This piece was inspired by a psychology thought experiment paper I read, which was written in the early 1990s that asked students to imagine that everything around them which could be experienced with their senses, was actually being fed to them by a computer instead of being real.
Could we tell the difference? Could we discern it, if what we see, hear, smell, taste, and feel by touch was actually not physically there, but was being fed to our brains, but experiencing it all as if it was real?
I learned much later after completing "Epistemology" that this same paper, this same thought experiment, was that which inspired the blockbuster film, The Matrix.