The "cannot escape" part is where physics disagrees with metaphysics. The latter believes that there's 'absolute existence' that creates and uses reality as a crutch or a mirror to learn walking.

If there was an AI, it would encounter the same problem: it exists in some indescribable form, but it cant touch itself, it cant see itself, it cant understand itself. So it would create a 'reality' - also a fictional thing, but with properties such as inertia, reaction and invariance (the three laws of Newton), and then it would constrain itself with that reality, so it would feel real. After that it would start building fictional sandcastles and understand itself.