The Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast Episode #278 - Rizwan Virk

TRANSCRIPT

(Note: This is generated by AI with 98% accuracy. However, any errors may cause unintended changes in meaning.)

Melanie Avalon

Friends, welcome back to the show. I know I always say that I am so incredibly excited about the conversation I am about to have, which I always am very excited about the conversation I am about to have.

Melanie Avalon

That said, I overwhelmingly cannot even describe how excited I am about this conversation. I have been looking forward to it for so long. So the backstory on today's conversation, a while ago now, I'm not sure how long ago, months and months ago, I listened to a Joe Rogan interview, and he was interviewing Rizwan Verk, and the topic was the simulation hypothesis, which people might have heard of,

Melanie Avalon

might be familiar with, but basically this idea that we might be living in some sort of simulated virtual reality of sorts. And I find this topic so, so fascinating, and that interview with Riz was just the most incredible eye opening enlightening thing.

Melanie Avalon

And I was like, I would just, I have to interview this man, I must have him on my show. So it was a long shot in the dark, but I reached out to him and he was game to come on. No pun intended. So here we are, and I am friends, I am just so excited.

Melanie Avalon

So Riz Verk, he is a successful entrepreneur, a venture capitalist, a video game pioneer, a best selling author, and an indie film producer. He's the founder of Play Labs at MIT and Bayview Labs, which is a Silicon Valley investment fund.

Melanie Avalon

He's a mentor and advisor to 500 startups. He has a really intense resume of video game development, and his books have been featured all over the news and all the places. And speaking of the books, so his first book is called The Simulation Hypothesis, an MIT computer scientist shows why AI, quantum physics, and Easter mystics all agree we are in a video game.

Melanie Avalon

And then his second book is The Simulated Multiverse, an MIT computer scientist explores parallel universes, quantum computing, The Simulation Hypothesis, and The Mandela Effect, which friends, you know, I am obsessed with The Mandela Effect.

Melanie Avalon

And in any case, I'm kind of tragically upset right now because I just realized that there was a follow up book, that follow up book. So I have not read that second one, I'm trying to, so I'm going to do that ASAP.

Melanie Avalon

I did read The Simulation Hypothesis, his first book, which is a major best seller. And oh, my goodness, what a deep dive. So it goes really intensely into the history of video game development. I learned so much and Riz, I'll have to tell you my own, my own video game history here.

Melanie Avalon

But so you learn all about the history of video games and how looking at it actually, I guess foreshadows or provides logic for this idea that what we are actually in is a video game. And then not only does it look at video games, it looks at the whole concept of space time and how physics and quantum physics relates to this idea of a simulated world that we're in.

Melanie Avalon

He talks about AI and simulated consciousness. There's chapters on religion and how different religious viewpoints also line up with The Simulation Hypothesis. Of course, there's nods to things that I am also obsessed with like UFOs and angels and demons.

Melanie Avalon

And it is just one of the most eye opening books I have ever read. I have so many questions. Riz, thank you so much for being here.

Rizwan Virk

Well, thanks so much for having me on your show. I've been looking forward to it as well.

Melanie Avalon

Yeah, I'm just it was so fun reading your book because you share a lot of your personal story in it. And there were so many moments that just gave me so many flashbacks to my life. So for example, I, I actually I forgot about this, I think until I read your book, I was in the programming club in my high school, I didn't program, I don't really know why I was in the club.

Melanie Avalon

But so what we did was we did like a programming competition. And we created a text based game. So I could not program again, I don't know why I was there. I think maybe we had a crush on one of the guys, but we program.

Melanie Avalon

That's a good reason to I was so in charge of so like they were programming the game the text based game and then I created the like I basically created real accompaniments like maps and, and real things people could hold to further create the story while going through the text game.

Melanie Avalon

So I got major flashbacks to that reading your book. And then I got also many other flashbacks because I would ask the same questions as you when I was playing video games. Like I remember I'd be in a video game.

Melanie Avalon

And I would look at the confines of the environment that you're in. And I would wonder, like, how far does it go? And I remember I would like play the game and I and I would want to just like explore the world beyond the seeming limits of the world.

Melanie Avalon

And why am I so excited about the idea of exploring this fake world going seeing how far it goes when I'm in a real world. And that doesn't seem as exciting. So there's just so many like things I've thought about in life.

Melanie Avalon

Reading your book was was so so interesting. So speaking up was a lot about me. Your story. What was your history with video games growing up? And what different epiphanies did you have and questions did you have that led you to this seemingly crazy hypothesis that you have today that we're in a simulated reality?

Melanie Avalon

Yeah.

Rizwan Virk

Sure. Well, first of all, on your stories, that's really interesting because having been a game developer, when you make a game, the programming really is only part of making that game. I mean, you need the artists, you need the producers who usually work on the story, make the maps, and do other things.

Rizwan Virk

So I guess you were definitely filling an important role in game development.

Melanie Avalon

Yes. Yes. Okay. We did not win, by the way, that competition.

Rizwan Virk

It's funny because I'm currently in discussions with some of the founders of Infocom. So Infocom was a startup that came out of MIT way back when, like 1978 or nine, and they created text adventure games.

Rizwan Virk

And they are known for Zork, which is kind of their most famous game and a whole bunch of others. And so I'm working at trying to get some of their legacy maps into a second edition of the book. So I was just talking to them today.

Melanie Avalon

Oh my goodness, wait, the legacy maps like maps in the actual the game.

Rizwan Virk

Or even maps they drew by hand back then when they were building the games. Oh my goodness, amazing. Because that's kind of how we had to do it. As players, we had to do that as well because usually the maps weren't shown.

Rizwan Virk

In text adventure games, you had to kind of figure out the map in your head or you had to draw them out. And that was actually how I first started programming was there was an old text adventure game called the Colossal Cave Adventure, or just adventure for short.

Rizwan Virk

It was really the first one and our math teacher allowed myself and my buddy to skip some of the assignments so we could figure out how to change this game. And so we learned a little bit of basic programming to do that.

Rizwan Virk

And that was, you know, this is going way back now, kind of dating myself, but we used to play the Atari game at home, the Atari games with the system, which were classic games like Space Invaders and Pac-Man.

Rizwan Virk

And there were these racing games that really made me wonder, you know, as the car went around the track, you'd see these fake bleachers with fake people in them. And then you'd see like a mountain that looks like Mount Fuji off in the distance.

Rizwan Virk

And I'd always wonder, well, what's beyond this track and what do these people do when I'm not, you know, driving in front of them? Oh, and is there something on the other side of that mountain? So I used to always wonder about these virtual worlds and the worlds would be so organized compared to the real world, you know, that all the lawns would be manicured, wouldn't have to cut the lawn, etc.

Rizwan Virk

And so that's what got me thinking about this idea of what would it be like to actually be in a virtual world. And then as I grew up, I started to read and watch a lot more science fiction, probably too much science fiction for my own good.

Rizwan Virk

And I remember watching an episode of Star Trek, The Next Generation, and they had an episode, they had something called the holodeck, which you may remember, some of your listeners may remember, where they could basically simulate any environment and the room would take on the appearance of, say, a cafe in Paris, and there would be these AI characters that would act like real people, and you could touch them.

Rizwan Virk

And there was one character who was an AI character who figured out that he was inside some kind of a simulated world, and that there was something outside of that world. And that was a character based on Professor Moriarty, who was Sherlock Holmes' opponent, if you will.

Rizwan Virk

And they told the computer to make him extremely intelligent, and he was so intelligent that he figured that out and tried to get out of the holodeck. Of course, he couldn't really get out without some modifications to things because the machinery that kept him alive was only in that room, but that really got me thinking, could we also be in some kind of an immersive holodeck type thing, and could there be another world outside of that which we can see,

Rizwan Virk

but everything looks and feels so realistic to us that we just can't tell the difference? And so fast forward a number of years, and I actually became an entrepreneur. I went to MIT, studied computer science, then became an entrepreneur, did a lot of enterprise software startups, and then I ended up moving to Silicon Valley and got involved with video game development.

Rizwan Virk

And we had a game called Tapfish, which was the number one game in the App Store. And so I had a series of games in the companies. We sold the company to a big Japanese company, and then I became an investor and advisor to a ton of different startups, including companies like Discord, which some people don't know was actually a game company before, and now it's the chat app that everyone knows for talking to each other.

Rizwan Virk

And so it was around that time after I had sold my game company that I was visiting a startup in Marin County, which is across from San Francisco, and their offices were right on the bay. And so there's a beautiful view of the San Francisco skyline, and you could see the Golden Gate Bridge.

Rizwan Virk

But they had just built a virtual reality ping pong game. And so they had this room, which was pretty empty except for a bunch of wires coming down from the ceiling with this headset. It was kind of a big headset, and we used to call them toasters on your face.

