Good post, you make overall accurate points. I will just bring up some clarification. Not disagreements really, as I already follow you, and I upvoted this great post. This will be more for those who want to object or don't understand what you are getting at... Some of my own work deals with this feedback between consciousness and existence processing.

"What we experience, then, is not reality itself but rather a simulation, a model of reality created by the mind based on the patterns of information flowing in through the senses."

This is a moot point of semantics. You experience reality. It's objective, and you are a unique subjective consciousness that is part of reality. Consciousness is not the totality of reality, so you can't do anything other than experience it through consciousness. The 5 senses are the instruments that measure existence and allow consciousness to receive these inputs from the senses to map the territory of reality. Consciousness has a subjective perception of reality, as you say that compares it's perception to reality to validate accuracy and veracity of perceptions. Our goal is to align our perceptions with existence, and not simply invent whatever we want to believe is in reality.

There is an internal subjective perception of reality that indeed, reflects the objective external reality. That is how it works. It obviously can't be reality itself. This does not validate solipsism as only you "exist". Your internal "reality" exists within you, the images of reality gained from the senses, but this is only possible because there is something out there external to you to perceive in the first place.

"we become aware that what we perceive is really a simulation"

Like I said, obviously that's all that can be done. You can't literally have existence/reality shoved into your consciousness itself... LOL. That is nonsense. The senses and consciousness create a perception of reality. How else could it possibly work? To claim a solipsistic view that reality can't be known to exist outside of oneself is a fallacy of an ego-focus who can't get past themselves and think clearly.

There is also a practical reason to limit sensory input to ranges. To de-finite the enormous data in reality, otherwise it would be sensory overload near an infinite constancy of stimulus.

When you mentioned parallel universes, yes indeed. That is a good way to view all the information that we don't innately have access to but we can access through additional sensory apparatus of technology.

Also, the internal subjective reality acts as a "multiverse" of individual unique perceptions, since we are born at different times, at different places, with unique data input from reality that shapes each of our perception of subjective reality. We also have an internal subejctive phantasmal realm of "simulated holographic projection" called imagination, where we can envision any number of unreal worlds at our choosing, and create them at our will as a "god", and then destroy them at our will. This is what a thought experiment does as well.

Take care. Peace.