"Are you mocking me?" Annie raised an eyebrow at Richard after hearing his words.
"No, I was appreciating what you said." Richard gently shook his head. "I don't know if you've realized it, but there was already some philosophical thinking in your words. If you'd shown that kind of potential more than four months ago, perhaps I would have taken you on as a student."
"Forget it. I don't want to be your student anymore." Annie said, "Compared to becoming stronger quickly, I only want to clear up the doubts in my heart."
"I can't help you with that." Richard spread his hands. "What exactly you want to pursue is something you have to ask your own heart. In a sense, this entire world might be fake. Everything outside you only affects you on the surface, so the answers it gives you naturally might not be real—the real answer depends on you thinking and discovering it for yourself.
Have you ever heard of a theory? There was a man named Descartes who believed that the world we live in might all be an illusion.
Just as illusion spells can deceive us, perhaps we are living within a massive illusion. Everything we hear, see, and touch could be false information fed back to us by that illusion. The people we meet and the exchanges we have might be fake. Even the bodies we possess might be fake.
It's entirely possible that we are merely... heads, or even brains, soaking in a huge vat full of medicinal fluid. Descartes called this conjecture the Brain in a Vat."
Annie listened with her eyes wide, unsure whether she understood or not.
Richard continued, "The most despairing part of this conjecture is that we cannot prove ourselves. Because everything we do and everything we discover