Fair enough.
That would only be true if you identify yourself in terms of your environment rather than how you choose to interact with that environment. You can learn something about yourself in dreams, for example, but seeing how you react in the situations they put you in.
The prospect of your human relationships prior not being real would be disturbing, but there are noticeable differences between how we interact with people in dreams versus reality, so there must be yet another way to distinguish between the relationships you might have in this new world and the world you experienced before. If there is no distinction, you could say those relationships you had before were just as good; perhaps you were even interacting with other "dreamers". If there is a distinction, it's possible that you could establish relationships that are more "real" now than you ever could before.
I wouldn't say that's a safe assumption; it's more likely that the "simulated world" was based on something that's fundamentally intelligible to the designers. According to the story, it's not as if you were raised in a universe of a completely different ontological substrate. The fact that this new world seems intelligible to you at all and even downright familiar in many ways would tell you that there's not all that much difference. It'd be as much culture shock as going to a foreign country for the first time without preparation. Who said they weren't human, or human-like? [/quote]
Alright, I'll be willing to give you that; the average person might have that problem. However, the philosophically curious would not.