Rizwan Virk

And so I put that on and I started playing this virtual reality ping pong game. And what happened was during the game, of course, I knew I was in VR and the graphics weren't even that great. But the responsiveness of the game, the physics engine was so good that I really felt like when I put my hand in a certain spot, I was really hitting a ball, and that it was coming back to me.

Rizwan Virk

So much so that my body instinctively forgot that this was a virtual reality game, and I tried to put the paddle down on the table, and I tried to lead against the table, just like you might do at the end of a ping pong game.

Rizwan Virk

But of course, there was no table. The controller fell to the floor, and I almost fell over. And that's really what got me thinking about how long would it take us to build something that was so immersive, like that holodeck that I had thought about watching Star Trek the next generation, or something like The Matrix, that was so immersive that you would literally forget.

Rizwan Virk

Now, in this case, it was only my body forgot for a few seconds, and then I remembered. But how long would it take us to build something that was so immersive that the whole time you're playing the game, you would forget that there's another world out there?

Rizwan Virk

That's kind of what got me started down this rabbit hole.

Melanie Avalon

I love this so much. Okay, so first of all, Star Trek comment. I'm obsessed with the original series and to the point that I probably, like if you give me the plot of one of the original episodes, I probably can tell you the title of the episode, maybe.

Melanie Avalon

I don't wanna like set myself up too high, but I love it. So all of the Star Trek references, I was just on board. It was so great. Okay, so, so many questions for you.

Rizwan Virk

Well, it's funny with those references, you know, the book has been translated into a few different languages, and of course, I can't necessarily read those languages, but I'll be looking at like the Portuguese version or the French version, and it'll be in Portuguese or French, and then suddenly, it'll say start tracking English.

Rizwan Virk

And so as I'm flipping through it, I'm like, Oh, okay, I know what this paragraph is about, because I remember writing the English version.

Melanie Avalon

I love it. Do you have a favorite original series episode?

Rizwan Virk

I watched all of them many, many years ago, but I spent much more time with the ones in the 80s and 90s, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Star Trek Voyager. So I'm trying to think back to the original series.

Rizwan Virk

It's been so long. I mean, probably the one where they go through that time portal and end up in the 1960s was pretty cool. Piece of the action? No, not that one. Yeah, I remember that one. That was actually a really good one.

Rizwan Virk

I did it. That was a really good one. And they end up on a planet which is based off of Chicago, you know, gangsters, right?

Melanie Avalon

I did it. Okay. Actually, you probably like there's one called who mourns for Adonis, because in that one, they go to this planet, and they realized that all the Greek gods from Earth were actually aliens, who actually it's kind of like the simulation hypothesis, they started to think they were gods because of how they were treated by the humans.

Melanie Avalon

Oh,

Rizwan Virk

that's interesting. Yeah, I think I remember that one. I remember an episode which had these Greek gods in there and they weren't really gods. That was a good one too. But again, it's been so long since I've watched some of these.

Rizwan Virk

I just remember the bare bones outline.

Melanie Avalon

I love it, I love it. Okay, so question about this whole concept. Okay, actually, first question. So you started having this theory and suspecting that you were that we're in a simulated reality. Did you ever have a moment where something happened to you in your real life, and you're like, Oh, like this is evidence to me that I am in a simulated reality?

Rizwan Virk

Well, I would say there was any just one thing, it's more like a series of interesting coincidences and synchronicities, you know, that would happen over time. That would make me realize, okay, what we think of as physical reality may not be so physical.

Rizwan Virk

And so, you know, I explored a lot of other areas of consciousness, like I kind of lived this double life. So while I was an entrepreneur during the day, I used to go off and experiment with different meditation techniques, you know, read different books, go to places like the Monroe Institute, which is a place in, I think, Virginia or West Virginia, where they try to teach, they use these different sound binaural beat technology.

Rizwan Virk

And you put on these headsets, and they try to put you in different states of consciousness to try to simulate not a body experience. But I remember one instance that happened to me when I was an entrepreneur, and I read about this in my non simulation books, there's one called Zen Entrepreneurship, which is kind of about this double life that I was leading.

Rizwan Virk

We had a startup that had a product that worked with Lotus Notes, which is this big platform from years ago that IBM eventually bought. And today, most people probably don't know about it, but it was like a big software platform, a lot of companies used.

Rizwan Virk

And we have this product that helped connect the IBM Lotus products to Microsoft products. And we had one competitor, and we were worried about this competitor, but the competitor had kind of disappeared, and we never heard from them again.

Rizwan Virk

And then one day, I had a dream where this competitor appeared. And that was just unusual, because I thought, Why am I dreaming about this guy now? We haven't heard from him in about a year. So I didn't even know they were still in business.

Rizwan Virk

And so after that dream, I just noted it because it was odd. And I went into the office and right at like 9am that morning, I got a call from IBM, who, you know, we worked with because our products bridge the gap between IBM products and the Microsoft products.

Rizwan Virk

And they said, Well, we're about to do this big announcement of a new product. I wanted to call you because we're partners, but our product is going to kind of crush one of your products. And we're sorry, but we wanted you to know before we announced it to the public.

Rizwan Virk

I was like, Great, that's not so good. You're going to crush one of our products. And then I said, Why haven't I heard of this before? And he said, Oh, well, it was that other startup called edge research.

Rizwan Virk

They've been working on it for a year with that guy named Mark Mark Kay, who I hadn't seen in about a year. It turns out it was that exact guy that I had dreamed about that morning, that I had this phone call about.

Rizwan Virk

And it was a, I mean, getting the phone call before the announcement didn't do much for us, because it wasn't time for us to respond in terms of product changes or anything. But to me, it was a sign or what I call a clue that something isn't quite what we think it is for me to have dreamed it in that morning.

Rizwan Virk

And then for that to have happened later that day, that's like the opposite of what the materialists say should happen for cause and effect. And so it's almost as if the future was causing something in the past.

Rizwan Virk

And so that got me to think a lot about what we often call glitches in the matrix today, and just about the nature of reality in general, I guess.

Melanie Avalon

I definitely want to explore that more with the future affecting the past and just what reality actually is because one of the main one of the big topics you touched on in the book and I mentioned in the intro is what quantum physics and in particular this idea of the collapse of the particle wave and how our observations determine our reality and I was mentioning before this that my new show purchase for find the mind blown podcast we actually did a whole episode on Schrodinger's cat so which was actually a good prep for understanding this a little bit more but I actually find out of all the evidence and I'm sure we'll talk about you know more things you talk about in the book as evidence for this but out of all the evidence I find this idea probably the most convincing to me that we're in a simulated reality and you can correct me if I'm wrong in explaining this but basically in quantum physics there's this idea that things can exist as as waves or particles and they'll exist as a wave until we actually observe it and then it collapses into a particle so our observations of things actually determine the reality of the state they're in so the idea was Schrodinger's cat for example is there's this cat that's inside of a box and because of the setup of the experiment in the box the cat exists in both states it's both dead and alive at the same time because it's in a probability state and it's not until you actually open the box and observe the cat that it becomes either dead or alive and there's all these theories about does it become dead or alive at the moment you see it is it you know does the cat observe itself is are there multiple universes where it branches off into all the versions so but this correlates to this idea of being in a simulated reality because you talk about how if we're in a video game and this is how video games work as well it's only rendering what you actually see at that moment so when you're playing a video game wherever you go it renders what you see it's not like the whole world is there all the time although you were talking about that earlier like is the is the whole world there all the time so I find this and please feel free to correct me anything I got wrong there um but I find this so honestly like very convincing because if we're walking around the world and things can be in states of probabilities and us looking at them determine the state of reality that I mean that really does sound like a video game where we're rendering what we see I'm not sure if there's a question there so thoughts on that

Rizwan Virk

Yeah, no, absolutely. So after I was thinking about the stages of technology and how we would build something like the matrix, I started to investigate a bit on the quantum physics side. And I found that they were telling us something very similar, that there really is no such thing as matter, like this physical thing called matter.

Rizwan Virk

So there was a famous physicist named John Wheeler, who was at Princeton with Einstein. And he worked with all the greats. And he just passed away, I think, in the early 2000s or so. So relatively recently for having been involved with all these guys, and he came up with the phrase, which was it from bit.

Rizwan Virk

And what he basically said was we used to think particles were these real things. But basically, what he what he found was, by the end of his life, he came to realize that if you if you start to look for this thing called a particle, the only thing you can find are these answers to these yes, no questions.

Rizwan Virk

And that's basically a bit of information. So the properties of the particle are what defines the particle itself. So he ended up saying if anything is it a physical object, like say a coffee cup or a table or this computer, that it actually at the bottom level, kind of like if you open up those Russian dolls, you keep going down to find, you know, what's at the bottom one, and there's nothing there.

Rizwan Virk

And that's kind of what he found it was that it was just information, it was an answer to a series of yes, no questions. Now he got there through this idea of the observer effect, which is what you were talking about with Schrodinger's cat.

