the sensory inputs were not real but were real to him, so in a sense this place that we call reality is not much different

Certainly the universe each of us live in (our theater) is the one created by our minds. It get’s its digital input from the firing or non-firing of neurons, and based on that data, and previous data driven experiences, it creates the holographic reality in our mind where we experience our lives. Yet most still believe in materialism, that there is an independent physical universe made of matter or “stuff” that is “real” and generating the physical phenomenon that feed our senses. However, over the last century, cosmology and physics have pretty much moved away from this view. Physics originally created materialism, but general relativity and quantum mechanics have since moved modern science away from it. The physical world “out there” can no longer be separated from the observing mind “in here”, the two are most likely, in fact, inseparable. So the metaphor of the matrix may fit a lot better then we think. Only there is no race of machines creating it, we all create it together. We and the universe all arise from the same universal consciousness, drawing our information from it and feed our experiences back into it. There is no true separation between me and the universe, and no true separation between each other. As they say, “all is one”.