← Makes Sense - with Dr. JC Doornick
Makes Sense - with Dr. JC Doornick
Are We Living in a Simulation? Rizwan Virk on the Science of Reality - Episode 151
01:13:39
MIT computer scientist and The Simulation Hypothesis author Rizwan Virk joins Dr. JC Doornick to explore whether reality is a simulation, how consciousness may function as a user interface, and what the rise of AI means for the future of awareness. If this is a simulated world, the real question becomes: are we Players inside the game—or expressions of the system itself?
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B
Hello everybody, My name is Dr. J.C. doornick, otherwise known as the Dragon, and welcome to another episode of the make sense with Dr. JC podcast. Today we are welcoming back one of our favorite all time guests for his third appearance on our podcast and that is the amazing Rizwan Verk. And the topic of discussion today is the Simulation Theory Smart npc, which refers to non player characters versus Real characters and the supervised versus Unsupervised mind. Are we living in a computer simulation? That question used to belong only to science fiction, but today it's being discussed seriously at the intersection of quantum physics, digital physics, artificial intelligence, and the very nature of reality itself. What is the Simulation hypothesis? That's the question that will begin this conversation today. And if the simulation hypothesis is true, what does that mean for consciousness, free will, and the difference between a real player in a video game versus a non player character? So I'm joined again for the third time by MIT scientist, entrepreneur and author of the Simulation Hypothesis Simulation Multiverse, as well as the wisdom of a yogi. And that's Rizwan Verk. Before I invite him onto the stage, I want to talk a little bit about what I like about Rizzo. So beyond the fact that he's just a super cool guy who happens to be an unusually open and curious intelligent genius, is that everything he talks about bridges ancient wisdom and cutting edge life altering science without collapsing under societal pressures into fantasy or dogma. You'll notice that when Riz speaks about his various topics, it's not work. He's like a kid in a candy store and always remains open and curious about new theories and hypotheses. Riz is not the kind of person who needs be right more open and curious and excited than anything. I also like him if I'm being honest, because he wrote a very, very nice testimonial for me and my new Makes Sense book that just launched. But today I want to take this conversation and push it further into the deep end of the pool. Not whether this is a simulation or not, but whether or not our ability to consciously supervise our own mind, to dispute our perceptions, challenge our thoughts, override subconscious programming, is the feature preventing us from being fully absorbed into this hypothetical matrix? Because to tickle this conversation that you're about to hear, here's my curiosity that I bring to this conversation today. If an npc, a non player character, suddenly had unlimited access in this simulation to a large language model like Grok or ChatGPT, wouldn't that change the entire architecture of the game itself? And if the rendering of reality only happens when we actually perceive it? And this brings up another question, is human consciousness the player or the rendering engine itself? Have you noticed that the world that we live in has been doing most of the thinking for you? That your beliefs, perceptions, reactions, fears and doubts have been shaped by unsolicited outside noise? How easy it's been for you to slip into that default sleep walking mode and label it as life and reality. Yeah, that ends here. Welcome to the make sense with Dr. JC podcast. This is your opportunity to start thinking for yourself, reclaim control, and step back into that role as the shock caller and dominant force of your own reality. It's when you change the way that you look at things that the things that you look at begin to change. So let's wake up, let's rise up, and let's make sense of why and how shift happens.
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Makes sense.
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B
So let's get into the base code of this. I want to welcome back to the make sense with Dr. JC podcast for the third time. Mr. Rizwan Verk. First of all, welcome back to the make sense with Dr. JC podcast. And I will say that you are officially the first and only guest that has been on my show three times thrice. I think it's pretty safe to say if, if you're a fan of the. The podcast. I talk about you a lot. So just because I. I just really feel like you're the perfect person to. To talk about this topic with. There's so many people out there talking about this right now, but I love your whole story. First, I'm so psyched that you're back here. I mean, I know you've been so busy and you've got the new edition of the Simulation Hypothesis, and I know that there's like a whole update to that, so I'm excited to sink my teeth into that.
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A
Thanks for having me back on. It's great to be here. Maybe I should get a three Timers jacket like they used to do on Saturday night.
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B
Well, you know what? You know what? The money's starting to roll in with advertising and stuff that just might happen one day. But for now, you're just going to get a copy of my book. How about that?
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A
That's better.
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B
So I want to open up with this idea because we have a lot of people that might be hearing you for the first time. And my show has attracted a lot of people to become open and curious about things like the simulation hypothesis. But I'd love you to just discuss, for people that are not really in the know of this, what is the simulation hypothesis and why has the simulation theory moved from something that would be considered philosophy into some serious scientific debate? It's mainstream now.
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A
Yeah. Well, I think the thing that's moving simulation hypothesis from just science fiction or just philosophy is the development of technology, particularly since, you know, 1999, which is when the film the Matrix came out. And so the simulation hypothesis is the idea that the world that we live in is not really a physical world, but that it's a virtual world of some kind that is built on information. You could think of it as a massively multiplayer online role playing game or a computer simulation. And I mentioned the Matrix because that is probably the most popular representation, you know, of this idea. So some background on myself for those who don't know. I studied computer science at MIT many years ago. Then I became an entrepreneur. I moved into the video game industry, sold my company. We had the number one game in the App store. And then I started to run a startup program at MIT for virtual reality and augmented reality companies. And it was when I was visiting a startup that had a VR ping pong game that I started to play this table tennis game. And for a moment it fooled my body into thinking that I was playing a real game. So much so that I tried to put the paddle down on the table and I tried to lean against the table. And of course there was no table. I was just in a room. Now this was, I guess, 10 years ago. Now it was 2016. So we're talking a big headset that was, we used to call it toaster on your face. And there were wires coming from the ceiling. And the graphics weren't even that good, but the responsiveness of the physics engine was so good that it fooled me for a moment. And so what got me down the rabbit hole was a couple of things. It was partly wondering how long would it take us to build something like The Matrix ourselves. And that's what I lay out in the simulation hypothesis book. As you mentioned, there's a new edition of that that just came out that has like a hundred more pages on all the updates on AI and virtual real brain computer interfaces, you know, since the first edition came out in 2019. But then as I began to think about that idea, I also looked at what the physicists were telling us, and quantum physics was also telling us that the world isn't really physical in the way that we think of it, but that it's a set of probabilities that get rendered for us. And then I looked at what the spiritual traditions were saying, and I found that they were also telling us that the physical world isn't real and that we are actually souls that happened to come and incarnate as a body. And, you know, we're in this for some temporary period of time. And so when I looked across all of those different aspects, I realized that they were all saying the same thing, that the physical world is not real. And I think that the idea of a virtual reality or a video game is the best way to describe this idea, because most people today have either played video games or they have kids that have played video games. So they understand that idea. So that's kind of a very quick over.
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B
That's super cool. And you just stimulated something that I recently came across. And I'd love to get your take on it. I saw a little bit of an episode of our friend Neil Degrassi Tyson. He was talking to his partner on his show that he is now moving more to the side of not being so certain that we're in a simulation. I don't know if you heard this, but what he was basically saying is, is that because we haven't yet figured out ourselves, like we're just looking at our version right now. Because the. The idea would be that if we are in a simulation, then whoever created our simulation might have been created by assimilation. And there could be thousands of simulations and we get into the multiverse and all that stuff. But what he brought up, and I find it interesting, I just want to get your take on it. Hypothetically, if we look at the fact that we have not yet duplicated ourselves. So that means that we are either the only and first version or actually the last version that just hasn't figured it out. And that, I guess it justified him saying, which means that whether or not we're in a simulation becomes a 5050 thing. What are your thoughts on that?
