As far as I'm aware, the idea that reality could be an illusion has been around since Descartes' deus deceptor. In the modern computer age, this theory has morphed into what we call simulated reality, the gist of this being that what we experience as reality could be generated by a sufficiently complex program, similar to, although more advanced than, the ones we use on a daily basis, run on a powerful enough computer.

I'm just going to focus on this little part of your post as I think the complex thinking you've performed can be explained more simply in the following way: How can you even say "reality could be simulated by a sufficiently complex program". How can that sentence make any sense? The only reality we have to rely upon in conceiving something like a program is the material universe that we ourselves are dynamically emergent from. Everything "informational" about what we are are basically "intra-actions" within a world composed of material objects. The information in our "heads" (i.e. perceptions, cognitions) is itself emergent, or dynamically contiguous with (in a neurological sense - the later and more evolved structures distant from the brainstem regulate the structures beneath it; these structures are not simply physical interactions, but also semiotic events between a physical system and the objects in the environment that either upregulate (toxin) or downregulate (nutrients) the homeostasis of the organism) the regulating rhythms of the physical organism itself. Feelings are these informational 'traces' that the higher level reflective mind is interfacing with. First something is felt; then its reflected upon; then its augmented within reflection by a focused deliberation on the objects significance. Now, how or where within this general stream is there an epistemological basis provided for the statement "reality could be simulated a sufficiently complex program". Where would this program be? What would it be made out of? How could anyone claim to know of anything existing that is not material in origin that can create a simulated reality? It boggles my mind how someone can make a claim like this, and not realize how poorly explicated it all is.

What is being assumed here? That a physical computer can generate a "universe" within the computer system itself? And that from within that universe (the computer) a universe could be created that looks like our universe? That is an extravagantly loaded set of assumptions to make about the world. Think about that means in terms of the potential infinity of it. If the universe is a computer simulation, then that means within the universe that the computer exists is itself caught up in its own simulation, ad infinitum. At which point does someone finally admit, "this is too stupid a claim to take seriously because it fails to evoke the sort of feelings that normally make someone take existence as a serious subject."

Feeling wise, nothing in me is released or produced by the slipshod idea that I'm in a computer program, because the philosophical dead end it creates (infinity) necessitates a being in another world controlling the program. It fails to accept that there is an unknown metaphysical principle which exceeds all human contemplation, and that whatever humans can known about this Other, all we have to rely upon are the the forms of the world itself. This is the typical and anthropologically common way human beings experience Nature: as a metaphor of some vaster Being. The computer idea fails to evoke the sense of magical "participation mystique" that the normal human relationship between self and world evokes.

What you seem to be underemphasizing is the possibility that the idea of a computer simulated reality is really your bodies need to make sense of this existential awareness of self and being but within the terms of what you presently value as a self i.e. according to the logic of computers and programming. In this situation, you have naively failed to realize the deeper reality of metaphor, itself reflecting the ontological situation of a superior Being communicating Itself to a being within itself. Why is this idea typically spurned? Because the traumas and pains - particularly the myriad times you've felt shame in your social existence as a self - that have occurred within your development as a person prevents you from experiencing the connection i.e. the feeling, that ordinarily exists between the self aware organism and the universe itself.

Perhaps you're going about this subject in the wrong way.

Since we evolved in a field of relations with other objects, you can never actually say "the whole is in the part", insomuch as the emergent wholes - such as organisms in interaction - played an ontological role in 'revealing' dimensions which exist only implicitly in the part, but depend on actual relations of complementarity in a horizontally extended environment (in cognitive science this is the three E's of enactive, embodied and embedded' aspects of the functional whole) to be actually and explicitly made manifest.

All in all, the truth is, we're moral beings to our core. Were motivational creatures which have an arc that begins on an observer pole, which extends in a circle to the object pole. Our minds are an emergent function of a scaffolding of processes - shaped like a pyramid - that makes your observing consciousness an emergent effect, which in neuroscience lingo, happens between 200 to 300 milliseconds, whereas feeling, or affect, is an essential background process that cannot be denied its primacy.

As relational psychoanalysts know best of all, the mind is a representation of the dyadic interaction between self and other. Nothing more.