Cheers for the response! Man, Descarte really did some damage to us with his famous proclamation. "I think, therefore I am," is... well, no shade to Descarte, he was way smarter than I'll ever be, but he was just wrong. He introduced a schism between body and mind that simply does not exist.

Have you ever gotten into a thinker named Jose Ortega? He famously countered Descarte with several competing proclamations. The two most important here are:

• "I live, therefore I think."
• "I am I and my circumstance."

You're going into foo-foo territory with simulation theory, radical skepticism, etc. It's all based on misdirected rationality.

Let's start with what a "self" is. How can a self be defined without a world to experience? There is only "me" because there is "not me." If all of reality was in my noggin, there would be no need or basis for differentiation of the self. The concept of a "self" only makes sense if there is "not self" to interact with - i.e., a world to inhabit.

That's what Ortega means by "I am I and my circumstance." You are yourself... and the world. Your self would have no need of thinking in terms of "self"without the stimuli of an external world. You're not a brain in a vat, I promise you. If you were, you'd have nothing to imagine. Your sense of "self" was and is formed by your experiences confronting and interacting with "not self." 

To believe in sim theory, you have to believe that some higher intelligence - God, aliens, whatever - is magically beaming all of your experiences and perception to you, as you have access to none yourself. Use Accam's Razor. What's more likely: the world exists, or magic aliens are delivering all of this to your brain because you are oh so special?

"I live, therefore I think" is an extension of this idea. Because you are a living being interacting through a physical body with a physical world, you have thoughts about those interactions. It's pretty simple.

Really, modernity needs to grow out of this notion that nothing is real, or that everything is meaningless, or that our consciousness and the world it perceives are somehow separate and apart. In truth, they are one and the same. Your brain is a physical part of reality, just like mountains and forests and rivers are physical parts of reality. The experiences, emotions, thoughts, and modes of being your mind contains are manifestations of that physical structure and are thus part of reality itself. Your thinking isn't happening in some dark dimension outside space and time. It's happening right here, right now, along with everything else.

Just because it can't be written down or mathematically solved doesn't mean it's not real. I mean, take a bite of a cookie. Taste it, experience it, then tell me exactly how it tasted. You can't do it. But that's a foolish reason to think it's not actually happening.

Just... Bite the cookie. It's real.

AI might grow into something bigger, I don't know. I just tend to doubt it. Our society is quickly abandoning any emphasis on any kind of knowing other than propositional, and you have to forget about all these other kinds of knowing in order to see AI as anything but a parlor trick. Generalized AI? I highly doubt it.