1. It's possible that right now we are living in a simulation that traps all our senses into believing this right here is 'reality'.
2. As long as there is even a single component of humanity(a physical brain, for instance) that remains in contact with today's world, humanity of the type depicted in your comment cannot fully accept "the virtual world" as reality.
For humanity to completely 'believe' that virtual world to be 'real', humanity will have to cut all ties to this world and live as 'pure' virtual entities. Not impossible, and as noted in 1, the 'reality' we accept and live with today was probably a 'virtual world' in some other 'reality'.
Given 1 and 2, it's possible that there is no such thing as "reality"—every simulation is just hosted within another simulation, in a directed cyclic graph (e.g. there is a simulation that eventually hosts one of the simulations above it—or, at least, a simulation quark-for-quark identical to it.)
And if you accept that, you're only a little way from proposing a basis to the existence of this graph: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothesi... — that a simulation that "runs" another is really just "connecting" to the mathematical structure of the other simulation, and so you can actually be simultaneously hosted by 1, 2, N, or even zero parent realities, and still you'd exist.
Comments
1. It's possible that right now we are living in a simulation that traps all our senses into believing this right here is 'reality'.
2. As long as there is even a single component of humanity(a physical brain, for instance) that remains in contact with today's world, humanity of the type depicted in your comment cannot fully accept "the virtual world" as reality.
For humanity to completely 'believe' that virtual world to be 'real', humanity will have to cut all ties to this world and live as 'pure' virtual entities. Not impossible, and as noted in 1, the 'reality' we accept and live with today was probably a 'virtual world' in some other 'reality'.
Given 1 and 2, it's possible that there is no such thing as "reality"—every simulation is just hosted within another simulation, in a directed cyclic graph (e.g. there is a simulation that eventually hosts one of the simulations above it—or, at least, a simulation quark-for-quark identical to it.)
And if you accept that, you're only a little way from proposing a basis to the existence of this graph: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothesi... — that a simulation that "runs" another is really just "connecting" to the mathematical structure of the other simulation, and so you can actually be simultaneously hosted by 1, 2, N, or even zero parent realities, and still you'd exist.