← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Science Points to the Simulation: New Physics Reveals the Truth Behind Simulation Theory & Life After Death | Rizwan Virk PT 1
01:11:36
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In 2022, three scientists won the Nobel Prize for proving that the universe is not locally real, meaning particles don't exist in a fixed state until they're observed. What does that mean? In simple terms, the universe only renders when you look at it. This has been proven scientifically, and it's made one question above all the obvious one to ask are we living in a simulation? And if we are, if this universe is simply a rendered environment, then there's no reason to believe that death is the end. Today's guest is MIT trained computer scientist, author and video game entrepreneur Rizwan Virg. He's got some wild theories that tie together ancient mysticism with modern quantum physics and simulation theory. I'm not sure if he's right, but I know he is interesting. Buckle up, because here's Rizwan starting at the foundation. What is the simulation hypothesis, and why do you think that it's actually a valid way to think of the universe?
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C
So I started off coming to this road through video games, and then as I started to research quantum physics and looking at all the weirdness in quantum mechanics, I came to realize that a simulated universe made much more sense than a physical universe. Like if we lived in a static physical universe, sort of a Newtonian world, if you will, where everything that's solid is solid and it always exists, as opposed to in the quantum world where everything gets rendered, or we say that there's a probability wave that collapses to one specific possibility. So that's called quantum indeterminacy. And then the third part was when I started looking at the world's religions, I found that they were saying something similar. They just didn't have the terminology to talk about it back then. So there's this strange Phenomenon called the observer effect. And this is so crazy. Yeah. Or quantum indeterminacies would be the more formal name for it. And most people can probably think of it in terms of Schrodinger's cat. Most people have heard of the cat. And so, basically, the idea is that you have this box. And inside the box is a cat and. And some poison. And without getting in details, there's a 50% chance that the poison gets released and the cat is dead. Which means there's a 50% chance poison does not get released and the cat is alive, let's say, after an hour. And so that is called a state of superposition. Which means the cat is actually in two positions. Now, normally we would say common sense tells us. The cat is either alive or it's dead. It can't be both. It has to be one or the other. We just don't know because we haven't looked in the box. But the weirdness of quantum mechanics tells us that both of those are true. Meaning the cat is both alive and dead. Until somebody looks into the box. And then what happens is that this state of superposition. Or this probability wave as it's defined. Gets collapsed down to just one possibility. And that's the possibility that we see. So those are the two most popular interpretations. The big question is, why would the universe do that? And we can say, well, why do we do that in computer games? We do it in order to optimize. Because we have limited resources and, you know, limited memory, limited CPUs and all of this stuff. So it's an optimization technique that only renders that which needs to be rendered. Now, the objection that some physicists have, you know, between these two camps, they like that. You know, these guys don't like that interpretation. And these guys don't like that interpretation.
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Why would the multiverse make sense?
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C
So what I'm saying is that the multiverse also makes more sense if it's a simulated multiverse. And I wrote a book called the Simulated Multiverse that goes through this idea. And so the objection to this idea that the universe is splitting off into multiple universes. Is every time we make not just a, you know, major life decision. Like, am I going to live in Los Angeles or New York? But at every single quantum decision event, which is happening, like, yeah.
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Infinite.
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C
Yeah. The numbers are incomprehensible. But one objection that people have to. That is. Well, that is not a parsimonious.
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Yeah, it sounds like a memory leak that would, like, crash your computer.
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Exactly.
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Because each of those, like when they split, then within that, there's essentially infinite quantum moments happening. And so those are, like, mushrooming, like. Yeah, I don't see how. Yeah, either. My instinct is either we are wrong. It's not a simulation. And so quantum works in some other way that doesn't require that kind of computation, or that one just rules itself out at the level of computation.