Rizwan Virk

And yeah, the reason why the cat has a 50% chance of being alive or dead is in this thought experiment is there's some poison. And there's a quantum randomness that has a 50% chance of releasing the poison say after an hour or so.

Rizwan Virk

And common sense tells us that the cat has to be either alive or dead. It can't be both, right? And just like in the double slit experiment, when we think of shooting particles, we say, well, the particle has to go through one slit or the other, it can't go through both.

Rizwan Virk

Similarly, the cat cannot be both alive and dead at the same time. But that's not what quantum mechanics is telling us. And that's what's just really weird. So we end up saying that the cat is in a state of superposition.

Rizwan Virk

So superposition means, you know, take the two positions that could be dead or alive, and you combine that together into a set. And it turns out that this is true of all particles, that they're in a superposition until they're observed or measured depending on who you talk to.

Rizwan Virk

And that is just really weird. And more formally, we call it quantum indeterminacy. Although the more common name is just the observer effect. Why is it a wave of probabilities until it's observed? And so if you go back to like those early games that we used to play, like I used to play a game called King's Quest, I don't know if you remember it, it's from the 80s.

Rizwan Virk

But it was one of the first games where you had a guy that was moving across the screen, and it was an adventure game that had like castles and things. But it turned out they had all the pixels were rendered for all of the parts of that kingdom, this myth, you know, mythical medieval fantasy kingdom.

Rizwan Virk

It was called Coventry or something like that. And the guy would move around. And basically, all the computer had to do was just move his character from one location to the next. And that's what classical physics makes us think that the world is, it's there, the particles are all in place.

Rizwan Virk

And we just move around in something that exists independent of us. But quantum mechanics kind of blew that out of the water, because it shows that we may be a part of the process. It's what Wheeler calls a participatory process of reality.

Rizwan Virk

And so if we're not there now in the 80s, if you had tried to say, hey, we're going to create something like World of Warcraft, you wouldn't be able to do it. And the reason why is there were just too many pixels to keep track of in in a 3D world or a Fortnite, for example, or a League of Legends.

Rizwan Virk

And you would have to figure out where all those pixels are. And then you'd have to store them all and you'd have to use the limited processing. So what happened in the meantime is not only did the processors get faster, but we figured out how to render 3D worlds.

Rizwan Virk

And the first example of this was the game Doom, the first person shooter. It was one of the first examples of it. And in that in that world, in that type of video game, the computer program optimizes.

Rizwan Virk

So you only see that which can be observed by your player. And those are the only pixels that you care about. And so if you end up expanding that idea to lots of lots of different rooms, or different planets, there was a game a few years ago called No Man's Sky.

Rizwan Virk

And even though a lot of people didn't necessarily like the game, they all wanted to check it out because it had 18 quintillion planets, right? And it turns out there's no way a design team can design that many planets.

Rizwan Virk

And so what they did is they use AI, or they use techniques called procedural generation, that generates all of the flora and the fauna on each planet dynamically as you go. So if you're not there, those pixels don't really exist.

Rizwan Virk

And to me, this sounded strangely like this idea of the observer effect that the observer is a key part of it, just like if you're playing a video game, you render only what needs to be there. If other people are in the scene with you, then they will also pretty much see the same thing that you're seeing, although that's not necessarily required.

Rizwan Virk

And we can talk about that separately. But but that so one of the key interpretations of quantum mechanics is called the Copenhagen interpretation, which is that there's this probability wave that has all of the different possibilities.

Rizwan Virk

And then when it gets observed, you collapse to one of those. And, and it's telling us the cat is both alive and dead until we observe it. And then it's alive, or it's dead. So so that's where the idea I think is an interesting one.

Rizwan Virk

Basically, physicists love things like infinity, like to say, this is infinite, no big deal. But computer scientists, as computer scientists, we hate that, because we know there's not infinite computing power.

Rizwan Virk

So we have to always optimize the programs to work on the machines that we have and the technology that we have. So we're used to figuring out how to optimize. So what I put forward in the book, and I think there are other people like Elon Musk, you know, who would agree with this is that quantum mechanics could very much be an optimization method for the universe, so that it doesn't have to render all the different possibilities.

Rizwan Virk

And it doesn't even have to render the entire universe all the time. It's like a player inside a game.

Melanie Avalon

So going back to the cat experiment, what would happen if you opened the door and there were two people, one on each side, and they both saw the cat at the exact same time, and maybe this is explained by you talking to the book about the idea of things being simultaneous and maybe that can't actually, or basically that the problems with things appearing simultaneous, but if things can happen simultaneously,

Melanie Avalon

if two people saw the cat at the exact same time, couldn't they in theory collapse it into different states? Okay, wait, so that's like the one question, like could it collapse it into two different states at the same time?

Melanie Avalon

And then in the video game analogy, same thing, say you had two players simultaneously witness the same spot, like couldn't that collapse it into two different realities? Or is it referencing a third party outside of the simulation reality that's determining what things become?

Rizwan Virk

Yeah, it's a good question, and it's actually a very complex question. And I'd say, you know, from a physicist's point of view, the jury's still out on that. But the best way to think about it is in computer games, you and I, we could both be in a field in say World of Warcraft, right, your avatar and my avatar.

Rizwan Virk

Now we think we're both looking at the same field, just like I'm not really talking to you right now, am I? I'm talking to my computer, which is turning my voice into bits and sending it to your computer, and playing it on your computer, and then you're responding to your computer.

Rizwan Virk

So we're not really talking to each other, but it appears as if we're talking to each other. And I think that's kind of the mechanism that happens in a multiplayer game. So in a multiplayer game, the server tries to be the arbiter, right, it tries to be kind of the master information, and it sends that information out to each of our computers, and we render the world on our computers.

Rizwan Virk

Now, the way I think that most physicists would say that it should work, or is supposed to work, is that the first person that sees that cat, that solidifies. It's almost as if that version of reality gets entrained, and so that the next person to look at it would see the same thing.

Rizwan Virk

So it's a question of is it possible for us to figure out who saw it first? And this is actually a synchronization problem we have in video games, like if we're doing a first-person shooter, and you're in Atlanta, let's say, and I'm in Phoenix or California, it does take a few microseconds for the signals to go from our computer to the server and then to go back.

Rizwan Virk

And so the server has to decide which one got it first. So even though you might have seen it first, it might have taken longer for that signal to get back to the server. So it might think I saw it first, and then it'll make that sort of the master copy.

Rizwan Virk

It does what we call caching. So one of the problems people have with the observer effect is, and this video game analogy is just what you're talking about, which is, well, other people see the same thing that I see, so how is it that we're all collapsing the probability wave?

Rizwan Virk

So in software, there's this thing called caching, where you cache the information so that the next person that needs to see it will see the exact same information really quickly. In their case, they don't necessarily have to collapse the probability wave.

Rizwan Virk

They can just get that information from memory because it's now stored in terms of what will happen. Now let's go to the edge case, which is this edge case that you talked about. And there actually is a experiment that was proposed, a thought experiment originally called Wigner's Friend.

Rizwan Virk

And so Eugene Wigner was another one of these 20th century physicists who got into, I mean, physicists today don't spend as much time thinking about what does quantum mechanics mean. This is so weird.

Rizwan Virk

Niels Bohr said those who are not shocked by the quantum theory have not understood it because it doesn't make any sense from a common sense point of view, the way we perceive this universe as being a fully material universe that's always there.

Rizwan Virk

And quantum mechanics is telling us that may not be the case. And so in this weird experiment, he proposed what if there were like three or four particles and in a lab, let's say Alice was in the lab and they collapse it to a certain set of states.

Rizwan Virk

And some of those particles are entangled with another set of particles and say Bob is outside the lab and Bob also looks at the particle and sees a collapse. But they do it simultaneously or so close enough that they're seeing, is it possible that they would see a different collapse of reality?

Rizwan Virk

And, you know, Wigner's friend, this experiment has only really been attempted, I think, once or twice because when he proposed it, they couldn't really figure out how to do it. But using entangled particles, they can get close to it.

Rizwan Virk

And there was a group in the UK that was doing it. And I believe the results suggest that it might be possible that there might be more than one collapse of this. Now, that sounds weird. But when you think of it in video game terms, it's actually much easier to think about because, again, you could be there on your computer and you could see, say, a dragon in the field and I could see a UFO in the field above me,

Rizwan Virk

above us. But we think we're both looking at the same thing, but we're not because we're both rendering the world, you know, per our rendering device. And I use that as a generic term. That could be your iPhone.

Rizwan Virk

That could be a computer or it could be your brain. If you remember in the matrix, what they had was a brain computer interface where they connected right into the cortex, into the spinal column. They had the little hole there.

Rizwan Virk

And so that's what we call BCIs now or brain computer interfaces.

