Has anybody ever said they were real? The word "virtual" seems to imply that whoever is using the term should know they are not. They're just convenient mathematical artifacts.
Although people usually do not get hung up on the virtual particles. Rather people get annoyed when we say that the definition of a "particle" is "excitation of a quantum field".
You have an apple in one hand. Since
1 = 1/2 + 1/4 + ... + 1/2^n + ...
I think that a lot of confusion arises because of the innocuous seeming equal sign. Explicitly replace the equals by approprate (algebraic) maps, and at least for me, the relationship becomes a lot clearer.
Maybe more familiar to HN, maybe it helps to do "typed" math? E.g. counting numbers have a different type than equivalence classes of Cauchy sequences. From a set theory perspective, it makes sense to ask the question whether the number 3 (as a set) equals the collection of triangles in R^3 (as a set). Of course, the two aren't equal, but it seems weird to even ask this question.
Maybe it should be just as incongruous to say that some vacuum state equals it's decomposition into virtual particles. The two things are just differently-typed. You need some computation to convert between them.
I believe mind is a particular form of process on information, but that doesn’t mean all processes on information are minds. This IMHO is the fundamental error at the heart of panpsychism.