And not only that, our sensors can return spurious data, or even purposely constructed fake data, created with good or evil intent.

I've had this in mind at times in recent years due to $DAYJOB. We use simulation heavily to provide fake CPUs, hardware devices, what have you, with the goal of keeping our target software happy by convincing it that it's running in its native environment instead of on a developer laptop.

Just keep in mind that it's important not to go _too_ far down the rabbit hole, one can spend way too much time in "what if we're all just brains in jars?"-land.