Melanie Avalon

Is it possible that sometimes in the world, if two people witness something, they both seemingly saw something different, maybe they just, maybe there were two collapses happening at that moment?

Rizwan Virk

And then the server, I think, eventually goes to one or the other, but they remember different things. So the server then does what we call conflict resolution. It's something that, like in video games, we have to deal with.

Rizwan Virk

If there are two different states coming to add us, we have to say, well, we think this one happened first, because we're looking at our master clock. And our master clock says, we got this signal first.

Rizwan Virk

Because think about it. You could change your clock. You and I are playing a game, shooting each other. And you change your clock to say, yesterday. And mine says today, if the server trusted our computers, it would think that you shot first, because your date says it was yesterday.

Rizwan Virk

And my date time says it's today, noon or whatever. But the server has to look at its clock to decide, but it has to make a determination. And that's why simultaneity is a complex thing. And even, I think, with Einstein's theory of relativity, there's some confusion there about whether you can even actually determine if things really happened simultaneously or not.

Rizwan Virk

It depends on frames of reference. I mean, that's where the relativity comes in.

Melanie Avalon

It's like being gaslit by the server if you're the person who if the server decides the other the other option then you know you have this memory that you saw but didn't actually get picked for the final.

Rizwan Virk

final thing. Yeah, and could those be the explanation for glitches in the mid-range or glitches that people see sometimes that are there or aren't there? And that gets us in a whole other topic of weird stuff, paranormal phenomena, ghosts, UFOs that are visible to one person but not the next.

Rizwan Virk

So there's a whole other area we can go into if you want to at some point.

Melanie Avalon

Well, one more question about the quantum entanglement, so with quantum entanglement and these particles that seem to mirror each other, are they referencing a third-party server of sorts, and that's how they are entangled?

Rizwan Virk

Well, nobody really knows how they get entangled, right? So, I mean, they know how they get entangled, but nobody knows how it works. And so, entanglement means that these two particles, they have a similar value.

Rizwan Virk

Now, it's not exactly the same, but it's almost like you have a left sock and a right sock. So, if you know one is the left sock, then the other one has to be the right sock, because in a pair, you have these two values that are complementary.

Rizwan Virk

And so, these two particles can be a million miles apart, right, or one could be at Alpha Centauri and one could be here on Earth. And yet, they would have this ability to reflect the state of each other.

Rizwan Virk

Like, they could both be in this indeterminate state that we talked about earlier, which is technically referred to as the state of superposition. But when you collapse one of the particles, it automatically affects how the other one collapses.

Rizwan Virk

And so, nobody knows how that works, but my proposal for this is that in a video game, what we think of as particles really is just a display on a screen. And what that display is reflecting is some information that's stored in memory somewhere.

Rizwan Virk

So, if I have two particles on the screen, they look like they're two different pixels, like one's up here and one's down there. But if they both reference the same memory location, then they're gonna show the exact same value, or in this case, you know, an opposite value, because they calculate it from what's in the memory.

Rizwan Virk

And so, there's this idea, I think this is explanation for quantum entanglement, that is more of a computer science explanation, which is that there is a server that caches this information, and each of them is, even though they may be really, really far apart in the virtual world, they are both referencing the same location on the server.

Rizwan Virk

Therefore, what happens to one automatically affects the other.

Melanie Avalon

Because I understand then the server would be affecting both of them at the same time, but you're saying also you affect one that updates the server, which updates the other one.

Rizwan Virk

Yeah, exactly. It updates the other one. So they both, or they both just read, you know, from the server. When it looks at one, it might go to the server to figure out what it is. And yeah, it sends the signal to the server to say this collapse has occurred.

Rizwan Virk

And then the next one, it won't be allowed to collapse as long as they're still entangled to some other value. It'll have to look at that value first before it lets you change it, if you will.

Melanie Avalon

Okay, gotcha. Speaking of, you're mentioning the future affecting the past with your personal story about that dream and everything. Going back to, there's so many different options we could use. So like with the Schrodinger's cat example, when you open the box, see the cat, collapse it into a state of either being dead or alive, does that mean now in the past it was dead or alive?

Melanie Avalon

Because you determined that in the future?

Rizwan Virk

Yeah, so this is where it gets a little complicated. And so, you know, my first book, the simulation hypothesis was about the idea that the physical world isn't what we think it is. And the second book, simulated multiverse gets into this in a lot more detail.

Rizwan Virk

Oh, man, I got to read it. But it's basically saying that time isn't what we think it is. And it's not so much that I'm saying it in the book, it's that quantum mechanics is telling us that time is weirder than we think it is.

Rizwan Virk

Now, we think of a simple cause and effect. The past goes to the future. Now, that's a very classical idea, like going back to Newtonian physics, that if you know the positions of all the particles, and you know the equations, you just play them out, and you can easily figure out what's going on.

Rizwan Virk

But quantum mechanics is telling us something really weird. And it's a little bit hard to visualize with Schrodinger's cap. But what it could say is, you look at the cat and it's either alive or dead.

Rizwan Virk

But turns out, there might be two other possibilities, even if the cat is alive, of what happened before that. Did the cat come into the box from the front yard or the backyard? Those are two different possible paths.

Rizwan Virk

Now, an easier way to visualize this is what another thought experiment, this one was proposed by John Wheeler that I talked about earlier. And he proposed something called the delayed choice double slit experiment.

Rizwan Virk

But probably the easiest version of that, I think, to visualize for people without getting into things like slits and screens and things is called the cosmic delayed choice experiment. And anyone can look it up so they can see a diagram of it.

Rizwan Virk

But basically, imagine that there is an object like a quasar, a very bright object. So quasars are among the brightest objects we know of the universe. And let's suppose it's 10 billion light years away from us.

Rizwan Virk

So pretty far, pretty much towards the edge of the observable universe. And suppose the light from that quasar comes to us, so it takes 10 billion years because it's 10 billion light years away. Now, that means it would have had to have left the quasar 10 billion years ago.

Rizwan Virk

Now, suppose there is something in the middle between right in the middle between us and the quasar, or not in the middle, but let's say it's a million light years away from us like a black hole. And what happens is that light from the quasar will have to go to the left or to the right around the black hole before it gets to the earth.

Rizwan Virk

And on the earth, if we have two telescopes, we can actually figure out which way the light went. Did it go to the left or the right? And so we measure it today because we measure it when the light gets here, which is a billion years after it left the quasar.

Rizwan Virk

But it's also a million years after it went by the black hole. So the decision of whether to go left or right would have had to have been made a million years ago. So maybe not quite in the age of the dinosaurs, but closer to the age of the dinosaurs than the current age.

Rizwan Virk

So that's the past. So it would have to decide in the past a million years ago whether to go to the left or right. But what the delayed choice experiment seems to be telling us is that it's when you measure that light and you figure out if it went to the left or right today that determines whether it went to the left or right a million years ago.

Rizwan Virk

So it's almost like we are choosing from one of two different possible pasts. Okay, that's just weird, right? It's not that hard to think about two possible futures. Oh, I might go to vacation in Hawaii or I might go to vacation in Cancun, right?

Rizwan Virk

Those are two possible futures. And if I make that choice, then one of those might happen versus the other. But when we say there's multiple possible pasts and that when we collapse the wave, when we do the measurement that we are choosing not just the state of the particle today, we are choosing what happened to that particle in the past, 100 years ago, 1,000 years ago, a million years ago.

Rizwan Virk

So this is just almost nonsensical from a common sense point of view. But it is what McConnell mechanics seems to be telling us. And I looked to see, okay, has anybody else really talked about this? Before Wheeler's delayed choice experiment, delayed choice, double slit experiment.

Rizwan Virk

And there was actually an obscure lecture that Schrodinger gave. And by the way, even Schrodinger, he came up with this idea of the cap because he thought this is absurd that the cap could be in two states.

Rizwan Virk

I know. But there was an obscure lecture of his and I found a reference to this somewhere that where he said, we are choosing from one of multiple simultaneous histories. And that is not something we're used to thinking of, right?

Rizwan Virk

We think of World War II as having one history, which is that the Allies won the war, and Germany and Japan lost the war. Now, when I was researching my book, I interviewed the science fiction writer Philip K.

Rizwan Virk

Dick, his wife, Tessa. And she told me that he had come to believe that that was a real alternate timeline in that book. In The Man in the High Castle, which is a book he wrote, and there's an Amazon series, it was pretty popular a few years ago, where Germany and Japan won World War II, and it tries to envision what America would be like if it was divided up, you know, by the Germans on the East Coast,

Rizwan Virk

and the Japanese on the West Coast, and kind of this Wild West area in the middle around Colorado. And so she said he came to believe that was a real timeline that happened, but that the simulators had changed the timeline.

Rizwan Virk

And now we're on this timeline, where, you know, the past is just what we think it is, which is what we remember, which is that the US and the UK and the Soviet Union, we all won World War II. And so, you know, this is where it gets really weird.

