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We all take it for granted that perceptual experience yields knowledge of the world around us. But in the first of his Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes invents a new and puzzling thought experiment. He imagines an Evil Demon with the power to manipulate the total course of his (Descartes’s) experience, so that what he naturally takes to be experience of the world around him is really a kind of perpetual dream: a simulation or virtual reality, as we might way today. Descartes’s problem, which has made its way into popular culture through films like those in the “Matrix” series, remains a source of philosophical puzzlement. While no one believes that skeptical hypotheses like Demon or computer deception are true, it is not easy to say how we can exclude them. Given that the deception is systematic, it seems that any “evidence” I cite could itself be part of the simulation. So how do I (or could I) know (for sure) that I’m not the victim of the Deceiver or the Matrix? We shall examine some of the latest attempts to respond to Descartes’s challenge. Does the “How could I know?” question admit of a theoretical answer, or is the question itself somehow ill-posed? Can we answer it without making significant concessions to skepticism? Exploring such questions should teach us some interesting lessons about knowledge (or the concept of knowledge).