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Not necessarily. And this is why I think it's interesting to look at simulation theory as a bridge between these two interpretations. And so the objection comes if the universe is actually spinning off lots and lots of physical universes. Basically, you're saying that there's an infinite amount of resources and an infinite amount of universes. Now, physicists love infinity. Computer scientists don't like infinity. We're always looking at this algorithm is on this order of resources are required. And so we're always looking at ways to optimize. And nature has shown that in general, it finds the most efficient way to do something. And I think that's true across many of the different sciences. Now, in a simulated multiverse, you've redefined what it means to spin off a new universe. In fact, it's very easy to take a universe as it is now, and then to create a copy of the data or information of that universe and spin off a new universe. And. And so that universe is only alive while the computation is running. So the idea is that these universes might only exist while they're needed for the computation. And so when we run simulations, what do we do? We run with a certain set of variables, and then we rewind and we run it again with another set of variables. Right. So in essence, we try out the different possibilities, and we see which of those is likely to lead us to, let's say, you know, what is the likely result? What is the most favorable outcome. So if those universes aren't necessarily alive forever, if those universes are alive only as they're needed in order to do whatever computation the universe is doing, it could be that the other. The other universe is paused. It could mean that it's running again. So you get into this interesting notion of what does it mean for these other universes to be physical universes. If our universe is not physical to begin with, then that starts to make more sense.
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B
I think when you say then that starts to make more sense. What's that?
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That the universe must be simulated. Our universe must be simulated. Doesn't mean there isn't a physical one outside of the simulation. Otherwise, this weird behavior that we get in quantum mechanics, I Mean, there's almost no good explanation for, for why that would occur. So let's go back to the, the Copenhagen interpretation. I said, there's a probability wave, and then that goes down to one, collapses to one probability. What does that mean actually? And so there was a physicist from Oregon, I think University of Oregon, named Ahmed Goswami, and he said something once that, that really struck me and he said, look, it's not really a probability wave because how would you know what the probability is of this happening versus that happening unless you had run something multiple times? Like if you look at where probability comes from, the idea goes back to some French mathematician who was asked to help somebody who was betting money on a roll of the dice. And so he said, look, if you have a dice, a die, a single dice, you can roll it. And there are six possible futures in a standard dice. And so the probability of each of those futures would be one out of six in this case. But how would you know that if you haven't actually run it multiple times? So probability by itself implies that there is some amount of repetition going on from which you can make the conclusion that this is a probability that begins to look like a simulated multiverse. It ends up being a universe that runs again and again and it tries out each possibility.
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You know, let's take Schrodinger's cat. So for people that know it, you're going to get this there. There's a part of the story where there's like a radioactive isotope that has the a 50% chance of decaying and as it decays, then it triggers the poison that kills the cat. 50% chance of not okay. If I'm programming that in a video game, I have to decide what the odds are so that when the box is opened, a calculation happens that goes this time alive or dead. Now, as a game developer, the reason that you do that is you want the game to feel dynamic, you don't want it to be on rails. So when you look at like procedural generation, you realize I can make this game a lot more interesting for the player if it's a rules based game. A lot of this mental model began developing for me when I played Minecraft. Minecraft is a deceptively brilliant game because it's just a set of rules. And so each biome has a different set of rules, which makes the biome react differently, which makes different things happen, different times of day, different amounts of light. And once you know those rules, then you can predict everything that's going to happen in the game. But if you make the rules sufficiently simple but complex, then what emerges is stable, learnable, but very diverse and capable of surprise. And so it's like, oh, as a game developer, that's, that's my goal. Now, if I'm a, from our perspective, a God like game developer, then I'm going to be putting probabilities across as many things as I can. And as a game designer, you want a stable, predictable game, but you want it to be based on rules enough that take for instance, if I wanted right now, I could go absolutely crazy. I could smash my computer, I could break this table. And