Rizwan Virk

And the reason I interviewed her was because Philip K. Dick gave a speech all the way back in Metz, France in 1977, where he said, we are living in a computer program reality. And the only clue we have to it is when some variable has changed, some alteration occurs in our reality.

Rizwan Virk

And that was kind of, it has become a famous quote, and he was part of the inspiration for the movie, The Matrix. And so I wanted to interview her and she said, well, read the rest of that speech. And I read the rest of the speech, and it turns out the speech was very much more about, it wasn't just about being in a simulation, it was about being in multiple timelines in a simulation.

Rizwan Virk

And that's where things just get really, really weird.

Melanie Avalon

Wow. Well, and hearing it explained that way, going back to the light traveling around the black hole, that really does make it seem like, to me, thinking about it, that it went both ways and just whatever future you're in, you see it having gone that way.

Melanie Avalon

So like all, I guess that is the multiverse, right? There'd be like multiple realities happening.

Rizwan Virk

Yeah, in this case, multiple paths, though. You're right. The light is in a state of superposition until it's measured in the future, which then begs the question, are we in a state of superposition until some future version of us observes or measures something that's happened, and then do they choose a particular timeline?

Rizwan Virk

Now, the multiverse is another interpretation of quantum mechanics. And if you go back to Schrodinger's cat, so this interpretation comes from John Wheeler's PhD student named Hugh Everett. Some scientists don't like the Copenhagen interpretation.

Rizwan Virk

They don't like this idea of a probability wave. Even Einstein didn't like it. He said, God doesn't play dice. So he doesn't like that idea. But in that interpretation, nobody knows how it goes from these probabilities, how it collapses down to a single possibility.

Rizwan Virk

It just kind of happens when it gets observed. And so that is basically, I don't know, there's this cartoon online if you've ever seen it, but there's this professor guy at a blackboard. And he's got like a bunch of equations on the left, step one.

Rizwan Virk

And then step three, he's got a bunch of equations on the right. And in step two, it just says, then a miracle occurs. And the caption is, another guy asked him, can you expand on step two? And nobody could.

Rizwan Virk

And so that's why some physicists are like, okay, there must be a different explanation than this collapse of the probability wave. And the most popular one, I mean, there are many different interpretations and ideas and theories.

Rizwan Virk

But the most popular one is that the multiverse idea. And that's the idea that there are actually, every time a decision is made, every time the collapse happens, what happens is there are actually two different worlds or universes being generated.

Rizwan Virk

So there's one universe where the cat is alive, comes out of the box happy. And there's another universe where the cat is dead. And you know, little Susie cries because the cat is dead and never comes out of the box.

Rizwan Virk

And so it, but it implies that when this happens, this happens for every single decision. So it's weird, because it means we're generating multiple universes all the time. And this is, of course, what gave way to the multiverse idea in superhero movies today.

Rizwan Virk

So if you've ever watched any of the Marvel superhero shows like Loki, or, you know, or the movies like Spider-Man, you know, No Way Home, they have like these different versions of Spider-Man. In this case, they took the different actors, right?

Rizwan Virk

What was it? Andrew Garfield and Tom Holland and Toby, Toby McGuire. And they said, well, they're all from different universes. And so it's become almost a trope now or storytelling tool within science fiction.

Rizwan Virk

But it really is a real idea that many physicists believe. Now the problem with that idea, okay, so there's a problem with that idea, which other physicists don't like, which is that you're creating all these universes, like every minute, every minute, every like nanosecond, right?

Rizwan Virk

Every time there's a quantum decision. And so there's another version of you, it's another version of me, we're creating new versions. And that just doesn't seem to be parsimonious, right? It seems like it's just doing a lot of extra stuff.

Rizwan Virk

How does that happen? And so I thought about this more as a computer scientist. And I said, well, you know, cloning something that's physical is very hard, right? Imagine cloning the earth. I mean, yes, we can, you know, cells might be able to be cloned, because they're really small.

Rizwan Virk

But how do you clone the entire earth? And how do you do it in a nanosecond? It's just too weird. Well, if we think of the earth as information, then it turns out you can clone it very easily. In fact, like all the processors or the computers, when I was back at MIT, we kind of learned, you know, these op codes, which are like their basic commands, they used to be some people used to program in what's called assembly language back in the day.

Rizwan Virk

And that's when you're writing these hex codes, rather than hexadecimal, like numbers rather than writing in, writing out the programs and basic, you know, instead of saying print Hello, you would give it, you know, I don't know, E4, whatever these hexadecimal numbers.

Rizwan Virk

And I always wondered what that was about. Because if you did that, your graphics would run so much faster. And it turns out each of those is a core command in the processor itself. So it barely has to do any computing, it's just able to do it really quickly.

Rizwan Virk

And turns out there's a core, there's usually a core command at a very low level that lets you clone information. So you can clone ones and zeros very quickly. In fact, turns out you don't even need to clone them.

Rizwan Virk

All you have to do is point back at it. So you can run, you can save your game state in a game. And you can say, Okay, should I go left or right? Okay, I'm going to save my game state when I'm at the fork.

Rizwan Virk

If you've ever watched like, the Lord of the Rings.

Melanie Avalon

Yeah, all of my favorite movie of all time.

Rizwan Virk

When the fellowship of the ring there in the minds of moria and then they have these different passageways and gandalf says follow your nose and so but you can save the game state right there and then you can let me run it forward to go to the bottom passage now let me go to the right one now let me go to the one that goes this way and but when you go down one you can say this isn't the right one but you have the game state saved already.

Melanie Avalon

Yup. That's what I used to do playing games when I was little. That was the hack.

Rizwan Virk

Exactly. You could try it, right? That was the hack. And so because when you save the game state, it's just storing some information. And to run it from that point forward, you don't have to change it.

Rizwan Virk

You can leave it there on desk. You can just point back to it and say, OK, we'll start from that point. So now this very mysterious process of how multiple worlds could be created becomes less mysterious, because all it means is that it's a processor that is running the process with slightly different variable changes.

Rizwan Virk

And you can run it as much as you want. And it doesn't have to be infinite. In computer simulations, you don't run an infinite number of simulations. But you don't run just one. You always run more than one.

Rizwan Virk

And you run multiple ones, but you can prune the tree. And so now this parsimonious issue that this would just create way too many universes, well, perhaps it's based on what the future is observing.

Rizwan Virk

And then we start to prune all these different possibilities. So we don't always have to run all of the universes. So there's a problem in physics. It's called the fine-tuning problem. And the fine-tuning problem is such that our universe seems to be fine-tuned in such a way that life is possible.

Rizwan Virk

Like, there are these constants, like gravitational constants. There's a whole bunch of them that if they were off by like 1%, 2%, 3%, 4%, the planets would fly apart. They wouldn't stay together. Galaxies wouldn't stay together.

Rizwan Virk

There would be no way you could have like our kind of life on a planet inside this physical universe. And nobody knows why that's the case. And one explanation that has been given for fine-tuning is that you is a multiverse.

Rizwan Virk

Well, there were a whole bunch of different universes, but this is the only one that has the parameters for us to be alive. But again, that gets into this problem that, okay, now we have an infinite number of universes out there.

Rizwan Virk

Unless it's like a game and a simulation, and we run all of these and we just prune the ones where life isn't possible. So we don't have to run those anymore because there's no point. Now we're just running the ones where we actually can have life.

Rizwan Virk

And even within that, we can start to prune different possibilities based on observations.

Melanie Avalon

I think with the fine-tuning problem, I didn't call it that, so I was raised very Christian, so we had a whole class about understanding the world from a, like, Genesis perspective and everything, but we'd always be presented with these arguments about the insane probabilities of things existing and how that was evidence of a creator.

Melanie Avalon

But I used to think, it didn't bother me that it required an insane possibility or probability for things to happen, because if that wasn't the case, we wouldn't be here. Like, the reason we're here, it's hard for me to explain, but the reason we're here is because that's the way it is, so I don't find that shocking, if that makes sense.

Rizwan Virk

Right, right, because we wouldn't be there if it wasn't that way. But from a scientific point of view, it's a little confusing as to how did it randomly end up here, right? And so it gets back to this idea of potentially intelligent design.

Rizwan Virk

And I did look a lot into the world's religions. There's a whole section of the book on that. And that's an area that I've been delving deeper into, but I teach a class on the simulation hypothesis at Arizona State University, which I think is the first college-level class about this idea.

Rizwan Virk

It's called Science Fiction, Technology, Religion, and Philosophy. I would love that. Yeah, well, I'm going to teach it online to the general public in the spring.

Melanie Avalon

So cool. Wait, wait.

Rizwan Virk

You said when? In the spring, probably January, starting in January, I haven't put it up on my website yet that I'm doing that, but I'm planning to, so depending on when people hear this. Yeah, that's awesome.