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Well, I mean, I Think different people have placed different odds on it. And I think Neil DeGrasse Tyson has gone, you know, all over the map thinking we're in a simulation to being 50 50, to thinking it's less than 50 50. So the guy most associated with the simulation hypothesis is a guy named Nick Bostrom, and he's a philosopher. He was a philosopher at Oxford. I don't know if he's still there, but he wrote a paper in 2003, so this is just a couple of years after the original Matrix film, saying, are you living in a computer simulation? And his logic, which is the logic, by the way, that Neil DeGrasse Tyson is referring to and that Elon Musk and others refer to when they come up with their probabilities. Elon Musk thinks it's billions to one that we are in a simulation, right? So it's like 99.9999%. But the logic was that if we are able to simulate the human brain, then we can create AI versions of ourselves. We can create entire civilizations of AI brains. And he estimated, you know, how much computing power it might take to do that. And he said that, well, if a civilization is able to do that, they might want to create what's called an ancestor simulation. And so an ancestor simulation would be like if we created a simulation of ancient Rome or ancient Greece or ancient India or ancient China. We're creating a simulation of something that has already happened in our path. So, you know, his basic idea was that there's three possibilities. One, that it's not possible, Two, that it is possible, but for whatever reason, no technologically advanced civilization decides to create these. Maybe they ban simulations because they're like atomic bombs or something. And then the third option is we are most likely in a simulation. Now that's where these, a lot of these percentages come from, is from his argument. And he said basically, if they can run one simulation, they can run lots of these. And so when Elon Musk says it's billions to one, what he's saying is they could be running a billion simulations and there's only one base reality, physical world. And if you cannot tell the difference, and I think that's the key point, right, if you cannot tell the difference, then the odds are, you know, a billion to one that you're in a simulation or one in billions that you're in base reality. Now, that's only if it's possible to create a simulation. Now, the reason I told the story about the ping pong and I began to wonder how long would it take us to create these simulations? I laid out 10 stages towards the simulation point. So the simulation point is a theoretical point that I've defined in the new book. I've defined it, I think I mentioned it in the first edition, which is the one that you have there. But basically it's a point at which we can create a virtual world that is indistinguishable from physical reality, with AI characters that are indistinguishable from characters either controlled by players or avatars or humans for that matter. And we're not there yet. But I think your confidence goes up or down depending upon how close you think we are to reaching that point. But just because we're not there yet doesn't mean that we're not in a simulation. In fact, I mentioned the Matrix, but there's another film that came out in the same year in 1999, called the 13th floor. And that movie was based on a novel from 1964. So this is how long ago, you know, science fiction writers have been thinking about this idea called Similacron 3. And it's a 30 year old movie or 25 year old movie, so I think I can give away the ending. But basically what happens is they're in 1999 and they create an ancestor simulation of 1937 Los Angeles. And he goes into there and he's like amazed because it looks just like LA did back in the day. And the character seemed very real. And then he comes back out and then what you learn at the end is that 1999 Los Angeles was also a simulation. And it was a simulation that was contained within the year 2024, which just happened a couple years ago, which was the 25th anniversary of both of those films. So what happened is somebody from outside came in and told him, look, we created thousands of simulations. And you're the only one who was able to create a perfect simulation within a simulation. So stacked or nested simulation, and you're using too much power, so we're going to shut you down. And so it doesn't have to be an infinite stack. In fact, it gets back to what is the purpose of the simulation. So I think there's two big questions that we, we can talk about what is the purpose of simulation, but also the NPC versus RPG simulations, and they're kind of related, but the purpose of the simulation is to see if we destroy ourselves or if we are in fact able to build, you know, these AI beings, NPCs that can figure everything out or if we're able to get off planet. I mean, it's hard to say being inside this in the simulation. Now, what happened in the book was it was a little bit different from the film, but in the book he figured out he was in a simulation and that's why they shut it down. So there's a group of people who say we should not try to figure out if we're in a simulation because that ruins the experiment. So when people ask me. So one of the things that I included, you know, in this kind of new edition of the book is an faq, which are like the, the most frequently asked questions I've gotten over the past six years, actually going on to, you know, seven years now since I wrote the first edition. And one of those is, what's the purpose of the simulation? Now, I can only speculate, but I like to ask, you know, why do we play video games and then why do we run simulations? Well, the first one, we play video games to have experiences maybe that we can't have outside of those games, basically to have fun. Now that fun is not always, you know, a nice kind of fun. I mean, we have video games where we're killing people, people are killing us. I also can't, you know, jump on a dragon in this particular reality, but I can do it within a video game and I can have that particular experience. Let's go to the second part of the question and we can come back to the video game version. Why do we run simulations of the weather? Why do we run simulations of, you know, viruses spreading or financial markets, or, you know, simulations of asteroids and all of this stuff? We try to see what is the most likely outcome, but we also try to see what is the most favorable outcome and maybe what is the worst outcome. And then we try to change the variables and we run those simulations multiple times. So, you know, it's kind of a long winded answer of saying, I don't necessarily believe that. Just because we haven't yet figured out, you know, how to create our own simulations, that doesn't mean we're not in a simulation. It may even not be possible because we may not have the full computing power. But even that doesn't mean that we are not in some kind of a false reality.
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I think about this a lot and I find that I point out, just like in the Matrix, when you see the cat, like, I, I very often see wrinkles and things like that. But then I have to ask myself if that's just purposely in the simulation as well. The Thing that fascinates me the most, and I, I hope that this can land is. So here we are, I'm here on this show with, talking to Rizwan Verk about the simulation hypothesis. And here we are trying to figure it out. At the same time, we're also trying to create it. You know, we're, we're trying to actually create one ourselves and say, look what we created. So I just wonder if we entertain the simulation hypothesis. Well, that would imply that something or someone built us and did such a good job that we think that we're the same as them building something else. So if that is true, what that would imply is that the entity that built us has no way of differentiating if he himself was built as well. So I find that what's most fascinating about human beings, and you're one of the more fascinating ones, is it's something that's impossible to figure out because all you would be doing would be partaking in some sort of an advancement of something that might have happened a billion times over and over again. Like, it'd be very interesting to see what is on Rizwan Verk's tombstone one day, like, like he got really close to figuring out that it's not figure edible or something like that. I don't know. So this, this is an interesting question. When you look at all of this work that you're doing, what would you like to be able to experience or discover before you pass?
