MIT Simulation Scientist Says The Matrix Is REAL!: Riz Virk on the Simulation Hypothesis

Do we live in a simulation? Today's guest claims there's powerful evidence that we live in a simulation. But why?

I became intrigued by this idea that there was a whole world inside the computer. And originally, you know, with the text adventures, we were visualizing it in our heads. But then with graphic adventures, we were suddenly able to see this world. But I always wondered what was beyond the boundaries of what could be seen.

But is there really evidence that we.

Live in a simulation? Our reality is not actually physical like this table. It's actually a virtual reality.

Today's guest, Dr. Rizwan Ver, explains exactly why he thinks it's more likely than not that our whole existence is a mere manifestation of a master simulation taking place in the universe. Let's go. Thank you so much for coming on.

Absolutely great to be here.

We'll go through the book and take. Take everybody on a journey. First of all, I want to present you with the Keating Medal for impossible Imagination. There it goes, with a picture of Arthur C. Clarke. And he plays a role in this book. Minor role, but. But a role nonetheless.

And, of course, you've been to his house, unlike me. What was that experience like when you went there Were there monoliths, like this little over there.

There were a lot of pictures of monoliths. And there were, you know, pictures of him with David Prowse from Darth, who played Darth Vader. Pictures of Arthur C. Clarke with, you know, the moon landing astronauts. It was really interesting because they preserved his office. And generally speaking, it's not supposed to be open to the public, but any foreigner who goes there and slips a few rupees to the security guard will take you up. And, you know, he's got all of his books there. And, you know, plays a minor role in my book because it was during that visit when I was looking at.

Behind his desk, I saw many of my favorite books from when I was growing up, like 2001 A Space Odyssey 2010, Odyssey 2. And I saw all these different translations. And I had one of those moments that we sometimes have when we get inspired. And I had wanted to be a writer for a while, and I just had this intuition that it was time for me to get busy on the writing side, because I had been spending all my time in Silicon Valley, first as an entrepreneur, then later as an investor. And it was during that time that I wrote the article about why I think we live inside a video game. That led to this book.

Eventually I noticed in this book, reading it, that there was this connection between something that happened in my childhood, which might have had an impact on my career. And it was the video game adventure which featured a virtual world. But more than that, it featured the very first real Easter egg, as far as I understand it. So Easter egg being a hidden message, encoded, encrypted, which if you took this magic zero dimensional pixel and you transported it, left, left, right, right, up, down, side, side, back, back, signal, and up, you'd come to a secret chamber. And then if you move the joystick to just the right position, you would drop the pixel and you would enter this, this room where there'd be some flashing lights. I mean a room, it was a square with a dot. And the zero dimensional pixel unlocked this, this message which came from the designer, Warren Robinette. And it said, created by Warren Robinette.

That's basically it for 1981 or whatever I was. It was amazing that I had unleashed and unlocked the evidence. Proof positive that living in a simulation. Tell me why you think that we are of greater odds than not that we live in a simulation.

Well, if you think of the simulation hypothesis, and I think we share a history there in terms of having played video games on the Atari computer, which is where adventure was. But before that there were text adventure games. And I became intrigued by this idea that there was a whole world inside the computer. And originally with the text adventures, we were visualizing it in our heads. But then with graphic adventures, we were suddenly able to see this. But I always wondered what was beyond the boundaries of what could be seen. So, for example, there was a racing game called Pole Position. And I used to wonder, well, what's beyond the racetrack? You'd see a mountain that looks like Mount Fuji, or you'd see some bleachers with some fake people.

I mean, they weren't really people, they were like a few pixels, right? But I'd always wonder what was beyond the mountain, what happens to those people when I'm not logged in, et cetera. And so that kind of inspired me later, when I became a video game designer, to really start thinking about this. So the simulation hypothesis, if you were to define it, I like to say it's the idea that our reality is not actually physical, like this table. It's actually a virtual reality like that depicted in the film the Matrix. But I also like to think of it as a series of propositions. And you can agree with some of those propositions, but I think they kind of follow logically, one to the other. So the first is that the world is not actually physical, but that it consists of information or bits of information. The second is that that information is getting computed all the time.

And the third is somehow that information is rendered for us, and it appears as if this microphone is a physical object. And then the last proposition is that this is all some kind of purposeful hoax. Now, different people have different opinions on each of those, but I like to lay it out that way because then you can discuss the different parts of what makes up the simulation hypothesis. I see it as an axis, where on one end of the axis is. It's really just a metaphor, where the video game is a metaphor for something very complex called reality. At the other end of the axis, we take it very literally and say the world is literally a computer simulation running on some type of advanced computer, probably way more advanced than what we've been able to think of thus far. And so the book tries to explore it from all of these different angles. That's why I touch on religion, philosophy, video games, quantum physics, etc.

And some people in the scientific world give me a hard time for spending time on the religious side, for example. But I like to show that they were using metaphors in the past. And this is a new type of metaphor that makes more sense. A techno scientific metaphor.

Yeah. And my conversations with Nick Bostrom a few times, he's been on the podcast, I mean, he's candidly admitted that, you know, there's nothing really that could be used to differentiate either the existence of the multiverse from the falsification of that proposition. And we'll talk about how scientifically we could prove or at least emphasize the evidence for the simulation hypothesis. But. But also that it does connect to prospects and propos regarding teleology and why the. What would be the purpose of such a thing, which naturally then invokes questions like the simulator, you know, he or she or it or they. What are some of the tangible physical advances that have led you to believe there's more preponderance of evidence for the simulation hypothesis than not? What is it coming from? AI advances? Game advances? Is it coming from quantum computing that we explored in my laboratory earlier today? What, what, what is most kind of convincing to you just, just at a basic level?

Well, I think at a basic level, it's all of those things happening in parallel. And I often tell the story that after I sold my last video game company, I was visiting a startup in Marin county, which is across the bay from San Francisco, and I put on a virtual reality headset and I was playing a VR ping pong game and Back then, the VR headsets were much bulkier than they are now. There were literally wires coming from the ceiling. So you knew you were in a virtual reality. And the graphics were terrible on the ping pong game, but the physics engine of the game was so good, the responsiveness was so accurate, that it actually felt like I was hitting a real ball with a real paddle. So much so that at the end of the game, I tried to put the paddle down on the table, instinctively, and I tried to lean against the table. Of course, there was no table, so the paddle fell to the floor. I almost fell over.

And then I began to really wonder how long would it take us as a civilization, as a technological civilization, to create something like the Matrix. And so that's really what led me down that rabbit hole. But I think the fact that video games are becoming more and more realistic. If you've seen, seen. I mean, sometimes I'll show a slide which will show racing games starting with 8 bit, and then show 16 bit racing games from the era of Nintendo, which was in the late 80s, and then show a 32 bit or a 64 bit racing game. There was a Matrix film, a fourth Matrix film, that came out a couple years ago back in 21, and at the same time, Epic, which makes the Epic engine, which is one of the. The Unreal Engine, which is one of the top engines for video game development. They released a demo called the Matrix Awakens.

And it wasn't a full game, but. But the city in that game looked like it could have been. It was a mix of Berlin, San Francisco, but it could have been a real city. I mean, it was really hard to distinguish. The characters still weren't quite there yet. But now with the advance of AI, particularly with LLMs and AI having passed, most people think that chatbots have kind of passed the Turing Test. In fact, in the book I introduced this idea, the Metaverse Turing Test, which is we can talk about later, but the idea that AI is getting good enough for us to have conversations and relationships with it. I mean, there are people out there who have AI boyfriends and girlfriends.

