Wild Talents (Claude Kendall, 1932).

The main argument against the possibility of us being artificially stimulated brains goes back to Hilary

Reason, Truth, and History (Cambridge University

literature dealing with this argument has been written. A good first point of entry is David Chalmers’s paper 'The Matrix as Metaphysics’ at

http://consc.net/papers/matrix.html .

For Jorge Luis Borges’s story 'The Circular Ruins’, see

his Collected Fictions (Penguin, 1999), pp. 96-100.

For a quirky brief statement of anti-solipsism, see Robert Nozick’s 'Fiction’, chapter 19 of his

Socratic Puzzles (Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 313-16.

An accessible introduction to cellular automata is William Poundstone’s

Shafi da ba'a sani ba