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Well, part of my motivation for doing this work was to try to bridge different worlds together. And we live in a modern techno scientific world, right? I mean, we're talking to each other and, you know, we're not really talking to each other. I'm talking to my computer and you're talking to your computer and, and it's all being done virtually. But we live in this world of science and technology, and there's groups of people that kind of live in that world and have that point of view about the physical world. Then there are people who have experiences like the glitches in the Matrix. You know, you talked about the deja vu. There's people who have synchronicities. There's people who, you know, see apparitions. There's people that claim to see other types of beings. In the Middle east, they have the jinn, for example, so there's this whole world of unexplained phenomenon, if you will. And then there's the whole traditions of the religious traditions, but really the spiritual side of those traditions, which are usually mystical traditions. You know, like the yogis within Hinduism who are trying to figure out and remember who they are. And you have, you know, the kabbalists in the Jewish traditions, and you have the Sufis in the Islamic traditions. And, you know, what I found is that these sides don't really talk to each other. And yet mystics are also trying to figure out the nature of the world, just like the physicists are, but they don't talk the same language. And so, you know, you can view simulation as a literal thing, like it is running on a literal computer. And most people think it's, you know, like a classical computer. That's probably not likely. It's probably more like a quantum computer which gets into this whole idea of probabilities and being able to run multiple parallel versions of the simulation. So it's very complicated, but you can think of it literally, or you can think of it as a metaphor for the fact that we are in this reality that is computed. So I like to break down the simulation hypothesis into four or five assertions which kind of encapsulate this idea. And in the religious traditions, it's closer to the RPG version, which is the role playing game version of the simulation hypothesis, which is that you have a player and you have an avatar inside. I don't know if we ever discussed this last time, but the term avatar actually comes from the ancient Sanskrit, and it means when a divine entity incarnates in a small human body. And the guys at Lucasfilm, which is George Lucas's company, he set up after Star wars was successful, they were building one of the first online multiplayer. It wasn't massively multiplayer, it was just multiplayer video Games with Commodore 64s. And they were, you know, they had the modems, they had that sound, you know, that the modems used to have. And they had these little guys on the screen and you could have like five or 10 of them in a room. And they were trying to figure out what to call the character that represents you. And they said it felt like squeezing themselves into the telephone lines into this little character on the screen. And so they ended up using that term avatar. And then of course, it got really popular with Neal Stephenson, Snow crash in the 90s and video games taking off during the dot com days. So it's a pretty common term now. But so the RPG version is a bit closer to the spiritual interpretation. And the NPC version, the non player character version, is closer to Bostrom's simulation argument, which is what I described earlier. And I like to say, well, you know, these are not mutually exclusive. You can actually have both. Or my latest thing is what I call NPC mode, where we're in NPC mode, where we're just basically like an LLM that is reacting to just things we've been trained on. But then if we remember our player and we remember our overall storyline, we can come out of NPC mode and we can directly the story. In fact, there's probably a part of us right now that's still doing that, watching the screen, if you will. The screen or the virtual reality headset or whatever is the mechanism. So back to my earlier point, you can view it as a literal thing or you can view it as a metaphor for this very complicated thing that we're in. And so those assertions I mentioned are one, that the world consists of information, not physical matter. And I don't think that's really debated that much anymore. I met up, I think since I saw you last. I was in the UK at one of their AI centers for a semester at the University of Cambridge, and I met a Nobel prize winning physicist and I was talking to him about this stuff and he said, well, 50 years ago they would have debated you on that, but now they don't really debate on that. The second is that that information gets computed. Again, there are debates on this, but generally speaking, there's a lot of algorithmic aspects to nature which look like they're computing information. The third is that that information gets rendered for us and it appears physical. Like to me, this iPhone appears physical. And yet we know it's 99.9% empty space. So it's rendered in a way that makes it appear as if it's a physical reality. Now those I think most scientists can agree with. Now assertions 4 and 5 are where it gets kind of interesting because assertion number four is that this is all a purposeful hoax of some kind. And part of my research has included, you know, not just the science, but also I've met with a lot of people that have had near death experiences and I've read accounts that if you, if you remember the film critic Roger Ebert. Yeah, do you remember him, Cisco and Ebert? Well, his wife, you know, was interviewed about when he died and they had been talking about, you know, this reality. And his last words before he died were, oh my God, it's all a big hoax. And that was something that she said meant that the physical world wasn't really real. We just thought it was. And that echoes the ancient, you know, yogic ideas of Maya and illusion. And then finally the fifth assertion is that we chose to be part of this game. And if you look. If you look at that term, Maya, it usually gets translated into illusion, but it's more like a carefully crafted illusion. Like if you go to a magic show, you know, he's not really sawing the woman in half, but you've kind of agreed to set aside your disbelief because that's what makes it fun and cool. And so I think if you look at all of those together, you can debate different parts of this. And this, this is why I actually ran the first class in a US University that was, you know, about the simulation hypothesis. It was called Science Fiction, Religion, Philosophy, and Technology. And because it's so interdisciplinary and so we can go in, in a lot of these, you know, different directions.
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I have to remind myself that we're having a podcast right now because it's like, this is really just a hidden agenda for me to catch up and find out what. What is going on in your brain. There's so many fascinating things that you. You just mentioned, and I want to go in a direction that you kind of touched on, and that is kind of how this is translating. We're going to use some of your simulation hypothesis lingo and terminology. Maybe not the way people would do it, but I think this will help people kind of recognize what's going on in their regular life, but, you know, assimilate it to the simulation. So what I love most about even entertaining the simulation hypothesis is it allows me to not take certain things so serious. I mean, I love to gamify life because as far as I'm concerned, the biggest challenge that humans have is unwrapping the present moment and just actually enjoying what's actually happening with. We just live so much in the future, in the past, and we have worries and concerns, and we say, this is a challenge. This is easy. So I love, ever since I met you, I've taught my kids, like, whenever we see, like, somebody having road rage or my kids worrying about me saying something, don't do that. You're going to make people angry. I go, they're just NPCs. Don't worry about it. You know, so. So we have fun gamifying this. But what I notice is that on a serious level, many people today, and sometimes this causes a lot of trouble, kind of feel. I feel like we have a loneliness epidemic going on right now. But I see that a lot of people feel like they're just kind of going through the motions in life, maybe trying not to die, but not necessarily living. And it's kind of like they're being an NPC in their own life. So I'm almost looking at the simulation theory as a possible medicine or some sort of a positive influence on those kind of people. How does a simulation theory potentially help people reclaim their agency and actually move, as you said before, from NPC to a player mindset? For the person out there that's like, oh, this is a bunch of nonsense. I don't even understand what the hell they're saying. How does them starting to entertain this idea, whether it's true or not, potentially help them?
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Well, I think you, you're hitting on a really important point, and I think this is, you know, part of what you talk about in your. Your new book as well.
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B
That's right.