And I had been interested in this for a while because of my interest in virtual reality and my background in video gaming. And then a couple of years ago, I was in Cambridge in the uk and this is the first time I had heard of this in the wild where. Meaning a friend of mine, she said, oh, her friend just broke up with her boyfriend. And so she got a replica boyfriend for a little while until she got a real one. And so that was the first time I really just heard about it. Not within the computer industry, not within the video game industry. And that's when I realized, oh, this is actually much broader than had been idea that we would not be able to distinguish both in terms of the graphics, but also in terms of the AI characters. I think all of that is lending more credibility to this idea that we could be in a simulation.

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So go to Amazon and get the Kindle copy today because this special only lasts for the first week after launch. Talk about some of the physics implications of the existence of a simulation. Let's talk about hardware versus software. So software, you quote, you know, Marc Andreessen in the book is, you know, eating the world. You know, I feel like LLMs are eating software because now you can basically have an infinite army of coders making any software application you want instantaneously. So the price of software is going basically to zero. But hardware, the physical world of monoliths and metals and things like that, is much slower. And I'm an experiment physicists, and it's much harder to make, as you saw the lab, the experimental 3D printed objects that we have to make to render those than to make a theory which may never be testable, like the simulation.

I bought this, or the multiverse for that matter, which another topic you've written about. So let's talk about the limitations. Where are the limitations coming from? It seems to me impossible to think that they'll come from software. And yet I don't believe that AGI is upon us. I don't think we're any closer to it. I think it's, as I said recently, you know, it's 10 years away and it always will be. But tell us, what are the limitations? You see them?

Yeah, absolutely. So. So first of all, I used Marc Andreessen's quote about software is eating the world. And I say information is eating the other sciences in that if you Talk to a PhD in physics or chemistry, most of their time is probably spent on the computer. And more and more we're seeing, even with biology, what we're really talking about are the DNA sequences and the genomes, which were first posited by John von Neumann. So you've got this idea that information science may in fact underlie all of the other sciences. And then even within physics, there's this idea of digital physics. Right? Whereas, you know, when I was a kid, we were talking about conservation of momentum, conservation of energy, and now physicists are talking about conservation of information.

And does information get created or destroyed? So there's a whole set of issues around the sciences that I think lends credibility to this subject. That said, I think I agree with you that we're not at AGI yet. And I think part of the reason why is that if you think of science fiction, AI is often presented as a discrete entity, if you will, like data in Star Trek the Next Generation, how or how in 2001. But the AI we have today is more like the computer in Star Trek the Next Generation, where you're just asking at things and it's giving you information. And so there's this divide between a separate entity that's self contained and kind of this synchronized AI that knows everything and is constantly updating itself. If you've ever watched the Dune movies or read the original Dune book, there's a whole set of prequels. And in the prequels, humanity is enslaved by AI. And it's something that is a very popular trope in science fiction.

Personally, I don't think we have to worry about that. But the reason I bring it up is there's an interesting element where Omnius, which was the AI, was basically it would learn all the time and had many copies of itself. So it was a synchronized AI, literally called it the synchronized Empire when it was ruling the humans. But then one robot decided it wanted to be separate from Omnius, and so it was non synchronized. I think the name was Erasmus or something, but because that robot would learn through its own experiences and stuff. And I think we're missing that a bit with today's AI. And so I think embodiment and exploring the virtual world may be one of the reasons to get there. So I do think there are some limitations around AI that may come up.

That said, computer science is often about optimization. And so even when we talk about the number of particles in the universe, will we ever be able to simulate that many particles? There's a lot of optimization that can be done so that we may or may not need. So I do think those are some areas now, our hardware today. Sure. I mean, when I talk about the universe being a computer, we're not talking about a 386 or today's Nvidia's GPU.

Atari 2600.

Atari 2600. Right. So back in the 80s, if you were to say, hey, can you create a whole world like World of Warcraft that has 3D pixels or Fortnite, we'd say, no, you can't. This is way too many pixels to keep track of. And so what happened between then and now is that 3D modeling became. Became popular and better techniques were developed. And so now we only have to keep track of certain pixels. And so that's a key part of why I think you can't always draw straight line comparisons and say, well, this won't work in the future.

There was a great case study for intel where they kept trying to make their processors smaller or actually more like, fit more transistors. And it was in like the 2000s, and they said, look, if we keep going at this rate, our microprocessors will get hotter than the sun. Which meant that Moore's Law would end. But it didn't. And part of the reason why is they changed the algorithms so they became more efficient and they began to use what were called mobile processors at the time, which used less energy, but they also had reduced instruction sets on those. So that's where I think, yes, there would be limitations in our ability to produce this, but they may also be overcome with new types of algorithms and new optimizations.

Before we get to the question that, you know, I think my audience will be really interested in terms of the quantum mechanical overlay on top of all of this, including wave function collapse, double slit experiments, and retro causality, things you all discuss in the book. I do want to pay at least a little bit of, well, not lip service, but I do want to at least mention the fact that you're one of the few that's unafraid, really, to confront the possibility of, you know, what religious texts could give to science that perhaps scientists are overlooking. So let's talk a little bit about your background. I don't think you've mentioned it much on, on many of the podcasts I've seen you on, but what, what sort of background in terms of faith and how does it influence what physicists, computer scientists may be getting wrong and ways to get us out of a Rut that we may seemingly be in at least towards getting to AGI.

So my background is, you know, my parents are from Pakistan. I was actually born there. And then I moved to the US and grew up in Detroit, in Michigan. So I grew up in a Muslim household. I was never particularly religious. But then, you know, as I went to college, I started to spend more time exploring some of the Eastern faiths around Buddhism, Hinduism, particularly the esoteric aspects, the yogic philosophy of the Eastern religions. And then later I began to explore more of the Sufi traditions, which is the mystical tradition in Islam. And so I think whenever you grow up in a culture where your religion is not the dominant religion, you start to look at things a little bit differently and you start to say, okay, well, what's in common between these different religions? So, of course, we knew the stories of the Bible growing up partly because.

Because they are there in the Islamic traditions, but also just because the culture has the Ten Commandments. All of this stuff is out there. And so I started to look at what's in common and what may be different. And I'm not afraid to talk about this idea because I think that if you think of religions, how do they start? They usually start because someone, say the founder of a religion has what religious scholars like to call a theophany, like somehow the divine breaks through into the physical world. Now, that could be a burning bush, that's talking to Moses, that could be angel that appears to Muhammad in a cave. And while he's fasting near Mecca in the desert, or it's through a series of techniques, you have mystic who is then trying to explore beyond the physical world. So the yogic techniques, Siddhartha on the Buddhist side, you also have shamanic techniques. And of course, now we're learning more about psychedelics as a way to potentially perceive more than what's physical.

But. But if you think of Plato's cave and Plato's allegory of the cave, most people know the general story, which is that you have people that are chained to one side of a cave, and what they're seeing is just shadows opposite the mouth. They don't know there's a whole world out there and they're just seeing the shadows, but not that many people outside of philosophy have read the whole allegory. And what happens is that there's a guy, a philosopher, who breaks out. He goes outside. The first thing that happens is he's blinded because there's too much light. They've never seen the sun. They grew up in a cave.

Then he comes back later and he tries to tell people what he saw. And of course they reject that idea because that's all they know. And so with these religious traditions, they had to describe things that they perceived that were non physical and might even be ineffable, which is a term that means cannot be put into words to the general population 2,000 years ago. And so how did they do that? They used metaphors. And often they used technological metaphors. For example, the wheel of Samsara in Buddhism. Okay, that doesn't mean there's a physical wheel. They're using that metaphor.

