What to do?

Our individual consciousnesses permit each of us to experience only one interpretation of the world. Do we have any way of knowing whether an objective reality exists independently of our senses, given that our consciousness limits us to only experiencing our own experiences?

How do we organize our phenomenal experiences? We attempt to incorporate them into existing patterns of thought, 'filing' them away in the appropriate folder in the appropriate cabinet. When then do we add new folders, moving to new paradigms for organizing our thoughts, frameworks for understanding the world? Would such a move require a catastrophe, in the sense of dynamical systems (a drastic shift in the behavior of a system resulting from changes in parameters, for example how raising water's temperature by 1 degree C from 99 degrees C at atmospheric pressure results in its transition from a liquid to a vapor)?

Assuming an objective reality exists, making sense of it would seem to reduce to constructing metaphors for what we observe in terms of what we already know, until the occurrence of such a dramatic event as described above. How do we add new terms to our 'vocabulary' for constructing such metaphors? New phenomenal experiences.