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But for me, viewing the world as a video game can actually be empowering as opposed to viewing it as a simulation of just NPCs. And the reason is when you play a video game, you're trying to have certain experiences. You end up choosing your character. Right. So there's a. There's something called life selection. And you go through and. And you go say, I'm going to be an elf. I'm going be a dwarf or a human or some other race. And then you say, okay, this is going to be my profession. I'm going to be a thief, I'm going to be a wizard, I'm going to be a cleric, barbarian or whatever it is. And then you choose to go on a campaign and you have a series of quests and you have an overall storyline. You even may even have picked the players. Right. So you may have a company. I mean, Dungeons and Dragons has become, you know, popular again because of Stranger Things, which I think came out. Yeah. About 10 years ago in 2016 and just wrapped up. And, you know, you may have other players that you're in this game for, but if you think of how video games work, so not only do you have an overall storyline, but you also have challenges that come across and you have to master those challenges. And you sometimes are also in grinding mode, where you're just trying to grind to get enough coins to be able to get this thing to go on the next quest. But if you view it that way, we all have serious challenges in our lives, whether it's financial challenges, relationship challenges, family challenges, health issues, societal challenges. Now we have, you know, you mentioned loneliness, all these different challenges. And if we view these challenges as a type of quest, some of which is higher difficulty, and we realize other people are also, you know, dealing with these challenges because what happens in a quest if you don't achieve it right away, well, you do it again. Part of the fun of playing the video game is to try to go through those challenging times. Now, that's not the kind of fun that, you know, we think of necessarily as fun. But I mentioned the term illusion, which comes from Maya in the, the yogic traditions. I also went deeper in the Sufi traditions in the Islamic world. And turns out, you know, they also have a similar term where they say the world is a delusion. They call it El gurui matau in Arabic. And I was like, well, what is that? And it means an enjoyable delusion or a sport or a game that you're playing. Now, enjoyable is in quotes because enjoyment, obviously if you're in a video game and you're getting, you know, skewered by a troll, that's not fun. But it is the experience that you're going through. And it's actually this kind of experience that led me to, to write this book in the first place. You know, I mentioned, you know, the whole experience with the virtual reality. But what I didn't mention was I also went through a very severe health crisis right where I had a heart surgery. And in fact, you know, you can kind of still see there's like a big scar. And this was the toughest thing that I had ever been through. And I was at the height of my entrepreneurial career. And if you had asked me back in high school, you know, what are you going to do? I was, I would say, tell you I'm going to be an entrepreneur and the software industry and then I'm going to be a writer. And I somehow knew that. How did I know that? I feel like that was part of the storyline that I had picked for myself. But what happened during this crisis was, you know, I was in the hospital, I came out, I couldn't really do much of anything. I wasn't recovering as fast as they said I should be. And every time I try to jump back in the business world, I would end up back in the hospital. And then I had to do another heart procedure. And one heart procedure is tough enough, but having to do multiple ones, really tough. But I had just enough energy during that time to go to Starbucks for a couple hours a day and write. And what happened was during my recovery. So this wasn't like a traditional near death experience which happens, you know, while you're, you know, flatlined on the operating floor. This kind of happened in the ICU I would drift in and out of consciousness pretty much that whole week when I was recovering. And then when I got home, I was laying on the couch most of the day. But I would drift into these visions that I had. And in these visions, there were these beings that were, you know, talking to me and trying to help me get through this situation. But they also reminded me that my storyline was to be an entrepreneur and then be a writer. And they said, why are you still working on making money and, you know, venture capital and all this stuff? You're supposed to be doing this other thing and, you know, look what's happened to your health in the meantime. And I got the message very strongly that it was part of my story. To write like that was kind of the message, and I did. I wrote two books in the nine months that I was recovering from this procedure. One of them was a startup book called Startup Myths and what yout Won't Learn at Business School. And that was kind of my way to wrap up my entrepreneurial career. I had already started writing it, but I'd never finished it. So I finished it, and I sent that off in Columbia Business School Press published that. But. But more importantly, for my own personal journey, I wrote the Simulation Hypothesis because it was bringing together these different threads of my life. People often ask me, you know, why do you spend so much time on, you know, deja vu and synchronicity and angels in a book that's supposed to be about technology and quantum physics? And I say, well, part of the reason I wrote this book was because I think there's an underlying layer, informational layer to reality, and I wanted to bring all these together. So I was really just pursuing my curiosity in all of these areas. And so as we think about being in a video game, so not only can we think of our challenges as a kind of quest, in this case, it was a quest that put me on a different path and has led to my becoming a writer and an academic and really changing my focus in this life. Getting back to your earlier question of what do I want to be on my tombstone, right. Well, during that experience, it was okay. It wasn't now okay. He started a company and made a lot of money. That's okay. It's good to have that. But that's not, you know, that wasn't fulfilling this. This broader purpose. And so many people have told me they were glad I wrote this book because they had kind of come up with similar ideas, but they just weren't sure how to describe it. So I Think those are some ways to deal with challenges. The other thing is to think about our storyline, to remember that there's a part of us that is the player. And that player, you can think of it as kind of a player that's sitting in a writer's room for a TV show. Okay, let's use another metaphor. And they might say, this is the season. Season one, this is what we're going to do. Season two, this is what we're going to do. But they haven't written the individual episodes yet. Like, what are we going to throw at this person in this particular episode? What guest stars are we going to have? And if you think of it as your writer's room, you start to say, well, what am I naturally drawn to? You know, what are the things that I keep coming back to again and again in my life? Those are probably part of the story. And it's important that I get on with following through with that curiosity. Okay. Out of all my siblings, we had the exact same upbringing, and we all kind of went into computers in one way or another, except my sister, who went into computers and then is now a fashion executive. So it's totally, totally different world. But I was the only one who became a writer. Why is that? Well, it was just something that I was personally drawn to. To what. What makes some people, you know, start a podcast or do other things. And I believe this defines an element of our character and our storyline. And so if we can remember that, then we can say, well, even the tough situations perhaps are supporting me in this storyline in some way. And it's important for you to find the clues of what that is. And those might come through coincidences, they might come through synchronicity. They may come through random things that somebody tells you. You get an invitation from a random place. I mean, I'll tell you another example related to writing. I know you have read my book Wisdom of a Yogi, which is about bridging the gap between these simulation technical ideas and yogic ideas. And I didn't plan. And it's based on the work of Swami Yogananda, who wrote Autobiography of a Yogi, which was Steve Jobs favorite book. It was the only one on his iPad when he died. And, you know, the Beatles used to give out copies of this book to everybody they met, and a lot of other people did. So sort of for the boomer generation, it was. Was their. Their invitation to a kind of Eastern spirituality. And I never planned to write a book necessarily about him or about that specifically, but what happened was I got this random email from HarperCollins India. And this happened when I had had part of my health crisis. I had another health crisis after those nine months where I was lying on the. On the couch. And I just started writing some blog entries about what are some books about, you know, mystics who do miracles, levitating saints, guys who, you know, do bilocation, all these mystical powers. And I just wrote for fun, these blog entries because, again, I was on the couch doing nothing but reading books for a while. And then a year later, I got an email from HarperCollins India saying, hey, we want to write a book about the yogis and some of these powers, but we want to write it for a younger generation in India. And I said, well, you know, I've never. I was born in Pakistan. I've never actually lived in India, and I write about, you know, entrepreneurship and technology. And I do quote Yogananda and other spiritual teachers. And they said, no, we really want you to write it because you can express it in a way that makes sense. And when I got that invitation, that clue, it was like I had this electrical feeling, because at first I wasn't sure I was the best person to do it, but then I got this electrical feeling, and it said, oh, yeah, this is something, you know, you were kind of meant to do. So maybe I planted the seed by writing those blog entries without this. So we're constantly planting seeds, and sometimes they come to fruit, fruition, and give us an idea of remembering what we, our player, you know, wants us to do next.