it has been programmed into the matrix the way that pressure applied to these specific materials will break and shatter and move. And so the first thing you learn when you're developing a game is, oh my God, I have to tell every pixel how to act. And so if you have, like, as a filmmaker, nature takes care of the physics engine. So clothes move the way you expect, grass moves the way you expect, wind happens the way you expect. It's all there. In a game, you've got to tell the fabric how to move, you've got to tell wind what to do, hair how to react to wind, hair how to react to a hand. This is why you get crazy things like clipping. And so if I'm developing that game and my game is dope in the way that real life is, it's like everything has tailored probabilities that you apply pressure in this way and it's likely to break like that. And I had a physicist once explain to me, tom, I can explain quantum physics to you in a single sentence. The universe you see is simply the most probable university universe. And I was like, oh, it's actually a really interesting way to see it. He said, there is, if there are infinite universes, there is a universe in which you go to sit down in your chair and you just fall right through it. Because all of your, the gaps in your space, because when you zoom in enough, we're all basically just empty space line up perfectly with the gaps in the chair because it's also at a microscopic level, just empty space. And so you fall through it. He's like, that's just not very probable. So it doesn't happen. So going back to game development, you've got this setup where everything's just been pre programmed so that no matter what might happen, it's already been accounted for. And so now the game isn't forced to be on rails. You get all of this surprise. But the rules ultimately are knowable and that feels like what physicists are trying to do is I'm an NPC inside the game and I'm trying to figure out how am I. And the, the game that I'm inside of, how are they programmed? And once you understand the rules, then you can do things like nuclear energy, because you actually understand how this stuff is programmed, structured, however you want to think about it. But it's the more that you can go deeper into this probability set, deeper into the rules of a given biome, all of a sudden you can do things.
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C
I want to just follow up on what you said. So if this universe has been fine tuned with a set of probabilities that allow us to do certain things, so there's something called the anthropic principle. And what the anthropic principle says is that the numbers in this universe seem like they're fine tuned in such a way that we can have planets, we can have galaxies, like the gravitational constant. And there's a whole bunch, there's a whole list. If you look up the anthropic principle, there's a list of constants that are found in physics such that if they were off by even like 1%, that the planets would fall apart, they would fly apart, the galaxies wouldn't hold, and that the universe would not be teamed for life. But yet our universe somehow seems like it's fine tuned. And so there really isn't a good explanation for that. And the, the only explanations that we can come up with are1, that it was intelligently designed this way. And there may be more that we haven't discovered yet. One, or that there have been multiple universes and those universes couldn't support life. So perhaps there's no reason to have those universes continue. And the one that we're in out of this multiverse is the one that has been fine tuned for these types of things. So in computer science, what we'll do or just think of like an old chess game, right? And so when you're playing against the computer, what does the computer do? It would try to project forward each move, so many number of moves. And then it would say, okay, this is the best one to take, but it's already tried out these other moves. And then what's your possible response to that? So it's possible that the simulation can run multiple times until it finds a universe or a set of constants that actually would support this. So those are the two possible explanations for the anthropic principle.
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Quick break. But don't go Anywhere. There's more to come after this short break from our sponsors.
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- [16:42]
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All right, we're back. Let's get into it. Is there a physical world somewhere? So I. I am writing a story that our video game is set inside of. So the game's called Project Kaizen. Inside the game, there's a character who basically goes crazy by asking a question, which is, where is the array? The array is our name for the server, basically, that we have to be running on. Okay, where is that server? Because that means that there's a world beyond the world that you're trapped inside of.
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Right.
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And so whenever I hear people talk about this, you're always just pushing the miracle essentially of a first mover farther away. That's true, because then you're just going to ask, well, how the hell does that universe exist? But so let's just say that instead of driving ourselves crazy with where this is. Do you believe that there is a material world somewhere?
