perceived in his "wholeness" without a yoga of the consciousness lived THROUGH our own body which is explained by Husserl but way better by the Goethean phenomenology...You can try Aurobindo if you are more interested in oriental attitude...
Perceiving anything in his true nature ask for a discipline of the mind and of the attention, alien to the common man prisonner of his habit and living in a "virtual" world...
There is no interface between us and the world , the interface is between our sleepwalking ego and our spirit and soul.... The interface is our own body between my ego and my soul....We must learn to inhabit our own body....We must learn to hear and see...
The history of philosophy is founded on the history of language and on the history of consciousness itself ...
The representation theory of perception is not even wrong, it is an half truth born from history.....
The Darwinian theory of evolution is not even wrong, it is an half truth born also from history....
The whole truth ask for the experience of oneness....This experience is the real basis to the participation in the cosmos and in the natural world at the animal level... In human this experience ask for a reappropriation of our animal nature instead of his negation and at the same time a spiritual transcendental experience of the "one"....All that in our own body/soul or External/Internal...
Like said Swedenborg very economically, Swedenborg stuttered al his life and learned to speak with very few words, speaking about death:
« In death the internal become the external and vice versa»
Then trhe relation between my body and the cosmos is a double in- flowing and out-flowing, like in respiration...It is a dynamic polarization which has been transformed in a static duality by habit and conditioning...
This is where we part company. I do not subscribe to the idea that mind is separate from body, that there is a "mental interface" between me and the world. That’s called "representational realism" in philosophy and it has a fatal flaw -- namely, that there is some way we could step outside of ourselves to view, simultaneously, both the "reality" and the "perception" in order to determine if the representation is correct. Cannot be done.
Rather than mind as "representer" of reality, think Darwin; think, adaptive organ for getting along in a wider environment. Think of perceiving-thinking as nodes in an ongoing and transactional sequence. Perceiving is like breathing. In other words, our perceptual experiences are world-involving transactions involving eyes, ears, brains, and eventually language. There is no interface between "us" and the "world." We are the world interacting with the world.