If you want to convince anyone, you have to do better than just referring to your feelings. Plato felt the world of ideas was more real than the "real" world. C

If you want to convince anyone, you have to do better than just referring to your feelings. Plato felt the world of ideas was more real than the "real" world. Cosmologist Max Tegmark argues that we have no reason not to believe that the universe is anything more than pure math, and all formal systems exist in precisely the same way that our universe does. Philosopher David Lewis argues that the actual world is nothing but the possible world that we happen to be in. Representationalists believe that any simulation that duplicates the causal structure of conscious beings would have conscious beings in it. (A novel does not duplicate such a causal structure, so that's one place where your argument falls flat on its face, if indeed you were trying to make an argument.) Searle with his Chinese Box argument is not buying it. The bottom line is that we just don't know, and are unlikely ever to know, but if one wants to argue intelligently about it, there's a huge amount of philosophical literature on just this topic. On the other hand, your position would seem to deny human rights to future intelligent robots, which has serious ethical ramifications should you happen to be wrong.