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C
I believe there is an outside the simulation, and I think because of the way that the physical world works. So getting back to what we talked about a little while ago, where you said, you know, this table is all 99 empty space. And if you were to go down, you would find that the molecules, mostly empty space, the atoms, you got the electrons, but it's mostly empty space. And if you keep going down, John Wheeler, the physicist I mentioned at Princeton, got down and said, well, at the bottom level, all that's there is an answer to a series of yes, no questions. And those are basically bits. That's what a bit is. It's a zero. Or a one, a yes or a no. And so what he said was he came up with this phrase, it from bit to suggest that anything that looks physical to us is actually just built of information. But somehow that information has to get rendered in a way that it looks physical to us and that it feels physical to us. And so my interpretation of that is that that means that there is another layer to reality where all of this information exists. But while we're inside, that's where the rendering occurs. And it turns out most physicists will not argue with that first premise that the world is built of information. So I met a Nobel prize winning physicist at the University of Cambridge last year and he's like, okay, tell me about the simulation hypothesis. And I said, well, it starts with the idea that the world is information. And he said, okay, that's not controversial anymore in physics. It used to be. I mean, go back 50 years and tell them the world is information. They'd say, you're nuts. The world is obviously physical. We know it's physical because, you know, going back to, you know, the bishop Berkeley was arguing with this guy who was it? Dr. Johnson, I think. And Berkeley thought the whole universe exists in his mind. And what Dr. Johnson was kicked a rock and said there, I just proved, you know, that it's real by kicking the rock. That said, if you're in a video game, you kick a rock and if the physics engine is well done, then it, you know, your foot won't go through the rock. So simply saying that there's something physical, there isn't enough to say that it's not built on information, because that's the particular arrangement of information. So this second part of how does that information get rendered to look like a physical world and feel like a physical world is where we don't have physics doesn't have an answer for that. Neuroscience thinks they might have an answer for that. But I think the simulation hypothesis provides an interesting answer for that, which is that it gets rendered as part of the computation and we are able to see only snippets of that information. They get presented to us in certain ways. This is where I think the conversation gets more mystical at this point, because we don't have the answers necessarily. But you can look at all the various religious traditions and they always use the metaphor of the dream, that the world is like a dream world and that you wake up from this dream and you realize it wasn't a real world. But I thought that it was real. And so you get into this metaphysical type of Conversation. In the Hindu traditions, for example, they have the whole world is a dream of the God Vishnu, and then when he wakes up, the whole world gets destroyed. And when he goes back to sleep, the whole world gets conceived again. And then you have this idea that the world is Maya, or an illusion within the Hindu scriptures. And you find the same terms being used within, say, the Islamic scriptures, where they say the world is an enjoyable delusion. And they use a very specific term for that, which is el gururi matau in Arabic. And what that means is not just it's an illusion, but it's an enjoyable delusion. What does that remind me of? It reminds me of a video game or a type of game. And in fact, in the Western religious traditions, you have this idea of the here and the hereafter, and we're told there are these angels that are recording everything we do. And then we have to, like, review all of that in the Book of Life, or in Islam, it's called the scroll of Deeds. So you can go to pretty much any mystical tradition, and you'll find that they're telling us that there's something more that can be perceived. And this is an ongoing debate in physics. I mean, you go back to Max Planck, who said consciousness is fundamental, the material is derivative. Today's material model is that the physical world is real, consciousness is derived from the physical model. So the neurons are there, and the neurons result in consciousness as an emergent property. So it's sort of an ongoing debate, and we end up in metaphysical territory, I guess, is what I'm saying, when we go down that debate.
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Is the pursuit of answering this question meaningful in any way?
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Well, I think it is. But again, it gets back to this issue of whether we're NPCs in a video game or we're not. So if you think back to Pascal,
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because one is meaningful, one is not
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meaningful, one is more meaningful, I guess
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I would say, okay, what does Pascal tell us?
