This is sort of a sidelight for me, not one of the things I spend too much time on, but perhaps a useful fragment of popular general ontology:
Baudrillard's hyperreality (basis for the Matrix films) is a useful concept, but you do have to decide to use it. And this reaches the explanation of why the Matrix scenario might in fact presently be the case. Allons-y. We see, empirically that the the mediated hyperreality, the sense of the world through stimuli conveyed by electronic devices, is a physical reality. That sort of thing is happening. Everyone's looking at their telephones. We assume that this is an inflection of actual reality, that it highlights certain aspects of given experience [cf. Sellars]. But what if the sense of the way things are that we receive from this παιδα is constitutive, not regulative? What if it constructs the understanding that then encounters the world of unmediated sensory experience, causing that world to be grounded in the ultimate reality conveyed by the machine? As proof for that notion, consider that a young or naive person, when looking for meaning, usually looks according to the gestalt -- when trying to be meaningful, we look to the more emphasized aspects of hyperreality, and along the lines indicated the culture, usually because we've been affected by some fragment of the culture -- a book, a movie, a play. These notions are more deeply held; this is where emphasis meets affect.
So, if this is the case, we ground our experience in the day-to-day world upon the hyperreality, instead of vice versa. Sensory data fleshes out the picture that is rooted in the meaningful moments that we've received. Further, to distinguish "actual" reality, we actively mask this grounding by constantly convincing ourselves that we are in the real, unmediated world, and that our understanding is constructed according to naive experience. But we are living in the given world. And this comes into focus when we act, when we actively seek to get meaning from experience, or, to put it in the old language, when we live according to our beliefs.