And even many of the stories about angels and what the function of the angels is, you know, my name Rizwan is actually the Islamic name for the equivalent of St. Peter, which would be the angel that sits at the gates of heaven. Now again, that's a metaphor. That doesn't mean there's one guy who sits there and decides for everybody whether they gain it or not. That is more like a function. And the same is true of many of the minor gods. For example, in the Hindu pantheon, where they have a function, there's something called the recording angels. Both in the Judeo, Christian and Islamic traditions, where you have angels who are writing down your deeds, your good deeds and your bad deeds, and you have one angel for this, one angel for that.

And in Islam they call it the scroll of deeds. And they say when you die, you have to read your book and you have to see what you did. Okay, now that doesn't mean there's a physical book or that there's, you know, a feather.

San Judaism. Exactly.

Right. Yeah. But my point is those are technological metaphors potentially for something that is ontologically real, that was perceived by the mystics and then translated today we would say, well, what that really means is that everything is being recorded and you would have to watch, you would have to rewatch a replay of your life. And it turns out near death experiencers have reported this. They call it the life review, where they say you have to go through every single event in your life, but from the point of view of other people. So turns out in VR, I've done this before, you can take like a World of Warcraft session or a League of Legends session, and there was a startup I was involved with, or you put on the headset and you can go back and re watch the entire video game from any XYZ coordinate and you could literally see what it was like to shoot yourself. And that's very similar to what near death experiencers Describe with the Life review, which not all of them have a life review, but the ones that do have it. And so I'm not afraid to explore that, to say, well, what if what they saw was something real? I mean, if a thousand people go to China and they tell you similar stories, even though the stories may be different, one might have gone to the mountains, one might have gone to Shanghai near the ocean, one might have gone in the south, that there might be something there.

And they're trying to describe it. And so for me it turns out that if you look at what the old traditions were saying, including Maya in the Buddhist and Hindu traditions, which means illusion, turns out there's a similar metaphor in the Quran which is El Gurui Matau, which is an enjoyable delusion, which is also represented as a game that we are playing. And so I look at that and say, well, today's best metaphor for that would be a massively multiplayer online role playing game which we are inside, we have a physics engine, we think it's real, but in fact there is something beyond that. And so that's why I'm not afraid to get into the religious side. And I get attacked both from the scientific, scientific, but also from religious world that are too fundamental on the religious side. Although many folks in the religious side actually are very open to this idea.

I mean I find it hard to envision ways that we, we could develop scientifically falsifiable, you know, hypotheses, even from near death experiences. My friend Michael Shermer has done a lot of work on this and basically asked them for not just the kind of really headline grabbing, you know, I saw light and I saw my deeds in a book. But you know, who was in the operating room, you know, while you were there? None of them can ever answer that. None of them can ever answer factual questions about the actual, you know, car that hit them or you know, in the studies that he's done. And in terms of replicable scientific double blind, you know, where they couldn't have known unless they really some way of omniscient. But they do seem to have this tradition. I don't want to argue about that. But you know, people have their own experiences but, but you know, we hear, you know, really trying to look at the scientific basis for, for these things where the religious side of things can give a little bit of color, maybe the spice, which makes things very much enjoyable.

And I think they do share commonality. As we were talking before we hit record, you know, and basically the, the, the notion of a Purpose and why, why we exist at all. And if we do exist and if the simulation is correct and you know, some people go on the spectrum, you give different possibilities ranging from, you know, Nick Bostrom to, you know, maybe me, a little bit more of a skeptic, you know, from 100% to 0.99.99, you know, with infinite number nine down to, you know, 0, 0, 0.1. The question, or 0.00, the question is what scientifically can we glean about the simulator, the simulation itself. So here's why I want to pivot to the physics kind of engine side. You already brought that up and that's that, you know, as you point out, simulators, video game designers are really smart guys and gals, right? So they're not going to waste time, you know, simulating stuff that is never going to be seen or can't be accessed, right? That's one thing they won't do or something that you'd need to get to. You know, one out of, you know, level 256 on Pac man allegedly does not exist, right? Because it was a 200, it would be 257 levels and they only had about 8 bits or something like that. So this, it only goes out that high.

So they're smart, they conserve like a spider doesn't. You know, it could catch every fly if it's spiderweb was a complete solid disk, right? Like your metal, the Keating metal, Right. If it looks like that, it would catch every single fly. But no, no, no, it's going to try to catch flies of a certain size. So the web spacing only has to be so much, so it conserves its biological energy. So what sorts of of inclinations or indications might we get as to the purpose of the simulation? The, the attributes of the simulator from basic physics. So let's start there. One thing you mentioned you do a great job of is describing, you know, what we call pixels or voxels, and the rendering engines that take place now and how they don't render, as I said, every single, every single life that could exist in, in whatever games you guys like to play.

I don't actually play many games. I do flight simulators. But even in flight simulators, they don't render like Nebraska when you're trying to land the Concord or fly the Concord underneath the Eiffel Tower, which is very hard to do, but you can do it. So they're not going to render everything all the time because it costs a lot of money, costs a lot of time, costs a lot of energy. So what? What sorts of energetic physical limitations would there be in the simulation?

Yeah, it's a good point. And you, you brought, brought up this idea of conservation and optimization, which is something that I talk a lot about in the book. And, you know, I will say I'm not a physicist, so I tend to rely on physicists interpretations of quantum mechanics and particularly of quantum indeterminacy and the observer effect. But to me, the collapse of the probability wave, if we take that interpretation for a moment, of course, you know, people have their own interpretations that they prefer the multiverse interpretation, which I also think makes more sense in a simulated world. But if we start with the collapse, to me, that sounded like very much how we build video games and we only render the parts that can be observed by your avatar.

It's a compression algorithm.

It's basically a compression algorithm. And it seemed to me that what we're finding is that the universe gets rendered as needed. Now, you can argue whether that's as an observer or it's via a measurement or an interaction. But to me, the golden rule is sort of render only that which is needed. And in computer science, we have this idea of lazy evaluation. And lazy evaluation is such that suppose you have a little expression that says x equals 2 to the power or whatever, 2 to the fourth power 16. But you don't use computing resources to calculate the value of X until X is needed. Because if X is not in the computer program, why bother? And when I was at MIT and I hadn't thought about this in a little while, I work with a guy named Greg Pocket Papadopoulopoulos, who later went on to become the CTO of Sun Microsystems.

And he was doing research on something called finely grained parallelism with parallel computers. This is back in the 90s, right? So today, you know, we have computers that have multiple CPUs, multiple GPUs. But back then, for the most part, every computer just had a single one. What his research was doing was it would break down an algorithm or even a set of code, and it would break it into parts and figure out which parts could be run in parallel and which parts were happening together. And so to me, even if you have multiple observers, all requiring collapses of probability waves that need to be kept consistent, that's pretty much how we do video games. So on the server, we send out information and we get information back. Now, we happen to be doing this in person, quote, but if we were doing this on Zoom, we wouldn't really be talking to each other. I would be talking to my computer, and then you would be talking to your computer, and it would play back.

And so where I was going with that was just this model of having to synchronize multiple individual players to basically ensure consistency. Reminded me a lot of this idea of how do you have a collapse of the wave? Can you have multiple collapses of the wave? And the Wigner's friend thought experiment.

Entangled, right?