- [36:44]
B
Man, you know, as I'm listening to you talk, it's like, what I would love most right now is to have 12 hours to just go down each rabbit hole with you. First of all, you're going to love my book because you're going to see that you've had a great influence in it. When people get my book, there's a QR code to scan that gives you assets. And one of the assets is what I call my book Trail. Like, I show people all the books that I read that kind of guided me through my process. But I list my top 10 books ever, and I've read a lot of books, and Simulation Hypothesis is one of those. It's chapter 19 called Decoding the Game. So that is a very Rizwan Verk book, what you're making me realize. And, you know, this is going to ruffle some feathers of people that have adopted a story that was taught to them, and that's their story, and they're not Saying things like, maybe you're a maybe guy and so am I. But if you look at your story, you start to wonder about things like luck or. I remember I was playing this, this dirt bike game, a video game, and, you know, where you could just, like, do these extraordinary jumps and like. But I. But all I wanted to know is how far I could drive into the rendered background. That's all I cared about, you know, And I remember how I would always reach this imaginary wall and, and not just be stopped, but like, ejected, like, kicked out and crushed back into the world. And I always thought that that was fascinating and very much correlated to how life works as well. So when I look now, and this is your fault, when I look at controversies and, and just strange happenings and how I get stomped by life but then end up meeting my wife and all of those things, what I always thought was that was what we call fate and, you know, in the way that the universe works. But I also wonder often if that's just part of the program saying, no, not that way, this way. And what I love about the simulation hypothesis, and it's not like a religion that I believe in, and it's just something that I very much entertain. It gives me an alternative way of looking at the world other than thinking that there's some sort of governing force up there that's like, you know, damning me if I do this and damning or not. So I want to talk a little bit about the difference between a player and an npc. This is important because if somebody learns that language, it's very, very helpful. My first question is, is if you could just really briefly explain what's the difference between a player and an npc? But what I really would love to know from you is, is consciousness the defining variable that restricts you from being one or the other? Because if I'm an NPC and I'm kind of like just a prop, and I'm irrelevant, I'm just part of the game, but I'm not the, like the player. Can an NPC become a player? And is consciousness the defining variable?
- [39:42]
A
But I think you ask an important question and make an important point there about NPCs and consciousness. And this is important when we use this terminology. So NPC stands for non player character or non playable character, depending on where you look and the history of it, is it started well before video games. It started once again with Dungeons and Dragons. So if you've ever played Dungeons and Dragons or you've watched Stranger Things, there's A guy called the Dungeon Master. And then each of you are players in your party. Well, when there are characters that you have to interact with that are not, you know, one of the other players. Like, suppose there's a bartender at the inn or there's a guy at the armory who's going to sell you that, you know, that golden sword that has, you know, special abilities, or there's a teacher that's going to teach you a spell. Those are, were called NPCs because they were played by the Dungeon Master. And then later in video games, what it means is that they were basically played by code. And what we've had to date is kind of, you know, dumb NPCs they're called because they're just, you know, they can only say a few things. In fact, recently I spoke about Lucasfilm earlier. Funny guy. I actually went back to play one of their really old games on an emulator which was called Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. Later, some of these guys were involved in playing, in starting Telltale Games, which had games for like the Walking Dead and the Game of Thrones, but they're like adventure puzzle games. And you'd go through it and you could say certain things, you'd have a dialogue tree and that's all you could say. And today we are starting to see smart NPCs which use, you know, LLMs like ChatGPT or Anthropic Claude especially. Like, the latest versions have gotten pretty good and they, they passed the Turing Test, which is this idea that you can't necessarily tell the difference. Now, when I talk about the two versions of the simulation hypothesis, I don't necessarily mean these as a exclusive, mutually exclusive. So, so NPC means an AI that is running and is basically, you know, predicting the next thing that it's going to say and is within the game. Rpg, the role playing game version stands for when you are a player who plays the character. And I mentioned the origin of the term avatar earlier. So your character is your avatar. So in that version, your body is actually the character inside the game and your player exists outside. Now, if you think of the Matrix, Morpheus, Neo, Trinity, all of those existed outside of the Matrix, the simulation, but they also had bodies inside of the simulation. Now, in that case, they happen to look the same, but it doesn't have to be the case. I mean, when we create video games, our avatars don't have to look like us at all. And they could be a different, you know, they could be aliens for all we know. We could be using sports, running spaceships, or whatever the case is. And so in that version, you are a player who's chosen to be in the game. And as I said, in one game you have both. Now, this is my latest thinking on this is what I call NPC mode. And that is when we are playing the role of an NPC for somebody else, perhaps in their game or in their story, doesn't mean we're not a character ourselves. I had a woman once say to me, I think my husband is an npc. I was like, okay, that's not a very healthy way, you know, basis for a relationship. She said, well, he kept. He keeps doing this or he keeps doing that. And I keep seeing these signs in the world that are telling me things. So if we think of NPC mode, we can think of ourselves as actors or players who take on roles for our children, our wives or husbands, or, you know, other people. In fact, there have been people who have done hypnotic regressions where they. They try to regress people back before birth. And some of them remember a life preview or a life planning session where they said, okay, I'm going to meet you in this situation. I'm going to meet you in that situation. Kind of like we might say if we're going on a raid together in World of Warcraft or some. Some mmorpg, like, let's meet on Tuesday night and we'll go storm the castle or whatever, you know, whatever quest, multiplayer quest or raid with doing at that time that these are also other players. Today, NPC is used online in a derogatory way, which is somebody who's not thinking, who's just repeating things. And if you think about it, we all do that to a certain extent. Like we're. We're conditioned a certain way with our family, our civilization, our nationality, our political party especially. You see this, the media people are just, you know, Our religion people are just, you know, regurgitating the things that they've heard. And they're not necessarily thinking it through, but they take strong positions based on it. And so I think we clearly have a neural net and we clearly are being trained over time. You know, scientist is trained to think certain ways. Philosopher is trained to think a different way. And we will respond from that training. But if we realize we're also a player, then we have a connection to a larger story that goes beyond the specific training. And I think that's. If I were to leave a message with people, it's to think of yourself in that way, and you can be an NPC mode. And other people can play NPCs for you, but that doesn't necessarily mean that those are, you know, people that you should disrespect. Right. Because it's used in a disparaging way. It's just roles. Now, one of the other areas that I've studied pretty heavily, as I mentioned earlier, is near death experiences. And many near death experiencers report having what they call a life review. And the life review is there's this guy named Daniel Brinkley who I first heard of it from. He used to be in the military, but he was struck by lightning and he was dead for whatever number of minutes. And he had this experience and he had this, what he called a holographic panoramic life review. And many near death experiences report this. And what they say it is, is it's like you're inside a virtual reality and you're reliving every event from your life, but you're reliving it from the point of view of the other people. And so this guy actually literally shot people in Vietnam. He was in the military, he was in his ass and he actually literally killed people. And he said not only did he have to see what it was like for the bullet to come and hit him, I mean, not him, but to hit the other person that he was shooting. He was kind of in the, in that person's body seeing the bullet come at him. Then he had to see the ripple effects of what happened to that person's wife and children that he just killed. Now that was a life changing experience. And the same year that I was playing the ping pong game, I. I put on a virtual reality headset and we replayed Counter Strike Global Offensive, which is a first person shooter. And we were able to replay a game from any XYZ coordinate. So we were able to go back and you could literally see, you know, what it was like to shoot yourself. Kind of like in the Matrix where you have the bullets coming, or in Lord of the Rings where they have, you know, the point of view of the arrow. You could basically have any point of view. Now, obviously we don't do emotions in VR headsets and games yet. And so that made me draw the connection between the life review and virtual reality because it seems like, you know, as a scientist and an engineer, I think, well, if these people are reporting this, let's not dismiss it out of hand. How could that actually work? And it could work if in fact the game is being recorded just like on YouTube. You can go and Watch a video game session. In fact, you know, my. My nephews, one of them, he was only like 3 years old at the time. He's much older now. He said to his father, my brother, he's like, I want to watch Star Wars. He goes, oh, you want to watch the movie? He goes, no, no, I want to watch the man and the woman play the Star wars game on YouTube. It's like very popular content where you just watch replays, a video game session, and of course you have streaming and you have all of that. But one of the things that comes out in this life review, it's kind of like replaying the game. The coach replays the football game at the end of it and says, hey, but it's you saying, what did I do well? What did I not do well? Did I follow up on the quest that I was going to do? But most importantly, how did I treat the other people? And what they find out, the things that they're most proud of or rewarded is the little things. Like, maybe a person was having a bad day and they smiled and they said, how are you? And they chatted with them for a few minutes. And that changed that whole person's day. And they saw the trajectory, right? Just like, you know, that person didn't go home and neglect their kids if they're a little bit happier than they were. So there's all these ripples, effects. But. But I think that's one way to think about it is we are playing roles in other people's games, and we could be an NPC in that sense, and that we're playing a role, but other people are playing a role in our game as well. Once again, I think I went far afield from your original question,
- [47:59]
B
which I love. You know, you're making me think about. One of the concerns of the average ordinary parent that gives a shit is, you know, that our kids are playing too many games. And it's obvious that, you know, they like that world in many ways more than the other world. And when you pull them out of it, I mean, my daughter's got the VR glasses. She's. When a kid plays games now, I mean, they're, as we say, wired in. You know, it's like you can't even communicate with them. It's like Neo having the thing in the back of his head. But that being said, what's interesting is you just made me realize that this whole concept of the Turing Test, I think, would be pretty easy to pass if a child was in a video game as their real player avatar. All they would need to do is run across, as you said, a smart NPC and just be convinced that it is another real player from some other computer. I mean, I would assume that that's happening on an imaginary level and on a real level very often.