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So what Pascal said was, I can wager there is a God or there isn't a God, meaning basically, in the Western traditions, if you're good, you end up going to heaven. If you're bad, you end up going to hell. And he said, if I act like there's a God and there is a God, and I've acted well, well, then I'm golden because then I get to go to heaven. He said, on the other hand, if I act like there is a God, but there is no God, meaning there's no afterlife, then it doesn't really matter, right? Either way, whether at that point, it doesn't matter whether you acted good or bad. But if you acted good, then, you know, insurance policy, let's say you're at zero. Yeah, it's like an insurance policy. On the other hand, if you act badly in the way that you could end up in hell, if there is a God, you think of it as -1 million points. So I drew this out like a video game, right? If you go to heaven, it's plus one million points. If you go to hell, it's minus a million points. And if you act badly and there's no God, then it doesn't matter, but it actually does matter. So he says it's better to just pretend like there is a God, whether there is or not, as an insurance policy. And so this one philosopher used the same argument to say, well, we should not try to find out if we're in a simulation. And he said, because if we do, then the simulators might shut us down. If we try to find out if we're in a simulation and we are actually in a simulation, the simulators might shut us down. If we try to find out we're in simulation and we're not in a simulation, then it may not matter. But on the other hand, if we don't try to find out if we're in a simulation and we're in a sim, then the sim keeps running because that may be part of the reason for the simulation. Then in the other case, it doesn't matter. It's the same four quadrants that you come up with. I don't necessarily agree with that, but we don't know what the purpose of the simulation is. Perhaps the purpose of the simulation is to see if we will get off the planet, if we will destroy the planet, if we will build intergalactic species. Perhaps there are other people on other planets to see if we are able to connect with each other or. But we might ruin the experiment in that version if we happen to know we're in a simulation. Or the purpose might be to see how long does it take us to finally figure it out. And how many times do they have to run this simulation, like what things need to happen for them to get to that point. And so now we get into the metaphysical version where if you look at the religious traditions, you have this idea of a soul, and then you have a body, and the soul goes into the body. And in fact, they end up using such similar language or terminology or metaphors for how that very mysterious process works. They end up saying the soul clothes itself in the body, just like your body puts on clothes. So they're using a metaphor of putting on clothes. So you can kind of understand how that works. Now, in the Eastern traditions, they say you go in, you put on a certain character, you come out, you go back in, and you play a different character along the way. In the Western traditions or the Abrahamic religions, right, you might say that we just do it once and then we're in heaven or hell afterwards. But it's the same idea either way. We're saying that we have put ourselves into this game for a reason, into this false delusionary world that we are in. And how do we determine what happens in a video game? Usually we give the characters an outline for the game. So you choose a character. When I was young, we used to have Dungeons and Dragons and we used to have the character sheet, which almost all modern role playing games are based on that idea. And we would choose the race, we would choose the background, we would choose the likely profession or the profession of that character. We might roll some dice and we would get different attributes. So there's an element of randomness in that. But then you also have a storyline that you're trying to fulfill in, say, a campaign, for example, and then we have a bunch of quests or achievements along the way. In modern video games, right.
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Do you leverage this? Like if you're going through a rough patch and you just start thinking to yourself, okay, hold on, the right orienting mechanism here is to assume that I am playing an rpg, I have chosen this character, so let me make the most of my time.
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Exactly. I think you're seeing exactly where I'm going with this, is that in that case, when you have difficulties in the game, I mean, in a video game, you don't necessarily give up when you have a difficulty. You go and you keep trying to work that specific challenge again and again. And you might have a. A tree of quests or achievements that you're trying to achieve. And some of them may not be unlocked until after you're able to, you know, achieve the first few in the tree. And then that unlocks other parts of the tree. And some of them you do in conjunction with other people. You might say, this is a multiplayer quest. And you might say, okay, we're going to meet at such and such a time in front of the castle and we're going to go on this raid, or, you know, whatever the case may be. And so you have this kind of weird purposefulness to it. But the grandfather of the video game industry, well, since we're talking about video games a lot, was Nolan Bushnell, who started Atari. Actually got to meet him once. It was really interesting, really fun guy. I got to know his son, Brent Bushnell, who runs kind of a amusement park type thing.