Yeah. And entanglement as well. So those were ways in which I really started to think through the quantum aspects. But also with qubits and quantum computing and the idea that a qubit can be in multiple position, it can be in superposition. And to me, as a computer scientist, that's really interesting. In fact, recently we were chatting a little bit about this before we did a screening of the Matrix at the Coolidge Corner Theater in Boston. And this woman came up and introduced herself to me, and she bought three copies of my book. And she said she was the wife of Ed Fredkin, her name was Joyce Fredkin.

And Ed Fredkin was one of the first computer scientists who was at MIT. And he was an MIT professor without having a PhD, which is pretty impressive. But he was exploring cellular phenomena, cellular automaton, back in the 1950s. He invented the Fredkin gate, which is a reversible gate. But just as importantly, he went out to Caltech, where Feynman was, and Feynman taught him about physics, and he taught Feynman about computers. And then Feynman came out with this talk that led to this idea of building quantum computers. And so you start to see the intersection with digital physics between computation and the physical universe. And I thought that was really interesting as well.

In terms of quantum computing, I like to bring out this kind of cudgel against my friends that do it, which is that quantum computers are. Are some of the best known and even imaginable devices for simulating the properties of quantum computers. It's kind of like string theory. String theory is like the best possible instantiation of the mathematics needed to understand string theory. I mean, these are devices that they're. They're sort of, you know, answers without a question. Yet, yes, they can do things in terms of cartography and that. That is well known and that was even envisioned by.

By Feynman. But his main kind of championing of quantum computers was to solve what are called Lagrangians and basically the energy distribution, how energy flows through quantum system, which is basically an atom, atomic systems that are. Get perturbed by external forces, magnetic field, photons, etc. Like that, right? So they're very good at doing that. It's not clear they're good at doing anything else. I mean, again, sort of analogous to string theory. String theory is very good at this kind of multi dimensional thing, but we have no inkling that we live in a 10 dimensional, 11 dimensional universe, right? So it's, it solves a particular type of problem, but it may be completely irrelevant and therefore it's very interesting math. Now I'm not saying they're useless as you know, I'm building one here, so I have to talk my own book, but I have to be honest too, as a scientist and say, look, these things, you know, are often tossed about as, you know, solutions to everything, just like AI and AGI.

There's no inkling that they can do any of the things that they're being proposed to do. Not just in your book, but, but in, in, you know, other kind of hyped up analogies. Again, this is really bad for my bottom line because I am going to hopefully commercialize with some friends. But, but tell me Riz, what are the actual hardcore core necessities or the necessity of a quantum computer as it applies to the simulation? Because if it's, if it's really dependent on, you know, quantum computers, then it would seem to be almost a letdown for me because, because quantum computers, we know a lot about them even though we haven't really built very advanced one. So I'm sorry to make it so long winded, but what is or are the different applications of quantum computing? Is it a necessary thing, is it a sufficient thing for the simulation hypothesis? Where do they come in in your mindset towards getting to the simulation point?

Yeah, well, it's a good point, but I would add one word to what you said, which is the word yet in that quantum computing may not be that practical yet. And what we find with technology development or useful practical or useful. What we find with technology development is we can't always predict exactly what the use cases will end up being. So when intel invented the first microprocessor, the 4400, they thought the only usage they could think of for it was for control systems in factories. And they thought maybe they would sell a few thousand and that's it. And of course today microprocessors are the, you know, basically the infrastructure of the information age. And we have millions, if not billions.

Right? But just to push back with respect, we had vacuum tube, we had human computers, we had slide rules, we had analog computers. So it Wasn't like it was an ab initio new thing. You know, we didn't have computing, and then all of a sudden we had computing. It wasn't like going from an abacus to a quantum computer. So, yes, it's true that they went up and they've developed beyond Moore's law, in fact, in some ways, but not in a radically different format than even a transistor switch or a vacuum tube switch.

Right, right. But you're right with quantum computing, it's such a different paradigm that I think we haven't fully grasped even the philosophical implications. And I know you've interviewed David Deutsch, who he modified. So John Wheeler is sort of my favorite physicist of that 20th century because of all the thought experiments he did. But he coined this phrase it from bit towards the of his life. And he said that anything that looks like a physical object is actually the particle really is just an answer to a series of yes, no questions, which is a series of bits. And then Deutsch modified that statement to say it from qubit. Right.

So if you think of particles as bits, then, you know, the qubit is the next kind of logical way of being able to represent the idea that a particle can be in superposition. Now, if we didn't have superposition, then we wouldn't need quantum computers. We could just do a sim off of classical computing and classical physics models. And you have a physics engine that runs on math. But supposedly quantum computers can solve problems which grow exponentially. We've talked about cryptography. A few years ago, I wrote an article just for fun, because I was exploring quantum computing. This was back in 2017.

I said how I cornered the bitcoin mining market using a quantum computer. And of course, back then, the quantum computers, the only ones that were out were like D Wave. Maybe IBM had a prototype at that point in time. And it was more a way to just explore this idea. Idea that could we explore. All the way bitcoin mining works is, you know, you have this thing called a nonce, which is a random number that gets added to some bits. And you're trying to basically find a number that will make the whole thing hash to a small number that's lower than a difficulty threshold. And it gets more and more difficult over time.

And today we effectively have mining pools for bitcoin that are basically, you know, parallel. Thousands of computers doing parallel processing trying to find the right answer. And so, you know, Deutsch has stated that he thinks the reason cryptography could be solved when it would Require, you know, more. More computations than the particle. There are particles in the physical universe is because of the multiverse idea, he thinks maybe we're going out and exploring these different paths and then finding the right answer. And I think in the end, that may be where quantum computing becomes useful, is when you want to explore multiple paths simultaneously. And in the case of some of these, these problems as they grow exponentially, I mean, it would literally take a classical computer thousands of years. And I hear the objection sometimes that we can't be in a simulation because it would take too much time or too much computing power to simulate all of these particles.

It's the same kind of thing. So I think right now, it's more at a conceptual level that quantum computing could be a way in which we could simulate the superposition of particles. But that said, if we're inside the simulation, it's very hard to speculate what's outside the simian. We can speculate, but it's very hard to say for sure. It would be like Mario trying to, you know, talk about physical, you know, quantum superposition outside of the game. It would just be difficult to do. But it is an interesting topic to speculate on, and that's why.

And I want to turn to that because I think it's a fascinating kind of topic that you explore in the book. Before we get to, you know, the concept of ways you could prove it wrong, let's at least do what you're not supposed to do, which is to judge a book by its covers.

Hey, book lovers, we're judging books by the way covers.

We know we're not supposed to do it better into the impossible.

There's nothing to it. Let's take a look and judge some books.

Tell us, please, the title, origin of the title, the subtitle, and this cover illustration here.

Well, so, you know, as you mentioned, this is a second edition, but the title of the simulation hypothesis is is. Is terminology. That really comes from Nick Bostrom, who popularized this idea that we could be in a simulation in his 2003 paper, Are We. Are you living in a computer simulation? That's. That said, he meant it to apply to only one of three possibilities, of which the third possibility is you are most likely in a simulation. But I think that the terminology has grown beyond Bostrom's original idea, which was based on ancestor simulations. And you have folks like David Chalmers who tried to coin the term the matrix hypothesis in the same year, 2003, and I think Chalmers has been on your podcast. I've interviewed him, he spoke at my class on simulation theory.

