Can a set of physical laws be deduced empiracally from observations of a simulated reality?

What is reality? [cliche gland squirting away] We don't perceive reality directly anyway--sight, sound, smell, and taste are a couple of inches of nerve fiber removed from the brain that perceives them, a few feet of nerves reporting touch, all at the speed of chemical reactions. What's the difference if reality is reported from thousands or even millions of miles away, at the speed of light?

And what is simulation? Our brains assemble nerve impulses into a visualization, a representation, that the ineffable "I" observes. Again, is it really fundamentally different if that visualization is assembled in a computer for presentation to a brain, through the intermediary of nerve impulses? Someday when we all have data ports installed in our necks the connection will be better and the computer visualizations will merge with brain visualizations.

It's just a phase we're going through. We're developing better and better mental prostheses. Our brains are directing the development of devices that improve their own functioning, in a cycle that clearly exhibits positive feedback. It's evolution in action. Our "selfish genes" directed the development of brains to better propagate those genes, and the brains thus created are improving themselves, all in service of the genes.

Is cyberspace sustainable? Sure it is. It's as sustainable as life itself. Worried that the positive feedback will get out of hand and destroy us all? Relax. Because cyberspace, despite its seeming artificiality, is really just a manifestation of, and a part of, life itself, it's subject to the same homeostatic regulatory processes that keeps life in rough balance. If cyberspace becomes a negative, negative feedback will set in to limit it.

Relax. No doubt cyberspace is unfolding as it should.