Rizwan Virk

In that, we actually go through Genesis, you know, line by line, and we go through what are all the arguments for there being a God, well, one of which, you know, if you go back to the Persian philosopher Al-Ghazali, he said, you know, well, everything has a cause, and we can just cause the cause of, we can call the cause of this universe God.

Rizwan Virk

That's one reason, by definition. The second is the universe shows it exhibits intelligent design, and that would turn out to be true in a simulation as well. That basically it means somebody had to have designed the simulation, or at least had to have designed the rules of the simulation.

Rizwan Virk

And so a lot of the arguments for God actually could also be applied to the simulation. This is why some scientists don't like the simulation hypothesis, because they think it gets us back into theological territory.

Rizwan Virk

And it's been called atheists, religion for atheists, right? And it kind of is, in a sense, because as an atheist, if you start to think of how things work, you're really just figuring out the rules of the game, what we call the physics engine.

Rizwan Virk

But even many an atheist would say, well, if there's anybody who's outside watching the game or is a super user of the game, to us, they would look like supernatural beings. They might look like angels that can do anything because they have more access to the game than the rest of us, or anyone outside would look like gods or God outside the simulation.

Rizwan Virk

And it also, you know, gets to this idea of the soul and the body, where the soul is like the player and the body is like the character inside the game or what we call the avatar. Which incidentally, the term avatar comes from Sanskrit and it means a divine entity that this big idea squeezes itself down into an incarnation of a deity, a physical body that the deity lives in for a little while.

Rizwan Virk

And the people at Lucasfilm, when they were doing the first one of the first MMORPGs called Habitat, way back in the 80s, they were using like Commodore 64 computers with dial up lines and they had this little 2D version of themselves on the screen and they were identifying with that character and they're like, what should we call it?

Rizwan Virk

And they said, it feels like I'm squeezing myself into the phone line, you know, at whatever rate, really slow rate of data transmission back then, 2400 baud modems or whatever they had. And I'm squeezing myself into this little 2D character.

Rizwan Virk

So it feels like an avatar coming from outside this world into a little world and a little body. That's where they came up with that term even.

Melanie Avalon

I love that. I also learned that the term IRL comes from video gamers. I was like, I did not know that I use that term all the time.

Rizwan Virk

It comes from video gamers, totally. I remember, so there used to be these virtual worlds called, one of them was called Second Life. It's still around, and I used to spend a lot of time in that world.

Rizwan Virk

People would have virtual jobs. They would come home from their job, and then at 9 p.m., they have to log in to be a bartender inside a bar in Second Life with their avatar. I remember we would use IRL all the time to refer to something outside of the virtual world.

Melanie Avalon

My sister and I used to joke because I used to play the games I played growing up were things like detective Barbie. I highly recommend it. It was really fun. But you would do like these, you know, like tasks, you know, you would be given like silly, silly jobs.

Melanie Avalon

And I remember when I actually got older, I was like, Oh, I used to like do this for fun in a video game. Like, what was I thinking? Like, now that now I'm like, doing this for real. The argument when I was growing up about the creation that they harped on the most was probably irreducible complexity.

Melanie Avalon

So the idea that if you look back in evolution, there's at some point, multiple things required for the entity to have the function that it's trying to do. So why would that have evolved? It would have required like, yeah, it was irreducibly complex, I guess.

Rizwan Virk

Yeah. Well, that's an interesting concept. I think that term comes from Steven Wolfram, who was a physicist turned computer scientist. He has been working for years with things called cellular automata.

Rizwan Virk

I don't know if you've ever seen those. They're like these 2D, even 1D or 2D boards where there's rules and the squares light up based on these rules. If the square next to you is lit up and you're lit up, then both of you should turn off and the one on your left should turn on.

Rizwan Virk

There are these rules. There's something called the game of life, which is kind of a famous automaton, cellular automaton. You just watch it and it goes through these rules and you end up with these weird patterns.

Rizwan Virk

Sometimes you end up in what are called stable patterns, which means it just stops changing because the rule is such that it doesn't let it change anymore. Sometimes you end up with periodic patterns where let's say it goes from a line that's horizontal and flips into a line that's vertical.

Rizwan Virk

If you just follow the rules, if all the squares follow the rules, and then it goes back to horizontal and all it does is go back and forth. In those cases, you can predict what's going to happen at step five million because you know it's gotten into a stable or a periodic state.

Rizwan Virk

This is what chaos and complexity theory are all about is that there's complex processes and chaotic processes where you can't know what's going to happen at step five million. The only way to know it is you have to run the program to step four million nine ninety nine nine ninety nine.

Rizwan Virk

To get to that, you have to run the computer to four ninety eight and then four ninety seven and so and so forth. Irreducible computational irreducibility usually means that you have to run the process to see what would happen even if you know the rules, even if you know the equations.

Rizwan Virk

There's a famous problem called the three body problem where they don't know if there's these three planets that are kind of or these three stars that are rotating around each other with this complex gravitational interaction.

Rizwan Virk

Whether that's going to be stable like in a million years or whether one of them will fly off and it's hard to actually figure that out without actually calculating it all the way. And so that applies to computer programs too is perhaps you have to run the program and that's where Wolfram was going with this is that the whole universe could be a series of computer programs and you have to run the programs to see what would happen.

Rizwan Virk

And that was even in the case where the rules were deterministic meaning the rules are really well defined. You know you know exactly what's going to happen. The next square is going to turn on, the square is going to turn off.

Rizwan Virk

You know exactly what the rules are but you don't know what patterns or complex patterns that's going to result in. Now I like to think of the world as a video game and there's two different versions of the simulation hypothesis.

Rizwan Virk

There's the NPC versus the RPG version and in the NPC version everyone is AI. It stands for non-player characters which anybody who plays video games has probably heard that term but now it's being used in a lot of other contexts out there as well.

Rizwan Virk

And in the RPG version you have a player who's playing the avatar, right? So in the NPC version everyone is AI, it's a hundred percent AI and in the RPG version at least some of the people are players who have avatars inside the game and turns out that's closer to what some of the religions have been telling us is that you have a soul and a body and the soul according to different traditions like in the Islamic tradition you know Rumi says that the soul takes on the body at just as you put on you know a set of clothes and in the Bhagavad Gita it also says that the Atman or your soul puts on a body and takes it off just like you put on and take off garments and so they're using the same metaphor and what if all the religions are describing something that's actually true but today as scientists we dismiss it because we say those are just stories because they're told in metaphors but the truth of the matter is that they have to use these metaphors.

Rizwan Virk

So where I was going with this was in the RPG version it's non-deterministic what might happen because the player who's outside the game has to make choices in the game but even if it's if we're all NPCs you still might not know what would happen and that's why you run simulations to see what would happen and

Melanie Avalon

And in the RPG version, are there also NPCs in the RPG world?

Rizwan Virk

there could be. And so they're not mutually exclusive. You can think of it kind of like an axis, like a game like, you know, World of Warcraft has NPCs and it has PCs or player characters or avatars in the game.

Rizwan Virk

I have a new idea that I've been playing with, which is this idea of NPC mode, which is that you, you know, there are things that we react to automatically based upon how we've been trained during this life.

Rizwan Virk

It's kind of like turning a neural network to do things and it can just do them. And people react without thinking they just react based on however, what their experiences are. But it's when the soul incarnates now this is looking at it from the religious point of view, when the soul incarnates, almost all the world's religions tell us there is this little this veil of forgetfulness that that's actually a term that's used in the Sufi traditions.

Rizwan Virk

There's 70,000 veils between God where you were before you were born and your body here. And in the Greek traditions, if you ever read the myth of Ur, you know, one of one of Plato's books, he talks about they have this river from the underworld, when you come into incarnate, you got to cross the river Lete, which is the river of forgetfulness.

Rizwan Virk

And what happens is when you cross it, you kind of forget all of the things that you knew before, then you remember, you know, a little bit here and there. And in the Chinese traditions, they have the goddess Meng Po, who brews the tea of forgetfulness, which you drink.

Rizwan Virk

And so this idea of forgetfulness is a key part of, you know, how we incarnate. And I was asked to speak at an Islamic jurisprudence conference in the UK, like last year. And I was like, Really, you want me to talk about Islamic law?

Rizwan Virk

I'm a businessman and a technologist who talks about video games, you know, and they said, No, no, we want you to talk about simulation hypothesis and how it relates. And they were all debating maybe the same debates we're having here in the US of, you know, when does this, when does insolment happen?

Rizwan Virk

And, you know, is it in 40 days after? Is it a conception? Is it 40 days? Is it 120 days? Can you have abortions and not all the same arguments we're having in the US? But I said, Well, I'd like to offer a different perspective and say a different definition using video games as the metaphor.

Rizwan Virk

Because I truly believe if any of these religions or scriptures were founded today or revealed today or written today, they would use modern metaphors to describe these things which are very, they may be ineffable, which means this can't be put into words.