But so I think the simulation hypothesis has become the catch all term for this idea that we are in a virtual reality. Now, it's a very long subtitle. Normally publishers would not let you have such a long subtitle, but they let me because the first edition of the book had it and it says an MIT computer scientist shows why AI, quantum physics and Eastern mystics all agree we are in a video game. And remember when I first wrote the book, ChatGPT wasn't even around, it was 2019. So this is why I've done the new edition, which has about 100 pages of new content. But I was more predicting where I thought AI would go. And it's moved even faster in that direction now. It's interesting, the COVID they gave me some cover ideas that I didn't like.

Originally it was just a bunch of geometrical shapes. And so I had them go back and then they actually used AI to help generate this particular cover, which I love because it shows a person in a world that looks physical but is in fact a virtual world. You can see the polygons, and that's how we build video games. Although now with AI, you can see the polygons on the guide, for example.

I never noticed it until you told me.

Yeah. Now how in a video game, if you've seen it without like, if you see how it's being constructed, there are these meshes that are like based on polygons, triangles, number of triangles, and then you put the texture or the skin on top of it. So this represents that idea.

That's great. Let's keep that next to the monolith. There we go. Put it back where it belongs, next to the monolith. Okay, so you meant. I mentioned that I'd love to talk about some more of the physical limitations. So one of the physical limitations that you talk about in the book is that space and time may be pixelated or voxelated. So a volume analog of a pixel, a two dimensional object is a three dimensional object called a voxel or a volume element.

And you make the case that the Planck length is sort of reminiscent or perhaps representative of such a thing. And it's not exactly clear to me that that's the case. So I'll just walk through my argument and then you can kind of, you know, contradict that or prove me wrong if you like. But, but the point that, that the smallest amount of space is related to this fundamental constants of nature, just three of them, the gravitational constant constant, Planck's constant hbar or H, and the speed of light, which is definitely a fundamental constant as we understand it, although we'll ask the question later on. I want to ask you, why is the speed of light so, so slow? At least if the simulation is as big as we think it is. But let's get back to the. To this Planck's constant and the accoutrements that turn it into a length so different square. You go through square root of HC over G, something that has dimensions of length, and you make the case that that must be the smallest element of length.

But I want to push back again with love and respect, respect and, and gratitude for what you do, but there's something called the Planck mass. So the Planck length is 10 -35 meters. So incomprehensibly small. It's less than the time it would take light to travel the distance of an electron or something, you know, or that speed, basically. And so it's incomprehensibly small. And that led many people, including Elon Musk, who was on the podcast for about 20 minutes last year, to speculate that this is, you know, that is the fundamental limit of everything in terms of the, you know, plenty of room at the bottom ends there. You can't go smaller than that. But there's something called a Planck mass, which you can also get from the same combinations to the fifth power instead of the three halves, power, whatever.

It works out to be correct. And that mass is like a 100,000th of a gram or something like that. It's a huge mass. I mean, it's not a grain of sand, basically, is the Planck mass. So what if you said, you know, you're someone who's fixated on weight loss or something, like you said, you could never lose more than the quanta of the Planck mass because that's the. That is, of mass. That's the only mass you get from the combinations of length, energy, frequency, time and gravity, and gravitational constant. That would be preposterous.

Obviously you can, you know, we weigh way more than that, and we can measure things in my lab that's a thousand times smaller than that with, with ease. So I ask you why. Why is there so much emphasis on things like the Planck length? And when it's so refutable that there's nothing fundamental about it, it is a consequence of just an arrangement of numbers. But there's nothing, absolutely nothing in physics says you can't speculate on things small, smaller than it, thousands of times smaller than it, perhaps or infinitely smaller if it is truly zero dimensional. Existing points. Yeah.

And I will say, you know, I rely on the physicists interpretation of this, but my understanding is that we can easily speculate half a Planck length. Right. You can put that in, you know, Planck length divided by 2 or divided by 10, right? Yeah, it's just a numerical calculation, but that we can't measure anything smaller than that amount. And so for me, if you think of. Again, I'm coming at it from a computer science point of view. If you think of a rendering of a screen, you have pixels and inside you can basically have, you can calculate this thing is moving from left to right and it's moving sort of half a pixel, but you can't render it at that point. So you wait until it gets to the next pixel level and then you render it. And so for me it's acting like a pixel.

And so the question that I'm asking is, is space quantized? Quantum mechanics leads us to believe that energy is quantized and that particles exist in quantum states. So they're discrete states. So is space quantized and is time quantized? And I think the second one is an interesting question that we don't have an answer for yet. I mean, in fact, I was on stage with Avi Loeb, a virtual friend of ours back in Boston, and he says, well, I have a paper proving that time isn't quantized. And that's an interesting point. But I think there are other physicists who are telling me time may be quantized. And so we don't know if there's a smallest unit of time. I mean, you can calculate the Planck time as being the amount of time it takes for the speed of light to get that small distance.

But can we measure less than that? And if we can't, that might be another clue that we are basically in a frame type, like in a video. You have frames, 30 frames per second, that there's, there is some level of discretization. And I think that's where, you know, the work of people like Stephen Wolfram Fredkin, who I mentioned other earlier and others looking at the universe as a set of discrete computations is an interesting model. So I like to ask that question, is space quantized? Is time quantized?

Do you think deja vu is a consequence of the existence of the simulation?

It certainly could be. And so, you know, one of my favorite science fiction authors is Philip K. Dick, and I interviewed his wife Tess while I was writing this book. And she encouraged me to look at a speech he gave in Metz, France, in 1977. And there's a famous line from that where he says we are living in a computer programmed reality. And then it pans to the audience and you see people like, what are you talking about? Remember, this is like the Apple one had come out, right? I mean, nobody had a personal computer at that point. And he's talking about a computer programmed reality. So his wife encouraged me to go back and watch the whole speech.

And if you watch the whole speech, what he says is that the only clue we have is when some variable is changed, some alteration occurs in our reality. And he said it would be as if we were reliving the same events, we were saying the same things, we would have a sense of deja vu. So he called deja vu a basic clue. Like in the Matrix, there's a famous scene where the cat is walking across the door and Neo looks at it and then suddenly he looks and it's the exact clothes, same cat, and he experienced deja vu. But it is possible in a multiverse interpretation. One of the things that stuck with me after I started writing about simulation theory was if you can run one simulation, you could certainly run more than one. And it's very possible that we are in one branch of that simulated run and that this has already been done, but now variables have been changed. And that is one possible explanation for deja vu.

I mean, I've heard Michio Kaku enough. Others speculate that it could be from a parallel universe, but in a simulated environment. What a parallel universe means is just another run of the simulation with slightly different parameters.

Do you think deja vu might be a consequence of us living in the simulation? I got you. Just joking.

Perfect demonstration.

That'll be good people listening on stage. Could it be? Let's keep going. The rest of the podcast is nothing but Brian asking Riz the same exact question.

Question is, would I change my answer?

Exactly. Yeah, because maybe the future retro causal Riz is now interacting with us. Let's talk about the ethics of, of the simulation. I've often talked about. Well, let's say we can simulate with perfect fidelity our ancestors. Let's say we could do that. I've often wondered if that is true, then why are there so many Kardashians? But that's not for today. We're not going to talk about that today.