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B
Yeah.
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C
Randomly.
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B
I've met them both.
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C
Yeah. Yeah. Because they're here in LA as well. And so there was a rule back at Atari, and they said, make the game easy to play but difficult to master. And so it's important that there be some difficulty in the game to make it interesting, because otherwise what will happen? You'll stop playing the game and you play it once it's easy to master, and then you'll say, okay, I'm done with that. I want to go on to the next one. On the other hand, if it's too difficult, then you might abandon the game prematurely. And so you need to make it difficult enough for the player. So when we encounter difficulties in our lives, we can think of them as ramping up the difficulty levels for a particular challenge or a particular quest that we're on as part of our storyline. And so again, now we're in metaphysical territory.
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B
Quick break, but don't go anywhere. There's more to come after this short break from our sponsors. All right, we're back. Let's get into it. So what I'm hearing you say is, uh, life is challenging, but there's this really powerful metaphor that all through history, people use the modern technology to explain the human experience. I'm no different. That's just how I look at this thing, is through that lens. Um.
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C
Yep.
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B
I come at it from a very different angle, which is. I've had the very startling experience of thinking that it was just a metaphor to then building a video game and seeing all these parallels to. Then the Nobel Prize gets handed out for people who. And I'm going to butcher this, but I really want people to at least have the vague understanding that I have of, Of. Of the. The quantum entanglement that you were talking about that they won the Nobel Prize for.
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C
Let me kind of explain that part. If we have light that's coming from, say, a quasar or some big object that's really far away, like a billion light years away, and then that is coming to Earth, it's going to take how long? Billion years. Right. It's a billion light years away. The light is going to take a billion years. And then there's something in the middle between the quasar and us. Let's say a black hole or a galaxy or something that's a gravitationally large object, then the light has to go to the left or to the right of that object before it comes here. And we can measure the polarity of the light, let's say, and to figure out which way it went. So this is kind of like the equivalent of two slits. It just happens to be going around an object. And suppose that object, that black hole, is a million light years away from us. Us. Okay, so when would the decision of whether to go left or right happen? Now, common sense. In a material universe where time, you know, is linear, that decision would have been made a million years ago. So before humans were really around on the planet, and certainly before we had any recorded history, maybe after the dinosaurs. But it was long enough ago that, you know, it's. It's in the distant past. And so that decision about which way the light went is not made until the measurement occurs of the light today on Earth. So if we have these two telescopes that. That can figure out which way it went left or right, it's when we do the measurement, that choice is made. That means today we are somehow influencing the past because that decision should have been made a million years ago.
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B
The past isn't real. This is.
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C
Exactly. And so the past isn't real. And so I'm not saying that it's only a metaphor. I'm saying that that shows us that the past doesn't really exist in a single format in the way we think it.
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B
Correct.
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C
So it's filled in, like in a video game or like in a Philip K. Dick story where they have false memories. So it gets.