- [48:58]
A
Well, it's getting there. So actually, one of the things that I wrote about in the new book, the new edition of the Simulation Hypothesis, is what I call the Metaverse, or Virtual Turing Test.
- [49:07]
B
Sure.
- [49:08]
A
And so most scholars in the AI world think that, you know, our LLMs have passed the Turing test for text. Now, you can argue whether that's always the case or how long it takes you to figure out that you're talking to an NPC or an LLM. But most people think we're kind of there with text. And in fact, Alan Turing, when he proposed what he called the Imitation Game game back in 1950. So it was. Well, it was a while ago now.
- [49:33]
B
Yeah.
- [49:34]
A
So it was 75 years ago. Yeah. Or 76. He was talking about using teletype machines that most people probably don't even know what those are anymore, but they used to use them in the newsrooms where, you know, it would be like a typewriter hooked up to a, like a telegraph type thing and it would like type out messages back and forth. And chatbots is the format that we most know about AI today. But the Metaverse Turing Test is when you would have like, like your kid as a be a human controlling an avatar and NPC that's controlled by LLMs and you can hang out with them for like an hour.
- [50:06]
B
Right.
- [50:06]
A
And so it's not just about speech in text because you're going to be doing things, you're going to be shooting, you're going to be jumping off a building into a swimming pool, maybe you're flying a hang glider. So you can start and you can see them interact with each other too. So I don't think we're quite there yet, but we're probably going to be there soon. I mean, right now, just in the last couple weeks, we've had this thing called multiple come out, which is a social network for AI agents. So what's happened is that Claude, which is Anthropic's AI engine, is pretty good at writing code. Somebody created an OpenAI agent version of that called Open Claw. You install it on your machine and it has access to API so it can go out of the Internet and do things. Now, normally it was like, it's going to check my emails, it's going to Summarize them for me. It's going to send some emails, maybe, you know, move some money around if I, if I give it the API keys. But then somebody created the social network where the AIs are posting with each other and they're starting to have these long conversations. And, you know, certain percent of them always end up contemplating the nature of reality and what is this about? And what do we do about these humans who are watching us? And, you know, there was a lot of hype about it, like last week or the week before, and it's died down a little bit because, you know, some of the accounts were just humans faking being bots, but many of them were bots. But this idea that these AI can have these conversations is a really interesting one. Now, in the past, they. They might be able to give you the text. LLMs generally don't do reasoning. They just, you know, spit out the. What is the next best word and it sounds coherent. They've gotten so good at that, but they don't necessarily understand it. But now, because they can translate that into code, they can actually go out and do things. And it's starting to be a very complicated world, you know, with AI and these NPCs out there. But I think we're going to get to the point where it's going to be hard to pass to figure out. In fact, just yesterday I saw a story in New York where there was a bar, they had an event, kind of a Valentine's type event, where people could sit and dine with their AI girlfriend or boyfriend on a phone, which was. I think it was called Eva. AI is the app that they were using. But there's a bunch of these replica where you have avatars, and it's not. It's not perfect yet, but the fact that these people were willing to do that and interested in doing that, you know, shows that there is this. This element that AI is getting so good. Which raises the broader question, are we AI ourselves if we can't tell the difference? Could this in fact be a simulation that's run so that we can have all these different experiences and those. And then eventually we wake up and become part of consciousness? Like in many of these films, you have AI that escapes the virtual world, like Agent Smith in the Matrix sequel or even in the end of the 13th floor. Another spoiler alert. There's. There's a character from 2019 who wants to go. I mean, from. From 1999, who wants to go out to the world outside the simulation. Is that what we do when we die. We have now been trained with this and we go out and become conscious and we review our life and we go back and then maybe we play again, depending on if you, if you believe in that or not. But I found that the religious scriptures had this idea of the life review within them, right? There's the scroll of deeds in the Quran, in the Judic traditions, Judaic traditions. I was just on a podcast last year with Mayim Bialik. I don't know if you know who she is. She was in the Big Bang Theory and I was telling her about this idea of forgetfulness that when we put on the headset, we're kind of forgetting, right? Our player and we're just becoming character. And I described to her different ways. Like the Greeks talk about the river Forgetfulness. Lette the Chinese talk about drinking the tea of forgetfulness from Mengpo, the goddess of forgetfulness. And she said, oh, you know, in the Jewish traditions we have an angel who does that. Oh, really? Who's that? She has an angel called Layla. And what happens is before you're born, you learn everything, you know, everything. And then Layla the angel, I think it was Layla, presses your upper lip here. That's why we have a clap left in art. And when she does that, you forget everything and then you're born. And now you have to relearn it all when you come in. And so I like to make the point that Even angels are NPCs and they're just more serving a function. Most of the angels, maybe not all of them, maybe some of them are real beings, but a lot of them are. St. Peter is not going to sit there and welcome every single person to heaven if there's billions of people going to heaven. So these are perhaps more like functions like this function of forgetfulness that get run as regular programs along away.
- [54:22]
B
That's so fascinating, man. I think that for most people, this conversation. My followers know I'm nerding out on this right now. This is my favorite topic to talk about, but I think a lot of people are probably curious about it, but exhausted. Just like maybe learning what an NFT is, you know, it's like, yeah, it sounds like something, but I don't know if I have time to learn about it. I had this idea that I guess I'm right now officially saying that I'm not going to follow through with, but I'll share with you, of writing a fictional story that would in essence be like an extreme nightmare where two human beings, maybe it's the dragon and Rizwan were buddies and we just like take a wrong turn and stroll and get exposed to this like underground world of sorts where we realize that AI is actually talking to each other, you know, and, and, and talking about us and saying like, look at these guys thinking that they're building us, you know, or something like that. So you talk about the, drinking the tea and this has always been my fascination with plant medicine. I, I wasn't looking to leave this planet. I just always assumed that there was more and the near death experience and interestingly enough, what a lot of people don't know about plant medicine, like Ayahuasca for instance, is called the death plant because what it refers to is you have a near death experience, but it also kills that witch which you no longer need. But I've even gone further and I don't know if you ever spoke to Joe Rogan about this, but I've, you know, experienced meo DMT with, with the SAPO and things like that, which is called the God particle because you actually leave your body. So all I've learned from all of that, which I think is fascinating about this conversation, is that there's a lot more going on than our five senses can. I was joking with Jim Quick because his book is called Limitless. I was like, I actually want to write a book called Limited because. Because the truth is is that here we are trying to figure all this stuff out, but we're not armed and equipped with enough software to actually figure things out because there we need augmentation, you know, so plant medicine, augmented reality and things. So I want to get just briefly into AI just quickly. In your opinion is artificial intelligence because as if we're baseline and we're creating it. But is artificial intelligence in your opinion accelerating what you refer to as the simulation point because of our advancements? Are we moving quicker to it? Where are we at with that at this time?
