„So far, we have no good answer to this problem.
Already thousands of years ago philosophers realised that there is no way to prove conclusively that anyone other than oneself has a mind.
Indeed, even in the case of other humans, we just assume they have consciousness – we cannot know that for certain.
Perhaps I am the only being in the entire universe who feels anything, and all other humans and animals are just mindless robots?
Perhaps I am dreaming, and everyone I meet is just a character in my dream? Perhaps I am trapped inside a virtual world, and all the beings I see are merely simulations?
According to current scientific dogma, everything I experience is the result of electrical activity in my brain, and it should therefore be theoretically feasible to simulate an entire virtual world that I could not possibly distinguish from the ‘real’ world.
Some brain scientists believe that in the not too distant future, we shall actually do such things. Well, maybe it has already been done – to you?
For all you know, the year might be 2216 and you are a bored teenager immersed inside a ‘virtual world’ game that simulates the primitive and exciting world of the early twenty-first century. Once you acknowledge the mere feasibility of this scenario, mathematics leads you to a very scary conclusion: since there is only one real world, whereas the number of potential virtual worlds is infinite, the probability that you happen to inhabit the sole real world is almost zero.“
– Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow
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