Have you started to get the feeling lately that nothing is real? That the world seems to be testing your credulity or cracking around the edges? You’re not alone.

Recently I’ve had this weird feeling, kind of like I’m the eponymous character in The Truman Show, in the sense that I feel like I’m living in a world that seems real, but one that I can also sense cracking around the edges, failing to connect at times in unsettling ways.

We’re not the only ones questioning the nature of reality.

Journalists covering the phenomenon of Trump and the ecosystem of the internet’s darker corners, myself included, have retreated into a sort of gallows humor. “LOL, nothing matters” became a common nihilistic refrain as, time after time, the reality we reported on seemed to come unmoored from all the rules of cause and effect. It started to feel not just like we were living in a fictional world, like a video game, but also that it wasn’t even particularly well-written.

As late-night host Stephen Colbert said on his show in July, “As I was looking at the news today, I went: What is this feeling I have? This feeling I have is that this is so weird that everything seems weird… that weirdness leeches into all the news, that feeling of weirdness, and after a while I’m not sure what’s real or not.”

We’re not the only ones questioning the nature of reality. A strange and fascinating argument is playing out, one that has set quantum physicists against philosophers and eccentric tech billionaire Elon Musk. They are arguing about the surprisingly plausible idea that our reality isn’t really real at all, but a computer simulation.

The idea rocketed into the mainstream public consciousness in 2016, when Musk endorsed it on stage at a tech conference.

According to a line in a New Yorker article profiling Silicon Valley incubator Y Combinator, “Many people in Silicon Valley have become obsessed with the simulation hypothesis, the argument that what we experience as reality is in fact fabricated in a computer.” Tantalizingly, the article adds that “two tech billionaires have gone so far as to secretly engage scientists to work on breaking us out of the simulation.”

The key paper for simulation theory, the idea to which Musk was referring, is a now extremely famous 2003 paper by an Oxford philosophy professor named Nick Bostrom, the founding chair of Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute.

Bostrom’s core idea was a compelling one. It has been amended, and different forms of it have sprouted, but in its most basic form it goes like this: First, assume humanity makes it in the future. If we do, computing power will likely increase; the more powerful computers get, the closer these theoretical future beings will get to the point where they are able to simulate worlds with conscious beings like us in them. Then, evaluate how likely it is that, across the whole span of time, we are the ones living in the real original world rather than in one of those simulations of it?