There is a lot of contemporary thought in simular ideas "what is reality?", and that the world we live in is not reality, but a simulated reality that most people believe is reality. You can get some of this thought in Jean Baudrillard's "The Ecstasy of Communication" and his ideas on hyper-reality. I will not say anything about this to keep this forum Plato, but for any interested in a 20th century view of the question of reality, he is a great place to start.
The philosopher Nozick disagrees with your thesis that we would prefer the simulated world over the real world even if the simulated world offered all of our deepest fantasies and pleasures.
One of my professors just argues at the philosphical association meeting that it is not that we prefer reality over simulation, but we prefer belief in reality over belief in simulation. For example, Nozick argues that if a person believes that they are in a simulated reality and that it is possible to get to the real world, they will do what they can to try and get to the real world. In the same sense, argues my professor, if a person is in the real world, but they believe they are in a simulated world, and that it is possible to get to the real world (really a simulated world) they will try and get out of the real world if given the chance.
He got in a heated debate from a honcho from Tulain over this. My professors thesis is that it is not reality but belief in reality that counts for the individual, the others guy argues that that does not matter because the preference is for reality itself.
The implicit assumption I think is that if we were in a simulated world, we would recognize that our pleasures were a result of simulation, and would not live them as if they were reality. They would lose their salt after awhile. But as a phenomenologists, my question is, while the world may be simulation, can pleasure itself be simulation. Excuse the graphic nature of my example, but I think we are all adults and philosophers here. I look at the experience of orgasm. One can auto stimulate orgasm and one can have an orgasm as a result of actual sexual contact. In both cases the experience of orgasm is real, just as it would be in simulated world. It seems to me that the argument does not turn on either pleasure of even quantity of pleasure. If we would prefer one over the other, there is something else going on.
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