- [32:07]
B
The false memory stuff is where you and I are going to start disagreeing. Yeah. So let's first lay the track down, because if we can, like, people at home should be spitting their coffee out, being like, what? How is that possible? The reason that the more I develop video games, the more I become absolutely convinced that we are living in a simulation is because that is exactly how you would have to develop a video game. There is no such thing as the past. What you say is there is a roll of the dice, a calculation that you were going to run at the time that you have to render that thing. And you're going to say, oh, now that light is going to hit here, but I need to understand, like, reflections and all that. So when the player looks at it, I'm going to go, oh, what are the probabilities that it's going to look like this? Okay, cool. It runs all these calculations, I decided the mathematics ahead of time, but I don't run the calculation until I need to look at it. So, yes, theoretically, there is this quasar way out there. And yes, because I know that that quasar is programmed, I know that there is a probability that I'm going to see the light when I look at the this thing and it's going to be reflecting in this way, all that, but I'm not going to actually do the math until I need to for the player. So, sure, by the programming, it left a million years ago. And I need to know that from the perspective of how I run the calculation. But I'm not actually going to run the calculation until I look at it. What got me thinking about that? So I'm playing Minecraft in my 40s and I'm like, oh, my God, this game is unbelievably brilliant. But the thing that traumatizes me is that when I walk away from the game, the game stops. And I was like, but what if you could take the server clock and have it keep ticking even when you're not there, right? And I was like, what if I could set up a set of rules that instead of growing crops of wheat, that my civilization keeps advancing and that I could walk away from the computer for a year and I could come back and whatever server tick I assign, let's say I assign every server tick is 50 minutes in the real world, but it accounts to a week or a year or whatever inside the game. And there's a certain set of rules, constant dice being rolled. Now, I don't roll the dice until the player comes back to the game and says, I want to go to that place. And as you. The way that I was going to do it is as you get successively closer, I start running more and more of the mathematics. And so then as you, like, get fully to the thing, you realize, oh, my God, there's like a space station here. This is crazy. When I left, there was just a bunch of monkeys. But I've got the rule set, I've got the mathematics, I've got the server ticks. And so we're just clocking. It's in a database. I say, last time you were here was this. There are this many server ticks between when you come back, you're this many blocks from seeing that. So I know to start running certain amounts of the math so that you don't have like some drastic load time as you get there. And I was like, this is the actual universe. I was like, oh my God, if you just set up all these rules, you've got evolution, you've got time, which none of it's real.
- [34:57]
C
Yep.
- [34:58]
B
In terms of a material way, yes. But because we have all of us NPCs or whatever, we are constantly doing the measurements, we're constantly forcing it to run the mathematics.
- [35:09]
C
Right.
- [35:10]
B
And so you have this perception of a persistent world that until you start pushing and pushing and pushing and pushing in, it just seem it's all solid, it all works and everything. But the reason that I'm obsessed with it is, I realize is if you become aware of how the simulation works, you essentially become a superhero. And that's why physicists have given us our entire modern world. More than people even realize, from GPS to nuclear power is they understand, oh, you can actually go and split the atom. It's not easy, but you can do it. Because I understand the fundamental rules of, in my opinion, the simulation. And so it's like, yo, there are real consequences. There are real consequences. By understanding the. Forget whether it's actually a simulation or not, by understanding the rules of this thing which happen to seem to point to it's a simulation, you can do things.
- [36:06]
C
Yeah. Although often we understand the rules only a little bit.
- [36:10]
B
I think for sure we could be.
- [36:11]
C
Sometimes we don't take into account, you know, what might happen if we start manipulating, you know, these rules without knowing all of the rules of the simulation.
- [36:19]
B
And of course. So you're worried that we'll go off half cocked because you said that this could be the simulation to find out if we destroy ourselves.
- [36:26]
C
Right, exactly. That could be part of the simulation. But I think this, this idea that the past gets filled in as necessary whenever there are players or whenever there are NPCs, depending on how you look at it, is quite fascinating. And I think the crops example is a good one. Right. Because you might say there's a 50 chance that you have a locust, a storm, a swarm of locusts. Yes, right. But when it's not till you log in and you run the game again that you find out so it literally hasn't happened. So there are two possible pasts there. There's the past where your crops just continue to grow and now you know, you're.
- [37:04]
B
And to your point, there's so many things that will, we'll get an answer to when we run the mathematics, when you log back into the system and you start moving back towards that village or whatever, then it's going to be like, okay, well, there was this many years Storms happen at this rate. The likelihood of a flood is this. The likelihood of raiders coming by your village? The likelihood that your thatch roof catches on fire, like you just have all, like all this crazy things.
