Inception-style dream simspaces would be very interesting, I agree. Personally, I love simulspaces, but they are quite difficult to envision reasons for the PCs to get into. One very interesting method might be to have the PCs attacked by a group of assassins using chem-weapons to paralyze them and/or knock them unconscious. When they wake up, they're recovering in nanovats, being debriefed by a fellow sentinel, who informs them that his war-bots managed to get to them just in time, as their stacks were about to be popped. They are then asked to go and contact their handler to get their next assignment. As they go to do so, hints are dropped that some things are not quite right (unusual occurrences, like seeing the exact same thing happen twice in succession; Deja Vu to a new level). When their handler doesn't show, they're asked by their fellow sentinel, the one who rescued them, if they know any other handlers or how to contact them. Eventually, the PCs find any attempt to leave the station, or even a certain portion of it, stymied (think Truman Show) by convenient circumstances. If they do eventually get suspicious and, say, hop a police barricade, something very odd tries to stop them or they just find empty, deserted, non-descript parts of the city. Soon, it's apparent that they're really in a simulspace, being brain-hacked. The "sentinel" is really just one of the hackers trying to get information out of them about Firewall. The trick revealed, they have to find a way to disable the program from within, wake up, and save themselves.

I'd argue that, in many ways, simspace and meatspace are synonymous in terms of describing a place, in the same way the nightlife of a district is synonymous with it, or its architecture, or what-not. However, I would argue in turn that there is still going to be a strong distinction between meatspace and simspace, being in that, in meatspace, there is no guarantee of respawning, no unlimited resources, and no universe bending to your imagination. Meatspace is reality, and reality is uncompromising. We all live there, even if our sensorium is occupied by simulspace. As a result, I would imagine that, for just about everyone, meatspace will always be seen as the "more authentic" reality.

Arenamontanus wrote:

Simspaces might be supervenient (ah, what a wonderful term) on realspace objects (the hardware, power etc) but they are not necessarily less important. After all, most of the things we value in the world supervene on the physical world but form their own domains - money, consciousness, fictional worlds, our cultures.

More importantly, as time goes on many of the things we value in the world are already beginning to dip into the virtual... the largest majority of currencies in the world are traded in a non-physical way, as it is with music, movies, and soon-to-be books. As time goes on and computer technologies improve, we will likely see more things that will transition into digital forms. In a world where simspaces are a possibility, virtual landowning will become very popular in places where physical space is a premium commodity. The amount of virtual land one can have is only limited by the processing power needed to sustain it.

Arenamontanus wrote:

Except for informorphs. And minds suffering from ontological confusion, who can no longer tell what feels real.

Well, I meant more that meatspace objectively IS more important, in the sense that even infomorphs need meatspace computer servers to run on. I don't doubt that simspace is important in the sense of culture, enjoyment, ownership, etc. I just argue that, in the sense of survival and reality itself, meatspace is much more limited. I can imagine habitats with community building projects on the scale of crafting whole worlds (a bizarre mixture of From Dust and Minecraft to the next level), where people spend time building wonders and living out fantasies more defining to their personalities than their real forms (and I can see this being especially common in areas like the Titanian Commonwealth)... But people still need servers for such things, and such realities will still come second to maintaining your meatspace form. Your simspace self might be more the real "you" than your meatspace one, but it will be much more important to your existence the maintain the latter than the former.

The fundamental difference here, Root, is that we have no proof of a "higher reality" where all of this is the dream of some greater beings. It's a neat idea, but we have no evidence. When you can look at the reality above your own with a thought, that's quite different, especially when someone there can destroy your reality with ease. I'm not saying that simspaces aren't just as, if not more, real in terms of experiences and such. I'm just saying that meatspace is more important as this is where you actually live. Even if you experience simspace, you very much live here.

It might be worth pointing at the "dust theory" in Greg Egan's "Permutation City" (great novel for infomorphs). It is entirely plausible that infomorphs might come to believe it, in which case they will not care what you do to their servers - they have reason to believe that the only thing that happens when you turn off their server in your vaunted "real" world is that they lose contact with it. Nothing more. Of course, "real" people say it is the poor infomorphs who eventually go crazy with functionalist speculation. Of course, then there is Eliezer Yudkowsky's "The Finale of the Ultimate Meta Mega Crossover" http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5389450/1/The_Finale_of_the_Ultimate_Meta_Me... which brings the dust theory to its logical conclusion. "You had a copy of my entire home universe?"