But the point is, you know, let's say we could make a perfectly, you know, perfect Farmville that, you know, everyone's in there and they're, they're basically Thinking that this is great and that they're actually existing and they, they have a sense that we exist and maybe it's, you know, kind of tangential, maybe they don't have concrete evidence, but we're talking to them or communicating with them and then we suddenly, you know, here at the University of California we're having a lot of budget cuts and, and you know, Trump administration has cut a lot of the scientific grants that we have. So I have to, I have to turn my quantum computer. You know, like when I was a kid I could afford the Commodore 64 but I couldn't record, I couldn't afford the tape drive. I was so poor, you know, I saved up all my money from working at the Venice Deli and Dobbs Ferry to buy a Commodore 64 and I would just have to leave it on. So I program it. I wrote a copy of elisa, which you talk about in the book. I wrote it took me two days to write it and then my brother came in and he was mad at me, Kevin was mad at me, and he switched it off, you know, so it erased everything. So what are the ethics of, of this type of existence? We are responsible for these children simulations or kind of in a non matrix reality.

We're just playing around with it. Do we have ethical and moral responsibilities? Obviously I'm going to ask you if the simulator of the simulated hypothesis, if he, she, they, them or she, if they have a responsibility. But first, do we have a responsibility to say we make these high fidelity creations that seem to exist, can we turn them off or cause them pain?

Well, I think, you know, that's one of the ethical questions that comes up around the simulation hypothesis. And sometimes people say, well, because there's suffering in the world, therefore we can't be in a simulation because it would be unethical for the simulators, right. To do that to us. But I mean, when we run simulations, why do we run simulations? We run to see what might happen under certain circumstances. If we're like a pandemic, for example, that we're simulating multiple times or if it's, you know, the comet is going to impact the earth. But in these simulations there's no reason, in our video games we actually do have characters, NPCs and I like to make the distinction between the NPC version and the RPG version of simulation theory.

So please explain for the audience who might not be familiar what's an NPC and what's an rpg?

So NPC stands for non playable or non player characters. And those are the AI characters within the video game. So the term comes to us from Dungeons and Dragons tabletop role playing games. But if there's a bartender at an inn or a guy selling you weapons, they're NPCs, typically because they're not controlled by you, the player and the character. And the RPG version stands for role playing game version. And in that case, the player exists outside of the game and they have a character, what's called an avatar, which incidentally is a term that comes from Sanskrit. It originally meant when a divine figure comes, comes down and squeezes themselves into a little body. And when the guys at Lucasfilm were making one of the first online role playing games, multiplayer, not massively multiplayer.

It was on a Commodore 64. It was called Habitat. They were looking for a term to describe this little 2D character on the screen. And they said it felt like they were pushing themselves down the phone lines into the small little character. And so they ended up borrowing this term from Sanskrit. And so the RPG version is closer to the Matrix version. In the Matrix Neomorpheus Trinity, they all existed outside of the simulation, but they had characters or avatars inside the simulation. And so I think you end up with different answers depending upon where you fall.

Now, Bostrom's logic tends to lean towards the NPC version because everybody is basically AI. And you have lots and lots of those in the RPG version, which is closer to like a virtual reality. We are the players and we are the characters. And that brings out, I think, a different kind of. Of morality. But if you've ever seen the movie Free Guy, that came out a couple of years ago, it was about an NPC inside the game who finds out he's an npc. And the game is a little bit like Grand Theft Auto. So the players characters are like abusing these NPCs, but then he realizes he's an NPC.

And so I think it's an interesting question, but it doesn't negate just because they're suffering inside a world that we as the creators of the world, or we. We as the people inside the simulation, couldn't be in a simulation for that. In fact, that might be one of the reasons to have it. A simulation is to be able to simulate suffering, to figure out how we can reduce suffering in our world.

Yeah, that's a fascinating kind of consequence of that. How you might reveal be revealed, or how we might reveal, I guess. One question I want to turn back to our discussion of quantum mechanics I've had recently. Adam Becker wrote A wonderful book called what is Real. He also has a techno dystopian version of kind of the abundant future that Andreessen and others have promulgated and musk, et cetera. It was the main subject of our interview. But when we talk about reality, locality Bell's inequalities and so forth, the questions of quantum mechanical interpretations come in. And you already mentioned one of them is the many worlds interpretation popularized by Hugh Everett, a student of John Wheeler.

Also coined the term black hole. Guy's just a phenomenal intellect. One of the was Feynman's advisor at Princeton. The question of, you know, kind of computational compression, depression and irreducibility comes up when you think about this. And in your video game experience you only, as I said before, you only render what you need. You don't have to render, no, no Nebraska when you're flying the Concorde, as I said, underneath the Eiffel Tower in flight simulator, you know, but to do that there is an agent and I don't think this is really covered quite so often. When you think about the simulation hypothesis as being economical, parsimonious, however you like, AKA alchemistic, you don't actually have to render everything, but you do have to know what you do have to render, you know, to kind of avoid the Truman show, like lights falling out of the sky or whatever, which, you know, kind of reveals. It would reveal the game, so to speak.

Although it's not clear that that, you know, couldn't happen or wouldn't happen. But, but let's, let's think about the practical implications of it. So when you do the spawning of say a new character in Minecraft or something like that, or you're rendering just around where that character is based on, you know, some physics engine trajectory of where they farmville, you make the point, you know, they keep growing crops and stuff like that, but they're not growing crops, you know, that are completely inaccessible in some, you know, fifth dimension that you can't reach. It's, it's something related to your crops. I don't play farmville, but, but I assume it's. So that is a measurement that has to be done. And as you know, when you do a measurement, you oftentimes in most interpretations of quantum mechanics, unless you do subscribe to the many worlds interpretation, you are enforcing an outcome. You know, you're not, you're not deciding the outcome, but you're deciding that the actual outcome happens.

So for, for example, if we are being observed, there is a quantum process that is going to destroy the coherence that we previously had in our wave functions and even in our entanglement. So how does that get avoided? I mean, how, how do you avoid that fact that for every compression there is an observation to allow you to notify you that you're allowed to do compression, so you're actually kind of destroying the coherence and, and collapsing the wave function automatically. How do you avoid that in the simulation?

It's an interesting point. And I think again, you know, we can look at it from this axis I mentioned earlier, the NPC versus RPG axis, because in the RPG version there is an observer that exists outside of the simulation who is watching the screen or has on a virtual reality headset. Again, those are just metaphors. And maybe in the Matrix it was a BCI or a brain computer interface interface that was going in there. In the NPC version, the rendering depends on where you are in the simulation. And so, you know, one of the topics that I discuss a little bit is this idea of the delayed choice double slit experiment, another experiment that Wheeler put out.

Why don't you explain it for the audience, just in case they might not.

Be familiar with it. So most people are familiar with Schrodinger's cat or the double slit experiment where the particle of light has to go through either one slit or the other other, but it's in a state of superposition, which is that it's gone through both until the observation or the measurement is made. Now, what Wheeler said was, well, what if the observation is made much later in the process? And he described it using the cosmic delay choice experiment. I think that's the simplest way to describe it because people can understand. So if we have light coming from a quasar that's a billion light years away, it's going to take a billion years to get here. And if there's a very strong gravitational object, like a black hole in the middle, then the light has to go to the left or to the right. And we can set up telescopes here to catch the polarization of the light. So basically we can tell if it went left or right.

Kind of like some of the lenses that you're building in your lab here for the polarization of light. Now, if that black hole is halfway between us and the quasar, then that decision would have had to have been made half a billion years ago. Right. So we're back in the age of the dinosaurs or maybe even earlier. I don't know whether even dinosaurs, 500.

Million years ago, early single cells.

Yeah, yeah. We may need a paleontologist to tell us. But what the delayed choice experiment is saying is that, well, it's not until the measurement is made here on Earth that the decision of whether to go left or right is made. So it's in a state of superposition. And so is it possible that the past itself is in a state of superposition until the collapse happens? And that would mean that that decision, it's a kind of retrocausal, if you will. And Schrodinger actually had a speech about this. I found this when I was looking around when I wrote my book the Simulated Multiverse. He had an obscure speech from the 1940s where he said, not only are we choosing the state of the particle, but we are choosing from one of multiple simultaneous histories.

