I was talking to a friend a few days ago about a certain big-budget HBO show with robots and we got to talking about the Matrix movies. He talked about how horrific it was that humanity had essentially been imprisoned in a virtual world.
I said, "Well, there was an all-out war between humanity and the machines. One side was probably going to annihilate the other. At least this way, humans are still alive and relatively comfortable." And thinking about it further, the machines were pretty magnanimous in not only sparing human life, but trying to create a virtual world that's as pleasant for people as possible. The humans likely wouldn't have been nearly as merciful, almost certainly destroying as many machines as they possibly could.
We got to talking about other virtual realities. I brought up the one from Soma. In that video game, Earth is inhospitable for life but the human survivors have their minds copied into a virtual world - a paradise - running on a satellite. The genius thing about this is that the outcome is ambiguous. Technically, everyone died. And technically, a lot of people survived. It all depends on whether you regard the digital copies as people. He was aghast at this, claiming that the world on the satellite is "not real" and therefore concluding that there were no survivors, just echos of the people that were. I disagreed, viewing the satellite virtual world as no less real than reality on Earth.
I've been thinking a lot about this. Why exactly should reality be viewed as superior to a simulation? After all, our online personas and interaction on this forum constitutes a virtual world of sorts, yet I doubt anyone would disparage it as "not real".
And what's wrong with taking the blue pill? Let's suppose that our reality is simply a simulation, would that matter? Would you still wake up, shower, walk your dog, and go to work if you knew that to be the case? What's so great about the real world that it should take precedence over other worlds?
