The movie Matrix was based on the idea that we all live in a simulated world while being physically located inside incubator-type containers during our entire lives. Now named The Simulation Argument, here’s a website that discusses a paper on the possibility that we actually live in a simulated world and the debate that follows that paper. The abstract itself lays down the very intriguing idea:
This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation. A number of other consequences of this result are also discussed.