And so he didn't write a lot about this, but if you think about that statement, it's kind of mind boggling. I mean, it's weird enough if the world is built on information, it's weird enough that it's quantized, it's weird enough that the probability waste collapses. But if we are then choosing a past and filling it in. So with farmville, for example, when you log in, you see what happened to your crops over the last 24 hours. Now, the computer is not necessarily sitting there and running every single second to see what had happened until it's needed. So it goes back to the past past and it says the probability of locusts or something happening, you know, to your crops is such and such, and it calculates and it fills that in for you. So it's possible that there are these multiple collapses going on. And again, I'm relying on the physicist here, you know, with these interpretations.

That's your first mistake, is relying on physicists.

And they don't always agree. Right?

Exactly right. There's violent battles over interpretations of. Which is interesting because we don't have like battles about the interpretations. Interpretation of classical mechanics or electromagnetism, even. Electromagnetism has features in it that are completely, literally unreal because they involve complex numbers and certain factors that we can't account for unless we make the concession that what we can observe is only a real number, which is something akin to enforcing the observation once you collapse the wave, not the wave function, but the wave. Let's talk about how we could detect where we are. I mean, this is something you must have thought about. You do discuss it, actually.

How could we discern the. The existence first of all, and then the purpose, second of all. So let's start with Existence. Could we look for glitches? Are there possibly glitches in the Matrix? You know, my friend Tom Bilyeu who you should meet in la, he talks about, you know, the Matrix was a documentary, it wasn't a real. So, but, but if that's true, we should be able to see, you know, the woman in the red dry her eyes are getting or she gets some wrinkles now after 25 years. So tell us, what, what, what sorts of, of, of cracks in the Matrix? What sorts of diagonal. I like to say that I know how the matrix ends. We diagonalize it using UL decomposition.

That's a super nerd linear algebra joke. I'm sorry, sorry Riz, you're getting all my dad jokes at once. But tell me, are there more plausible scenarios that you've encountered where we could get a glimpse into the existence of the Matrix through glitches and fragments of it?

You know, people often ask, you know, is there a way to prove we're in a simulation? And this ties to another question I know that you have, which is, is it non falsifiable? I mean, is it impossible to prove that we're not in a simulation? And if the simulation is perfect, then it might be very difficult to provide. But just because you can't prove something is not true doesn't mean you can't find evidence that it is true. Like, I mean for example, we could say there are no asteroids anywhere in the universe. Well, we can't really prove that, but we can certainly find asteroids. And if we find them, you're getting one.

Here's a fragment of an asteroid, is a real life meteorite. Oh, that's a fragment of an early asteroid, older than the Earth itself, maybe interstellar, we don't know where did this fall? This fell in Argentina. And you too can get one out there. Not only will you get one guaranteed, if you are like Riz and you have a. Edu email address brian keating.com edu guaranteed to win one in the USA. But you'll get one by chance perhaps if you go to brian keating.com yt and those are ways to win it. And you'll get all the information about them, where it fell, how you can collect your own, where you can see, when you can see them, what you need to see them and what kind of telescopes, monoculars, et cetera you can use. So that's another gift for you to come here.

But it is a fragment, an artifact and what do they call the NFT from the early universe, at least the early solar System. So anyway. So Asteroids, you're saying?

Yeah, absolutely. So I put it on the picture of Arthur C. Clarke. So that's appropriate. Rendezvous.

Rendezvousing right now.

It's true. In fact, you know, I was telling Avi Loeb that if you look at the estimated size of Oumuamua, it was almost exactly.

That's right.

The estimated size of Rama from Rendezvous. Rama. But we were getting into ways we might look for evidence. And so I think, you know, one of the ways we might look for evidence is this idea of looking for computational processes in nature. And, you know, I think you've had Jim Gates on your podcast who talks about finding basically error correction codes in the equations of strings theory. And error correction codes are basically another way of compressing data, in a sense, for people who don't know. If you have a string of eight ones in a row, you can add a couple of bits to that to say there are eight of these, and that's how you can tell the integrity. But we also say that there isn't much information entropy in that string of bits because they're all ones.

If you start changing, there's no surprise in them, right? Yeah, there's no surprise in them. Then you get more information entropy. And they can have many different possible meanings as well. So we can look for evidence of computation in nature. We can also look for geometrical structures that might imply that the physical universe, you know, has even pixels, depending on what type of. If you're inside a computer screen, again, really simple example, you can look at sort of the number of pixels this way versus that way, and how do things flow differently? So that's another way. Then there's. There are physical glitches you can look for, and then there's a whole host of paranormal phenomena that could be considered glitches.

And most scientists don't buy that. But again, I don't always agree, simply because if you're in a court and one side can always dismiss the other side as evidence, then of course you're always going to say, well, evidence doesn't exist, because you can just say, I don't take that evidence. But people see ghosts. Which to me, if you really listen to people, people's observations, they say sometimes it looks like it's replaying the same scene over and over again.

You have to be careful of confirmation bias, too. If we're looking to have excuses to believe that the simulation or ghost or your dead loved one who you love so much can be resuscitated even digitally or artifactually, you know, we have to be careful.

It could be, but. But my point was, okay, whether. Let's assume for a minute that people are actually seeing things. And then, well, is there a way? How could that be explained? And it's pretty easy. In a simulation, you have memory that sits there. We have something called garbage collection in computer science where we leave values in memory and we only clean them up because it's too much work to clean everything up only when we need to. And so you could have glitches from the past, which are just. The code is just replaying the scene again and again until it's cleaned up.

And so you could look for these types of weird glitches as well. And then, you know, there are people who think maybe you can overwhelm the simulation. Right. So there's a whole. There was a movie called the Mandela Effect.

Yeah. What is the Mandela Effect?

The Mandela Effect is this idea that a group of people remember history differently than it actually happened, at least as we know in this timeline. And it was named after Nelson Mandela, where many people remember him dying in prison in the 1980s. But of course, he didn't die in prison. He got out. President of South Africa, Nobel Prize winner. But it turns out there are lots of these little effects where a subgroup of people remember something happening that the majority don't remember. And so I use that as a starting point to explain this idea that if you run a simulation multiple times, it's possible that some people are remembering either because they've retained things in memory or because they are players who've played it more than once but don't remember. And we go back to some science fiction now, Philip K.

Dick, in that speech, if you read the rest of that speech, he said you would need to find a group of people who remember an alternate past. And he wrote his book the man.

In the High Castle, about the alternate history of World War II.

About alternate history. And he came to believe that that was a real history that was rewound. And so I think that that's an interesting way to think about the past. But then there are things like the.

Tiananmen Square, Woodstock, Mandela. They say that the three times many people think they were Brett Woodstock, than we're actually there.

Oh, that's interesting. I haven't heard that one. But with the Tiananmen Square, it was did the tank run over? Right. You know, the guy in front of.

The tank, which was where the brain fills in gaps. Right. Garbage collects, as you're saying.

Yeah, it could be that. But the. What it could be if somebody has more proximity to that event. Like, for example, if they're ardent followers of the Reverend Billy Graham and they remember his funeral, and they remember, you know, people speaking at his funeral. Funeral, they're more likely to have that memory be correct than someone like me. I couldn't tell you the difference between when Billy Graham died versus Martin Luther King. Well, obviously he died later than Martin Luther King, but in general, I couldn't tell you from one reverend or another when they died. And so the question is, are there people who remember that? But again, whether you believe in it or not, it's an interesting way to think about this idea that simulations run again and again with different variables, could result in these types of glitches.

