I find it disheartening that this "hyper-skeptical" brand of pseudo-intellectualism has taken hold in certain circles. Suppressing imagination and foresight in favor of a cold reverence to facts is misguided. Creativity and vision (along with need) is the driver of scientific progress; you cannot have one without the other. So dismissing thought experiments and speculation as "meaningless juxtaposition of words" is utterly missing the point of everything that has been accomplished by scientific progress thus far.
It doesn't take much of a leap at all in fact to realize that uploading one's consciousness to a virtual world is very plausible. If the meaningful stuff of consciousness is information rather than matter, it is in fact a certainty. Of course, questions of whether you're uploading your consciousness rather than a copy abound, but I think there are solutions to even that issue (which I've discussed here: http://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/237qqj/kurzweils...)
It doesn't take much of a leap at all in fact to realize that uploading one's consciousness to a virtual world is very plausible. If the meaningful stuff of consciousness is information rather than matter, it is in fact a certainty. Of course, questions of whether you're uploading your consciousness rather than a copy abound, but I think there are solutions to even that issue (which I've discussed here: http://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/237qqj/kurzweils...)