That's funny, I always thought the debate concerning simulacra and simulation was more of a philosophical perspective on things. As to whether or not we are in one, I guess we're really not in any position to know, at least not with our current senses and intellect. The only way we'll ever know is when we'll die, I think.
Assuming it's a simulation, I could see one of two things happen:
1. we wake up, are unplugged and realize how crazy we were to put so much of ourselves into something that's clearly fake, now that we know better;
2. we cease to exist, as we're actually programs or functions of a greater program. Death involves either our termination or the final "compiling" of what we were and the re-allocation of resources to other processes. That feels like a decent allegory for decomposition and the overall postmortem biological events.
I'm more of the mind that we'll never know, and that it ultimately doesn't matter. I'm alive now, I might not be tomorrow or the day after or the day after that one. I have my goals, my tasks, my needs and wants. If I was programmed to want to work on my thesis, that's what I'll do. If my operator is actually using me to experience life through writing a thesis, that's what we'll both do as one being. Fuck, maybe there's some non-being out on the Plateau of Leng or something that's actually chipping out those very words on a wind-blasted stone tablet as I'm typing them, and I'm actually just a projection.
Fuck, maybe Descartes was right. Maybe we're all brains in a jar.
Who cares, honestly? The only use I see this having is if we try and use that conundrum to understand the "code" of the universe. The laws of physics, in other words.