And frequently we do it for a purpose. Right. I'm a pilot. I fly little, you know, planes around the Southern California airspace. And we have to go into simulators, you know, once every year or two to get. To get up to speed. And it's much safer and more cost effective to do that than to go out and do it. So there's tangible benefits to running those simulations to me.

My insurance, you know, might require it, etc. And so forth. We simulate weather. We look at, you know, what's going to be the impact of a drought or a fire season on crops in California and whatever. But what is the purpose of the simulation simulation, if it indeed exists, as you claim it does, or you claim.

The proponents of the evidence, it's more likely than.

More likely than that. But it could be 51% as you. Well, you've updated your problem. Let's skip that for now. But let's just go to your. To. To what could be some of the purposes of it? What would be the analog of my insurance company?

Yeah, well, so when people ask me that, I like to ask two questions. The first is, why do we run simulations? And the second is why do we play video games? And the first, first is what I think we were just alluding to with this idea that when you run a simulation, you want to find out what is the most likely outcome, but you also want to figure out what is the most favorable outcome. And so you'll go back and you'll change variables and you'll keep running it until you get to that most favorable outcome. And then you try to steer things in that direction. Perhaps the timeline where the Nazis and the Japanese won World War II did not lead to. To the best outcome. And so the simulators decided to rewind that and we're just on another branch, and this branch may only last so long where at some point in the future, people may collapse the probability wave and find a different simultaneous history than we have today. So for simulations, there's a civilizational level answer to that question, which I think is this idea of the best outcomes, the most likely outcomes.

Will we get to the point where we leave the planet? Could it be that we're trying to see if we're able to build other simulations? There's another simulation film from the year 1999 that came out 60 days after the Matrix, called the 13th Floor. Now, it didn't get much attention because the Matrix was such a big cultural phenomenon, but in that I'll give away.

The Punchline, yeah, it's 25 years.

It's been 25 years. So they're in 99 and they build an ancestor simulation, what Bostrom would come to call an ancestor simulation of 1937, Los Angeles. And then later they find out that they are actually 1999 is actually a simulation from the year 2024. So very recently, and what the people that come in from the outside or from the future in that case, depending on how you look at base reality, say, is that we made thousands of simulations and you're the only one that ran your own simulation, but you're using too much computing power, so we're going to shut you down. So there could be these great filter type purposes of that. It could also be that there are multiple civilizations being incubated in different planets. And the whole point of simulation is to see when we meet and to try to simulate everything before that to see what might happen. Now, going to the RPG version, why do we play video games? Well, mostly to have some kind of fun, but we also try to have experiences that we can't have outside the simulation.

And so this is where I'm not necessarily in agreement with the Bostrom or others, that if we're in a simulation, it has to be an ancestor simulation, or that the rules outside the simulation have to resemble the rules inside the simulation. So I can get into a game like a Lord of the Rings game, and I can maybe get on a dragon and fire arrows and shoot orcs. And that's not something I can do outside. So there are experiences that I might want to have as a player that I can have in the cast character. Now, the nature of our world is pretty dark in many cases. There's a lot of suffering. Getting back to the ethical questions, etc. But I think that ties more to the idea of a soul Basically coming into a body to have a human experience which might include suffering, because perhaps there isn't as much suffering outside the simulation, and that's why we do it inside the simulation.

So I think there may be individual reasons where each of us have our own experiences. So if we, if we're in the RPG side, we might have a storyline. So if you had asked me in high school what I was going to do with my life, or if you'd asked you, you'd probably have an answer that at least anticipated, in your case, becoming a physicist. In my case, I would have said I'm going to be a software entrepreneur and then I'm going to become a writer. And I thought that would happen when I was the ripe old age of 28 is when I would make the transition because I was in high school.

Go back to school and got a PhD.

Yeah, now I went back, back to get a PhD later. So it's interesting, but I think we may have individual storylines and of course, now we're in the metaphysical realm, so there could be a teleological purpose to the simulation. You may have fine tuning as a way of clipping the branches. It's possible that the multiverse idea holds with multiple simulations, but it's not infinite. So one of the big objections is not a parsimonious interpretation, because you're literally creating, creating a new universe, right every. Not every second, but every so often. But if you're pruning the branches because they wouldn't lead you down where you want to go, then you have this direction to the simulation that it's possible we could be in something like that. At best, we can speculate, just like video game characters can speculate.

So before I ask you the final kind of hard question about the simulation crashing, what's your next project? What's your next big event, big simulation run for you in this branch of the multiverse?

In terms of simulation theory, I wanted to go deeper on two aspects that I explore in this book. And one of the aspects is the religious aspect. And so I want to go deeper on the religious scriptures and ask the question, what if at least the things that they have in common are real phenomenon and there is more to the physical world than what we can see or even we can observe with our science and really draw parallels as a way not just to connect science and religion, because I feel like these two have been growing further and further apart, but as a way to connect individuals of different faiths together, because there are many similarities and for a newer generation this metaphor of the video game is as good as the metaphors of the soul putting on the body like a set pair of clothes, which is in the Bhagavad Gita. It's in the Sufi mystical traditions. It becomes a new way to think about. If you've ever watched the show Battlestar Galactica, they have these AI characters called the Cylon who are, oddly enough, kind of religious fanatics. But they say one of them asks, what is the most basic article of faith? And the answer is that this is not all there is. And so I want to explore that in a little more detail.

And then on the other side, I want to explore this idea of digital physics and computation in more detail, including the history of some of the players in this revolutionary way of thinking, thinking about the physical world as information.

Last question. If it's all a game, if it's all a simulation, what's the winning strategy? How should we conduct ourselves?

Well, I think if you play a game, you may want to think about how you evaluate the game after you play. And so some people think there's nothing after death, some people think that there is something after death. I take the near death experience report more seriously about life reviews because they end up seeing things that they could not have known. And so this idea that we may have to go back and review everything we did and how we treated other people from their point of view, I think should lead us to be more compassionate with others and to think about how we treat other people inside the game. Basically. A woman once said to me, I think my husband is an npc. And I say, no, that's probably not a healthy way to approach this. I think viewing everybody else as a player and that how you treat them is actually part of your challenge.

Video games consist of quests and achievements. Part of the quest here is, do you abuse people or do you treat them well? And also I think we're all drawn to certain professions, vocations, places. We all have different skills and strengths. You know, just like in Dungeons and Dragons, we would roll the dice and you would have, you know, so much charisma, so much strength. You know, I didn't roll to be a basketball player, even though for the.

Riz, you got the Riz.

Exactly. So I think we lean into the things that we're drawn to, and that's how we play the game, is to do the things that we, we were meant to do, that our character was set up to do in this life.

Dr. Rizwan Burke, thank you so much for making the trek down here to San Diego. Hope we do it again for your next book and even for your print previous book in the simulated multiverse. So much to talk about. So much cool technology and developments in the video game world and the AI world and the startup world. It's just an exciting time to be alive. I just love playing the game. I hope I can play it even beyond the biblical age of 120.

Thank you Riz. Thank you so much for coming down.

Thanks for having me here.

If you enjoyed this interview with Rizwan Merck, I know you're going to love my conversation with the master of the simulation hypothesis himself, Dr. Nick Bostrom. Click here for that video and don't forget to like, comment and subscribe.