First, yes, our conscious experience may be of a simulated reality. This is a little surprising, because there are so many topographic representational maps in the brain. I heard a lecture on a type of brain disease which removes a person's perception of moving objects. A woman with this disease explained that she only sees things when they're not moving. So, if she's at a party, and someone walks up to her to talk to her, she doesn't see the person at all until they stop in front of her, when they suddenly appear in front of her and startle her so much that she doesn't go to parties anymore.

If we had conscious access to the topographical representations of our visual field, she would see something in that area of her visual field obstructed by the person.

However, the larger purpose of your post is, I think, a rebuttal to Mitchell Porter's previous post (and you should link to it if it is), which I don't think you understood. (And, judging by its current rating of -4, you're not alone.) You don't want people to say consciousness has a "metaphysical" aspect. I think that you think "metaphysical" is a synonym for "magical", and that the admission of the metaphysical is a denial of Reason and Science.

Newton's theory of gravity was one of the key paradigm-changing developments that gave us science in the first place. But at the time, a lot of people objected to Newton's notion of gravity because it is metaphysical. "Physical" here refers, at any moment, to the set of behaviors explained by your beliefs and intuitions about the physical world. For most of us, the physical is basically kinematics and optics at human scale, and chemistry.

Gravity posited action at a distance. And not a repelling force, which would have been a little more accessible by way of analogy to things like wind or air pressure; but an attracting force.

(I said gravity is metaphysical, not was metaphysical, because IMHO gravity is still not explained by our physics. We have equations that let us make predictions, but our familiarity with them has made us forget how deeply weird gravity is. Using equations to make predictions involving gravity is not very different from using matrix mechanics to make predictions involving quantum mechanics. The fact that you can write F = GmM/r^2 doesn't mean that the force involved fits into your existing ontology. Yes, people say that gravity doesn't act at a distance because things are actually responding to the local curvature of spacetime; or that the gravitational force is communicated by particles called gravitons, which somehow pull things back the way they came from. I don't understand that bending spacetime stuff. It's voodoo to me. I'm not convinced anyone really understands why gravity exists.)

Radioactivity was also, initially, metaphysical. It was a new source of energy that did not fit into the existing physics. Electricity and magnetism were also metaphysical. (As with gravity, I'm not convinced that anybody understands them even today. I gather that they have been reduced to quantum physics by attributing their effects to the interactions of subnuclear particles. That reduces the number of mysterious concepts, but doesn't solve the mystery.)

When someone says that consciousness is metaphysical, all they are saying - all they can be saying; there is no other coherent way to interpret the statement - is that they involve some process not described in our textbooks.

It seems to me at least as likely that there exists something undiscovered that is needed to explain consciousness, as that we can explain it with our existing concepts. If you're going to insist today that we can understand everything without adding any more fundamental concepts of physics, then I conclude you would have also stood against Newton, Gilbert, and Boyle.