My theory here is really sloppy, but in this topic I think there are two concepts worth examining:
* Baudrillard's ideas on the hyperreality, which is basically a simulation that doesn't actually relate to any underlying reality. He argued that a lot of the signs and symbols in our postmodern society have become hyperreal, purely manufactured artifacts.
* Deleuze's concept of virtuality which he defines as something isn't actual, but is nevertheless real.
Is a virtual reality any less real than physicality? If sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, then sufficiently advanced artificial reality might be indistinguishable from reality.
Virtuality is arguably only less real in terms of its very dependence on the Real, in that you cannot you have virtual worlds without the physical worlds that generate and power them.
I think as we go along, a lot of Baudrilliard's ideas that seemed radical in the 1980s are becoming inert, as they are so ingrained in our everyday experience (eg, hyper-reality, the simulacra, etc). At least in this iteration of the technology. Moving into mass-scale mixed reality environments will be an entirely different proposition.
I think this is true for a lot of poststructuralist thought, the most popular which have generally been subsumed into the cultural consciousness (e.g. Deleuze's rhizome becomes what we know as the distributed network). But I think it's still useful to draw upon those concepts to codify what we live and breathe.
* Baudrillard's ideas on the hyperreality, which is basically a simulation that doesn't actually relate to any underlying reality. He argued that a lot of the signs and symbols in our postmodern society have become hyperreal, purely manufactured artifacts.
* Deleuze's concept of virtuality which he defines as something isn't actual, but is nevertheless real.
Is a virtual reality any less real than physicality? If sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, then sufficiently advanced artificial reality might be indistinguishable from reality.