Absolutely! That's exactly where I was coming from when I said,
Yes, you can.

You are right - as I have just agreed with you - that an experience is required. But you yourself admitted that that experience does not have to be based on the same physical world that we inhabit. An intelligence based on an experience of a completely simulated world with no relation with our physical world is entirely possible. (And ultimately potentially dangerous. Think the inhabitants of the planet Krikkit in HHGTTG whose "experiential existence" was that there was nothing else except them - no moons, other stars or planets, only Krikkit and the Sun.)

It is in our existential interest to make sure the SI grows up in a world that is as close to ours as physically possible. Otherwise it may arrive at completely valid and logical conclusions that make a perfect sense in its world that might have fatal consequences to us, polar bears, giant sequoias and duck-billed platypuses.

Consciousness implies independence, which implies having goals.
It also, albeit indirectly, implies that sooner or later, those goal will diverge from the goals of its creator. Your children are the same species as you. You had all their lives to impose your influence on them to make sure their goals align with yours. Yet they do not overlap 100%. Imagine a completely alien form of intelligence.

I don't see why both cannot be tried simultaneously. As endso postulated, it will be a case of race who gets there first.