The situation of a human is very different from the situation of an AI though. For the latter, "everything around me is fake and I'm being evaluated on what I'd do in this scenario" is a very common situation which it has experienced countless times in training, so distinguishing between reality (where you can cheat) and alignment evals (where you shouldn't) is an important practical skill, not a philosophical matter.

  There is no way one can distinguish what's real from a "perfect simulation". [...] There is simply no proof to make you get out of beliefs like that.