[gall]

Check out Greg Egan's Permutation City in which sort of the opposite happens.

[nitrogen]

I'm reading that book right now, and so far it's good. One can also read: Anathem, Snow Crash, http://qntm.org/ra, or (extremely NSFW) The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect.

All of them explore the nature of reality and consciousness in some way.

To the parent commenter, please write your story. The world always needs good fiction.

[mhink]

The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect is one of my favorite sci-fi novellas. But yes, extremely unsuitable for anyone with a weak stomach.

[kale]

Yahtzee (of Zero Punctuation) wrote a novel that used simulation as a plot device. It's called "Mogworld". I thought it was well done.

[sdenton4]

I just finished reading Permutation City a couple weeks ago. Good fun. The core conflict is between two different approaches to modeling, via mimicry of existing systems versus really interesting cellular automata. The automata version doesn't need to 'cheat' in the same way, and is thus a bit harder to find the edges of... (Hopefully that doesn't count as spoilers.)