Rizwan Virk

So what do they do? They use metaphors like the river of forgetfulness, or they use a metaphor like the soul puts on the body, like you put on a pair of clothes. Those are just metaphors. And so in this case, I said, it's like when you finally put on the virtual reality headset, or as in the matrix where you plug in to the matrix, and you forget at that point, about the player that you were, and you start to identify 100% with the character.

Rizwan Virk

And so it's using a different analogy. It's using, you know, this, this forgetfulness as the key. And some people might still remember things, you know, mystics tend to start remembering things and then they tend to describe them to try to describe them to people, but they can't really describe what they really saw.

Rizwan Virk

So they have to use these metaphors and words, because it can't be put into words.

Melanie Avalon

That relates to a question I had. Although I wanted to clear up one little thing. I'm really glad you brought up the computational irreducibility because I wanted to talk about that. The irreducible complexity that we were taught about growing up, I think it's a different concept.

Melanie Avalon

They were saying that basically in evolution, they always use the I as an example. Like it requires multiple different things at the same time to function. And so evolution could not have created that because it would require creating multiple things at the same time to have this intended function.

Melanie Avalon

That was their idea of irreducible complexity. I just want to clarify that, but I wanted to talk about computational irreducibility. So I'm so glad you brought that up. And also when you were talking about it, I was like, actually computational irreducibility might explain irreducible complexity because it would give this idea that all this random stuff could be happening.

Melanie Avalon

So maybe that stuff could develop just by random.

Rizwan Virk

Right, it's an interesting question because I think, yeah, I think what you're talking about irreducible complexity is used generally in the idea of intelligent design. Like you couldn't just have these random mutations.

Rizwan Virk

That could have resulted in the complexity that we have, right?

Melanie Avalon

Yes. So, but going back to what you're talking about with the, the metaphors and the story and who we are and forgetting where we were before, I'm super okay. Why do you think in this hypothesis or in your hypothesis that the simulation that we are in, why would it necessarily correlate to or mirror the ultimate reality of a simulation hypothesis?

Melanie Avalon

What I mean by that is if we're simulated beings, we could just be all these video games we have, they themselves don't evolve. Like programmers can make new versions of the game, but within that game, it doesn't really evolve into something else.

Melanie Avalon

So why would we be in a simulation that mirrors the evolution of the simulation originally and not just in a simulation where we're like playing detective Barbie in a carnival all day?

Rizwan Virk

Well, it's, yeah, it's an interesting question. I mean, first of all, the question of whether what's inside the simulation has to look like what's outside of the simulation is an interesting point. And I think people sometimes make assumptions about that.

Rizwan Virk

Part of the reason they make assumptions about that is one of the guys who really popularized this idea of the simulation hypothesis was a guy named Nick Bostrom at Oxford. He's a philosopher. And he wrote a paper all the way back in 2003.

Rizwan Virk

Oh, he published it in 2003. He probably wrote it in like 2001 or 2002 that basically laid out what he called the simulation argument. And in this argument, he basically said that, look, if any civilization ever gets to the point, he called it posthuman, but I call it the simulation point, which is the point at which you can create these super realistic simulations, so realistic that the beings inside don't even know that they're in a simulation.

Rizwan Virk

And it's filled with AI characters that seem like they're biological. And so he said, if a civilization ever got there, then they should be able to produce not just one, they can produce lots of simulations.

Rizwan Virk

And he called them ancestor simulations. And so that would be like, if we were simulating ancient Rome, that would be an ancestor simulation. Or like the Oregon Trail, let's say, if you remember that game.

Melanie Avalon

No, I love that game.

Rizwan Virk

Yeah, it was like a game about the pioneer time.

Melanie Avalon

I can hear the theme song in my head right now. It's funny.

Rizwan Virk

In a sense, it's an ancestor simulation. Now, that wasn't super sophisticated, but what if we were to create a highly realistic virtual reality of ancient Rome? That would be an ancestor simulation. So, he put forth this argument that if a civilization could create ancestor simulations, and if they had the permission to, meaning it wasn't outlawed, and they didn't kill themselves before they got to the point where they could create these,

Rizwan Virk

that they would create lots of these simulations. So, there might be billions of simulated worlds, but there's only one base reality, one physical world. And therefore, the chances that you are in a simulation is very high if it's possible for anybody to create these simulations, because if it's possible, then probably that was us.

Rizwan Virk

We already created it, and now we're inside the ancestor simulation. So, it was almost like a future version of us that created the simulation. And that's what got Elon Musk in 2016, actually the same year that I was putting on the virtual reality headset.

Rizwan Virk

He said at a conference that the chances that we are in base reality, meaning the chances that we're not in a simulation, is one in billions. And that's another famous quote that's gotten out there, and he was basing his logic on Bostrom's simulation argument, that there are so many simulated worlds, and so many simulated beings inside those worlds, that you're more likely to be one of those.

Rizwan Virk

But it hinges on this idea that if we can actually create those simulations. Now, one, it's not really a counterpoint, but looking at a different, sort of an adjacent argument is when we create video games, though, we don't always create games that look exactly like the physical world.

Rizwan Virk

Why do we play video games, and why do we run simulations? People always ask me this, what's the purpose of the simulation? And I say, well, let me ask you two questions. Why do you play video games?

Rizwan Virk

And two, why do we run simulations? Now, the answer to the first question, why do we play video games? It's to have fun. It's to have experiences that we couldn't have outside of the simulation for some reason.

Rizwan Virk

Like, I can't really jump on a dragon and fly around and shoot arrows, you know, from the sky down on hordes of armies of orcs, for example, in the physical world. But I can do it in a virtual world, and therefore that virtual world is created to have these experiences.

Rizwan Virk

And so it doesn't have to be that the simulation looks exactly like the world outside the simulation. It depends, it gets back to this NPC versus RPG question, I think, which is why I always bring this up.

Rizwan Virk

And not a lot of people who talk about simulation theory bring it up. But I think it's an important one, because it gives us an interesting perspective. Now, if you look at the religious text, just to go there, you know, in the in the Hindu and Buddhists in the Eastern traditions, they talk about the world being an illusion.

Rizwan Virk

Being Maya is the term. And Maya is an interesting term, because it's almost an illusion that you agree to take part in. It's like if you go see a magic show, you know, that guy's not really sawing the woman in half, but the whole fun of it, if it's fun, if you add with quotes, is because you know, you want to suspend disbelief and you want to actually look at this and say, wow, oh, my God, how did he do that?

Rizwan Virk

How did he saw her in half? Because that's the fun of the magic show. And in the Islamic traditions in the Quran, they also have a term called El Gururi Mattal. And that means a delusion, but an enjoyable delusion.

Rizwan Virk

And, you know, we might have all kinds of crazy things happen inside video games, but we might want to still play that video game, like Grand Theft Auto and do these these bad things. But, you know, that's like a key part of the illusion itself.

Rizwan Virk

And so that's why the world inside simulation doesn't, in my opinion, have to look like the world outside the simulation. In fact, there probably would be some differences.

Melanie Avalon

So do you think you're an NPC and or do you look at people in the world and wonder if they're NPCs? Now I do that all the time now, ever since reading your book. My sister and I even called people NPCs.

Melanie Avalon

We're like, oh, that was just an NPC.

Rizwan Virk

That's funny. A lot of people are using that term now. I had one woman say to me, what? I think my husband's an NPC. I said, that's probably not a good approach. I always tell people, assume that everybody is the source player and not an NPC, but this is why I've been playing with this term NPC mode.

Rizwan Virk

I think what happens is we go into NPC mode. NPC mode is when we're completely forgetful. We're disconnected from the soul, if you will. When people do terrible things or people just repeat the same things again and again without thinking.

Rizwan Virk

They're kind of an NPC mode, so they're using their neural network of their brain based on how it was trained here in this world, but they're not connecting to something bigger. They're forgetting the purpose of their story, I think personally.

Melanie Avalon

like trauma patterns appearing in people.

Rizwan Virk

Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So that's how we maybe get conditioned in this world is through patterns of experiences, whether the traumatic experiences or not. And that gives us kind of this automatic behavior, if you will.

Rizwan Virk

But that doesn't mean we always have to act that way. That's just how we were trained. And so I like this idea of we all go into NPC mode sometimes, some more than others.

Melanie Avalon

The other ethical question is like when you're dreaming, which I guess is like a simulation inside of a simulation, if you ever lucid dream and you realize you're dreaming, when that happens to me, I'm like, Oh, I can do all the things I can do whatever I want.

Melanie Avalon

And so there's this question of if people have this idea that we're in a simulation now, what's to stop them from thinking, Oh, I can, this is just a simulation so I can do whatever I want.