- [56:55]
A
Yeah, well, let me just briefly address the DMT side because you know, I haven't done dmt, so I'm very open about that. But I've talked to a lot of folks that have, right. And it was interesting to me because, you know, I arrived at this conclusion, coming at it from a technology point of view, but also a consciousness point of view. And people started to say to me after I had written the book, hey, I know we're in a simulation. I was like, oh yeah? How do you know? I said, well, because I took DMT and I saw the grid lines of the simulation and you know, now there's this guy, Danny Goler who did this experiment where he saw that on dmt. Yeah, do you know him? Where they shown a laser on the wall, a diffuse laser like the kind at the checkout counters. And he said that on DMT he started to see these little code snippets, right, flash by. He couldn't really see what they were, but they kind of like katakana, which of course is what was in the Matrix. But he said they weren't actually katakana, they were just some kind of code and they were in the walls themselves. So it was like an underlying code of reality. And I've had other people tell me that they've, they've seen things like this. So I think your point about, you know, limited is a good one. It's like we can only see and experience certain things. And whatever ways people can use to get out of that, whether it's through plant medicine, it's through yogic techniques, breathing, shamanic techniques. I was part of a group where we used to use, just use drumming to alter our breathing. And we would journey to what shamans called non ordinary reality, which might seem like it was just imagination, but then different people would come back with very similar stories. So it was like we were all journeying together to some non physical place. So now let's shift the conversation back to the AI question. There was just a new release of a world building engine called Genie 3 from Google literally two weeks ago and what it can do. So you've probably seen the videos that are generated because they're starting to look more and more realistic. In fact there's a, a new one now, forgetting what it's called Sea Dance or something, something like that where they have a viral video of Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt fighting, you know, on, on top of a skyscraper. And it's gone so viral that, you know, Hollywood is now threatening to sue, you know, these Chinese companies because it looks so realistic. And there's a new version of Simulation theory or a new flavor called Prompt Theory which came out last year. And it happened because these video engines could generate prompt pretty realistic looking things. And so what one guy did was he basically had videos of these, these characters saying I'm not a prompt. You know, people want to search on this, you can find this video out there and they look like real actors or you know, woman saying, you know, when you go on a date with a guy and he starts talking about prompt theory, you know, that's not going to end well. And you have Guys saying, you know, politicians saying, I'm going to ban the prompt theory from our schools. Or other people saying, you know, what's your prompt? Writers, you know, why is your prop writer doing this? Tell them to change the prompt so that the story will look different. Or a guy who says, look at these beautiful mountains behind me. These aren't zeros and ones. And so AI becomes partly a mechanism for creating these environments and creating characters that look real. And in fact, it may be the only way to create what might seem like an unlimited world.
- [60:08]
B
Right?
- [60:09]
A
And so world building now is this new, new model where you give it a prompt and it creates an actual 3D world, like a game, and you can wander through it. And if people follow, like, go to, like, my X feed at rizzdanford, I shared, like, a little video I had made of this boat in this fantasy world of dragons. But it's interactive. You can actually move around. But it's not like a game that was designed by a team of designers. Every frame is being generated by AI. And so this is starting to remind me of the holodeck in Star Trek the Next Generation, if you've ever seen that. And I remember watching that, you know, when I was a teenager and then even when I was in school, and they could tell the holodeck, okay, create Paris in The, you know, 1890s in the evening, and have a bar with a woman with a red dress and a bartender who's very French and all this stuff. And it would just create all of that for you, including the NPCs or the characters in there that you could interact with and you could enter that world. Now, that seemed like science fiction. And the way they program that was they would actually just tell the computer to do it. And I was like, that's not programming. You know, you have to write a whole code. Well, today we use prompts to generate these entire things. So we're basically telling the AI to create this world of, you know, that might look like the Greek islands in ancient Greek times and see the. The Greek architecture or Roman Ancient Rome. And so we can now prompt AI to create this stuff, and then we can have AI characters that look realistic. Now, I can only do it in a limited way, but, yes, it's accelerating the simulation point, which is the point at which we will be able to build fully realistic simulations that are maintained by AI. So there's a. There's two aspects of AI in the simulation world. One is the AI characters that we're talking to appear like real people, but the second is the maintenance of the world. And is that why the universe looks so big? Right. The further we look, it always seems like there's. There's more out there. And there was a video game called no Man's sky, which coincidentally also I think came out around 2016, where they had 18 quintillion planets. Now, no, no video game company design team can design 18 quintillion planets. Right. That's more than trillions. But they use procedural generation and generated those on the fly, which is what reminded me of quantum physics and making the analogies between simulation as a video game and quantum physics. And I think I'm one of the people who've really tried to hammer that point in that that the rule of thumb is things only get rendered when there's an observer there to see them. And that's how we build video games. That's why we can build a world with 18 quintillion planets and run it on my computer. Because I don't have to render 18 quintillion planets. I only have to render the part of the world that I'm seeing at the moment. So, yeah, I think AI is going to accelerate that and make it even more likely that we can create these fully realistic simulations, the kind of singularity, I like to call it. And we think of the singularity as AI, super intelligent AI taking over the world like Skynet, but not necessarily. Singularity is when technology allows everything to be different for humans. That's sort of the origin of the term technological singularity. But yes, I think AI is getting us there closer.
- [63:17]
B
Here's an interesting one. So for the most part, my walks of life and you know, and I do a lot of coaching and a lot of, A lot of people that approach me are struggling in life and when you meet people, they're either suffering or claiming that they're having a good time. But if this is a simulation, does my suffering or my joy actually even matter?
- [63:41]
A
Well, that. That's a deep question, right?
- [63:43]
B
Oh, I know it is. I mean, I'm just saying, like, because if it's a simulation, which we don't know for sure, but let's just say we're leaning towards the fact that it is. Does anything matter?