Rizwan Virk

Right. Well, that gets back to the purpose of the simulations, which I think is a broader question. Now we're back in philosophy and religion, I think, more than in science. I always say that it depends on what the purpose is of the game.

Rizwan Virk

As I said, I think most religions were founded by individuals who either came from or peaked outside or had someone or something from outside the simulation break in and appear to them. What's often called a theophany by religious scholars, right?

Rizwan Virk

They saw an angel or they became enlightened or they remembered who they were through whether it's, you know, based on something out of their control or something in their control. But because of that, and they've all come back and told us things and, you know, they've told us that the point of this world is not to harm other people.

Rizwan Virk

And because that's what you get judged on at the end of the game. And so, you know, there's this thing called the book of life in the Bible and where they were, you know, write down the names of the people who get into heaven and who don't and this idea that St.

Rizwan Virk

Peter is there looking at your deeds. But in Islam, they get into a lot more detail. They call it the scroll of deeds. And supposedly there's these two angels that are writing down all your good deeds and your bad deeds.

Rizwan Virk

And then it says at the end of life, what Judgment Day really is, is the book is open and you have to read the book and you'll see your own actions. You'll even see what happens, you know, what was the result of those actions?

Rizwan Virk

What did those do to other people? And I remember hearing about this and reading about it. It reminded me of what a number of people have reported in near-death experiences. And they've reported what's called a life review.

Rizwan Virk

And the life review, they said, is a holographic panoramic review of everything you did in your life, except you have to review it from the other person's point of view. So you get to feel what it was like to be the other people in your life.

Rizwan Virk

And, you know, I first heard about this from a guy named Danny Brinkley who wrote a book called Saved by the Light. He was struck by lightning back in the 70s. And the book was a huge best seller in the 90s.

Rizwan Virk

And he used to be in Vietnam, he used to shoot people and kill them. And he said during his life review, he had to actually experience what it was like to be shot by himself. And then he had to see the ripple effects, like what does that do to that person's wife and children when they're no longer there.

Rizwan Virk

And he said it was in like this panoramic holographic 3D, like you could see everything and you could feel everything. And to me, that's sort of like at the end of a game when you review what you did well and what you didn't.

Rizwan Virk

And so what is the purpose of the game or the simulation? And I think that gives us a clue. And the only way you could possibly do that, now, as I said, the scriptures speak in metaphors. So I don't think they meant there's literally two angels sitting there with feather pens writing down.

Rizwan Virk

And he got up today and went to work, right? It's all being recorded because if it can be played back, it has to be recorded somehow. And a few years ago in Silicon Valley, I was involved in a startup where we took a game like League of Legends.

Rizwan Virk

And we could have you put on a virtual reality headset and we could put you back at any XYZ coordinate inside the game. So you could literally see in a game like Counter Strike Global Offensive, which is a first person shooter, you could see exactly what it was like to be shot by your character.

Rizwan Virk

Like you could review any moment in time, you just had to change the T and the XY position and the Z position. And now we couldn't feel anything because the virtual reality headset isn't a brain computer interface.

Rizwan Virk

But that gave me the clue that, okay, as an engineer and a computer scientist, if these things are really happening where people are able to play, they're most likely a video game. And so for me, that is the biggest clue to the game.

Rizwan Virk

The game isn't really Grand Theft Auto. Now you might have a storyline where you're supposed to do certain things in the game, just like you choose a character like Dungeons and Dragons. When we used to play as a kid, we'd have the character sheets and you roll the dice.

Rizwan Virk

And then you say, you know, you're an elf and you're going to be a thief. And here's all the different attributes you have, strength, dexterity, charisma, et cetera. And I feel like we kind of do that when we choose our character, but we may have a general storyline, but it's up to us to make the choices.

Rizwan Virk

And then we have to review it at the end to see how we did. And so that's what I think should stop people from doing things that they kind of know are bad when they remember what their soul or remember why they're here in the first place.

Melanie Avalon

I love that. Quick side note, have you met Raymond Moody? I haven't met Raymond, no. Have you met him? Yes, he's a dear friend and he's honestly one of my favorite people in the universe. I was just thinking about it because he's the one who popularized the near death experiences stuff and he's just, he's like, he's like in his 80s now.

Melanie Avalon

He's just like the most, if you ever want to like meet him, he's like the most kindest wonderful human being I think I've ever met. Like I just smile thinking about him. So when I saw his name in your book, I was like, Raymond, shout out.

Rizwan Virk

Yeah. Oh, that's great. Yeah. I'd love to meet him someday. I mean, I've read a lot of his stuff. He wrote Life After Life all the way back in 1975 and really categorized these stages of the near-death experience.

Rizwan Virk

And he was the one that Danyin went to, you know, before he wrote his book because he didn't know what was going on exactly.

Melanie Avalon

I love him so much. Well, okay, this has been so amazing. I took all of your time. And I think listeners can see now why this is just such a riveting concept. Everybody get these books now. So how can people best follow your work, get the books, all the things.

Rizwan Virk

Yeah, so I have a website that's called zenentrepreneur.com, and that's based on the title of my first book, which was actually called Zen Entrepreneurship, which wasn't about simulation, per se. But they can also follow me on Twitter or X at rizstanford, just like the university, and on Instagram at rizcambridge, just like the city Cambridge.

Melanie Avalon

Awesome. Quick question. Has chat GPT passed the Turing test?

Rizwan Virk

Well, many people think that it has, that LLMs today are pretty much at the point. So there used to be this competition. It was called the Lobner Prize and it started in the nineties and it was basically for the chatbot that came closest to passing the Turing test.

Rizwan Virk

And they would have these minor prizes and then the major prize. And it went on until about 2019. And there was a chatbot called Kuki, K-U-K-I dot A-I, which was actually called Mitsuku was the real name of the chatbot that won it like five times.

Rizwan Virk

But the prize went defunct in 2019. And so now with these large language models, these LLMs, most people think that it has passed the point where you can tell it's not human. Now the Turing test was never defined in exact enough detail because how many people does it need to talk to?

Rizwan Virk

Like how many times do you need to run this test? How long do you have? Right. But for most people, if you sat down for an hour, you know, you may not be able to tell. So many people think it's either there or it's so close that it will definitely pass it.

Rizwan Virk

Now in the new version of the simulation hypothesis that's going to come out the second edition next year, I talk about the Metaverse Turing test, which is can you be inside a virtual reality, a virtual game, even just on your computer with your avatar and two other avatars, one of which is AI controlled with chat GPT or something behind what are called smart NPCs today.

Rizwan Virk

And the other is an avatar controlled by a human and you get to hang out with them for as long as you want or let's say the whole day doing different things in the virtual world. Will you be able to tell which one is AI?

Rizwan Virk

I don't think we've passed that yet, but it might be coming soon.

Melanie Avalon

I get in arguments with chat GPT like every night, so I just, I can't handle its gas lighting and its hallucinations. I will not, I will not stand for it.

Rizwan Virk

Yeah, there's so many hallucinations. I had this happen to one of my students where they gave me an assignment. This is like when chat GPT first came out. It had these references. It was for my simulation class.

Rizwan Virk

It had some really interesting references. I'd never heard of articles about the simulation. I was scratching my head. How is it that I, as an expert in this field, have never heard of these articles.

Rizwan Virk

I've got to add them to my syllabus. Let me go click on them. It turns out the URLs were completely fake. There were real professor names, real journal names, but the articles didn't exist. We emailed the professors.

Rizwan Virk

Did you ever write an article about this? They're like, no. It turns out it had just completely made them up.

Melanie Avalon

It's scary. I asked it like a while ago, I was like, is it true that you hallucinate and make up things? And it was like, you know, it said it really politically, it was like, well, I, you know, I try my best to find the answer.

Melanie Avalon

And it admitted that it did. And I was like, Well, can you just tell me when you're hallucinating? And it was like, I'll try to, but I don't know. I don't always know when I'm doing it. It's like, Oh, great.

Melanie Avalon

We are so weird. We're doomed. Oh, man. Well, thank you so much, Riz. This has been so amazing. I just am so grateful for everything that you're doing. I follow it eagerly listeners get the book and the last question promises last question.

Melanie Avalon

And it's just because I realized more and more each day how important mindset is. So what is something that you're grateful for? I'm great.

Rizwan Virk

I'm grateful that a lot of people are as interested in this idea as I am, so I'm grateful that I get to talk about it because it's something that's brought together the different threads of my life, my experiences and consciousness, my science background and my technology background along with all these weird paranormal things.

Rizwan Virk

It brings them together into one place, so I'm grateful that people are interested in talking about video games and reality.

Melanie Avalon

I love it. Well, I am so grateful as well. And this was everything I wanted it to be a more. Thank you so much for what you're doing. Hopefully we can talk again in the future. And this was just incredible.

Melanie Avalon

So thank you. Yep. Thanks for having me on.

Rizwan Virk

We can definitely talk again awesome. Have a good