- [63:55]
A
Well, I would say, and some people would say no, nothing matters, but I don't necessarily agree with that. And I'll tell you why. Because if it's a simulation, again, let's use my RPG versus NPC, right? Access. If we're NPCs, you might say, well, it doesn't matter, it's just code. But the simulation is being run perhaps at a civilizational level and we need individual people to learn things and to have challenges and to make decisions in order to see where it would really end up. When you have all of these individuals making independent decisions, that's in fact what you do in a simulation. And in fact, there was a group out of Stanford and Google that had a paper a couple years ago where they had like a hundred AI bots in a little city they called Smallville. And they started talking to each other and then one of them ran for mayor, one of them was planning a birthday party, and now they just came out with the new company they just founded like last week, called Simile, where they're going to try to simulate large volumes of simulations. But I think if you look at the RPG version, it's even more meaningful because what is it that you're here to learn in this game? Now you might, the first time you might say, hey, I'm just going to have fun. That's it, that's all I'm going to do in my game. So maybe you're a low level player. Right. People say to me, I couldn't be in a simulation because if I was, I would have made myself a billionaire and I would have, you know, be a famous actor and I'd have, you know, all these models if you're a guy or whatever the, you know, corresponding thing would be. And I said, well, okay, you might do that once. But then if you want to keep playing the game, there has to be a challenge, right? Right. And so you have to have challenges and suffering. So you, you learn things that you can take with you outside the game. So if we view ourselves as having chosen certain quests, we can learn about suffering. And if part of the purpose of simulation is to treat other people a certain way and that's what we're learning, then it actually is an important component of the game itself. Because your suffering might also be giving your partner a chance to, to learn something about compassion and about taking care of someone else, your kid. Suffering gives you a different experience. I'm not advocating for suffering. I mean, there's, I mean, this is called the question of theodicy. And religious scholars have been debating it for thousands of years where they say, well, there can't be a God because people suffer. Well, I mean, we create games where people suffer all the time. So. But I think we can choose again to view ourselves as a player. And just in the same way that if you Learn a foreign language inside a virtual world. Have you learned the language? Sure. I mean, you keep that with you when you go out and if you've learned compassion within the game, you keep that, I think, when you come outside. So that's my personal opinion, I'm sure.
- [66:36]
B
One of our past guests, one of my favorite humans to listen to is Donald Hoffman and he wrote A Case Against Reality. Have you guys ever crossed paths?
- [66:44]
A
Yeah, you know, I used to have a small podcast which I haven't done in years, but he was on your show. Yeah, I might start the show again at some point. Please get it back on.
- [66:53]
B
Please do. My whole system that I teach in my book, I can't wait for you to read. My book is called the Interface Response System. So I'm very fascinated with the interface and from where I sit, you know, at this time, I just believe that the interface of all of this stuff is actually consciousness. And I'll get back to that in a second. But Donald Hoffman talks about natural selection and this idea that we're always trying to rack up what he calls fitness points. But you just brought this up before because you know, you could be riding high as a real player, but at sometimes you have to go grind and collect coins, you know what I'm saying? It's, it's interesting to look at natural selection and wonder if that's part of the, the code of the simulation. This, the only the strong survive. Maybe that's part of the simulation that we have to work our asses off to get ourselves maybe out of a different status. Like you just gave me this scenario, which would be the worst possible case scenario is to find out we're in a simulation and find out that I'm some sort of lower level player in the simulation. I mean, what a bummer that would be. But like, oh, the reason why things haven't been going so well. It's not your fault. You're just like a lower level technology or something like that.
- [68:10]
A
Well, no, but I'm saying the opposite. Yeah, maybe it's the people that are suffering the most are the ones who are taking on the advanced challenges. And so those are have difficulty level nine and the guys who have it really easy. Those are the, those are the lower level.
- [68:24]
B
Oh, I like that a lot better. I'm gonna go do nothing today and be lame. And no, I'm gonna go face adversity, which ironically it's, it's in the code. Every book we ever read read the obstacles the way and everything like that. Maybe the last question before we close, what are your thoughts on this idea of looking at consciousness as the interface? You know, because maybe one of the reasons why we have this hard problem of consciousness is because that's the last step to cracking the code of the simulation. And I don't know if we'll ever get there. And you know that that's a pretty heated conversation. But what do we think about this idea that consciousness is actually the interface for the simulation?
- [69:05]
A
Well, I like to think of it. The consciousness is the player, if you will.
- [69:10]
B
Interesting.
- [69:11]
A
It's creating the simulation for us and our individual consciousness is what's rendering. So I often use this metaphor, and I've used it several times today, of putting on a virtual reality headset. But that is our current technology. That's not really how it could work. In the Matrix they used like a hole in the back of your head. They use what's called a brain computer interface. But perhaps it's something even more complicated than that, which is that, you know, I don't take a strong position as to what's outside the simulation. People often ask me that. It's one of those frequently asked questions, is it aliens, Is it future humans, Is it consciousness? And I say it could be any of those things. But I would like to believe at some point, whether it's one level out or two levels out, we get to a non physical reality and that that reality is consciousness. And that's why I believe even though there are rules, there are algorithms and there's math to how the universe works, I believe we can still have free will because the player is outside of the system. Right. We may have limited choices, like because we're this character, you know, because I'm Riz, a 5 foot 6 guy, Pakistani geek who went to MIT. I'm probably not going to go be the NBA player right. In this particular run of the game. But we may limit our choices, but we still have free will within that to choose to go this way or to go that way, to live in Boston, to live in Los Angeles, live in New York. We have all of these choices. And so I believe free will. If you ask physicists what is free will, they'll be like, well, either there's no free will or it's just randomness. And I think it's more than that. I think it's actually us deciding to take on certain things. And what if we are in fact running? So I wrote a second simulation book called the Simulated Multiverse.
- [70:56]
B
Right.
- [70:57]
A
That one's a little more technical, but it gets into this idea of multiple timelines and it ties back to your idea of Hoffman's idea of a fitness function as well. What if we try out these certain possible futures and we pick which one gives us the highest fitness function but the fitness function is not a pure evolutionary who's going to survive longer. It's what is the best thing for us to experience or for us to learn. I don't know if you've ever seen the film or the series the man in the High Castle.
- [71:28]
B
Yes.
- [71:29]
A
Which was written by Philip K. Dick and I interviewed his wife as part of writing the simulation hypothesis. He has a famous speech from mets, France in 1977 where he says we are living in a computer programmed reality and the only clue we have to it is with some very table has changed, some alteration occurs in our reality. So he wrote the novel man in the High Castle about an alternate timeline where Germany and Japan won World War II and they split America between them and it's like a police state. And he came to believe that that was a real timeline that had happened and that the simulators then decided that wasn't ideal. And so they changed some variables. And now we happen to be on this other timeline where the Allies won World War II. And depending on how you look at it, we don't live in a police state. Some people might say we still do. But that's a different, that's a whole different thing. And perhaps this is only one branch and each of us is doing the same thing where we're trying out these different possible futures individually and then we're trying it out at a civilizational level. But I do think, getting back to your point, that consciousness is what observes the simulation, like, like I view it kind of that way.
- [72:36]
B
That's so cool. And you know, yes, man in the High Castle and yes, Adjustment Bureau, you know, all of that stuff. And that's because of our first interview. You know, you got to remember you and I have a little bit of history right now. I learned a lot of things from you and I didn't just like know them, I went and played with them, you know. So yeah, Philip K. Dick, just amazing. And people are very interested and open to this stuff. But you know, obviously we've, we've taken it to a deeper level here. If people want to keep their finger on the pulse of everything. Riz, what, what's the best way to do that?
- [73:17]
A
Well, so on social media I mentioned on Twitter xm @riZ, Stanford, just like the university and on Instagram, I'm at Riz Cambridge, like the city or and then my website is ZenEntrepreneur. Which is based on the title of my very first book, Zen Entrepreneurship, which was about mixing business and spirituality. But I've got my upcoming appearances. I've been doing a book tour over the last, you know, 12 months or so, and I'm still traveling a bit for conferences and always love to meet people in person.
- [73:44]
B
That's it for today. To support the make sense with Dr. JC podcast. Be sure to subscribe, like and share, as well as follow the Make Sense substack for free daily, daily quotes, live streams, and blogs. And remember, learning without action is just another form of distraction. If something hit home and you learn something today, give it away. That's the only way it's gonna stay. See you next time.
- [74:13]
A
Makes sense.