- [37:28]
C
Now it turns out in quantum mechanics, based upon what we were talking about earlier, the delayed choice experiment, that is true as well, that there are all these probabilities of things that happened, but it's not until somebody observes them that all this entire history, including the dinosaurs being here, and they left us fossils, all of these types of things. Now, at first I thought, okay, this can't really be the case. I mean, is that what really what quantum mechanics is telling us? Most physicists would tell you there's no such thing as retro causality, meaning that we can't change the past, but that there is an exception to that, and that is this experiment. And so I started looking around at some of the original quantum mechanics pioneers and founders of the field. And Schrodinger himself had a very obscure quote all the way back in the 1940s. So even before the whole multiverse idea, they were still struggling with this Copenhagen interpretation. And he said, every time we make a choice, or we observe or we collapse the probability wave, we are choosing from one of multiple simultaneous histories. Right.
- [38:44]
B
That's a very weird choice of words. Why choosing.
- [38:48]
C
It's a very weird choice because physicists would tell us we can't change the past. And that's what it seems like once we've chosen a past. Right. It's as if it's all been fixed. So they'll say, you're not changing.
- [38:59]
B
Do you agree with the use of the word shoes?
- [39:01]
C
I do. Because I'm of the opinion that the observer effect requires an observer. Right. That it's not just the npc, the observer.
- [39:09]
B
Somebody has to log. Now run the mathematics. It doesn't say that. Okay, Go left instead of right around the galaxy or the black hole. That seems like an odd way to think through this problem. And this is going to matter as you and I begin debating whether there's life after death.
- [39:27]
C
Right. But the observer does determine, say, what they do next. Right. So if you think of it as a series of choices over a long.
- [39:35]
B
Do you think we have free will?
- [39:37]
C
I believe we do. But you can't account for it inside the system in the same way.
- [39:42]
B
How could we have free will?
- [39:44]
C
Because you. In order to have true free will. So physicists define free will simply as randomness, quantum randomness, this.
- [39:50]
B
So that's not free will.
- [39:51]
C
That's right. That. That's there that I'm saying from a materialist point of view, that's the only approach where we could have free will is if it's random, but it's not
- [40:01]
B
free will in my opinion.
- [40:02]
C
Right, And I kind of agree with you there. But in order to have free will, you have to have a set of choices, and then you have to have someone outside the system who's free to make those choices.
- [40:14]
B
To have free will, you'd have to have choices that, I mean, quite frankly, you couldn't be bound by physics. Because the second you're bound by physics, now I'm like, okay, I have a bounded option set. And then it becomes, well, what is helping me process whether I choose left or right? And then all of a sudden you'll get down to, oh, yeah, I'm running a program. My brain is made of certain material. Even if it's made a certain material inside the simulation.
- [40:37]
C
Right.
- [40:38]
B
It still runs and processes data in a certain way. And if it processes data in a certain way, I don't have free will.
- [40:44]
C
Right. But then the question becomes, how are those rules defined? And also, like a good example, I think it was David Deutsch, who. Or Seth Lloyd. These are like two pioneers in quantum computing. I'm forgetting which one used this example, but it was a good one. They said that running physics rules can get you to know how materials interact with each other and chemistry can combine, et cetera. But it doesn't tell you why. There's a bunch of brass that's a statue of, you know, Admiral Nelson in the middle of London. Right. So there's some. There's some ability. Because if you're just running rules, why would you end up with that? Unless there is some set of goals or, or some, you know, some set of people, programs that are choosing that specific goal in and of itself. So. So I think you can set up
- [41:39]
B
a pretty simple set of rul. Evolution is going to get you there because nature is deceptively simple from a survival standpoint that is just motivating you to have kids that have kids. But then you're trying to get this one animal has gone down a path of cooperation. And so then you realize there are going to be certain mechanisms in the brain that you have to plan for cooperation. We'll shorthand it to religion. So you have to create a sense of awe that there's something that people kneel before. And because they're willing to kneel before it, they're willing to gather in large groups because we all kneel before the same thing. And all of a sudden you realize, oh, this is literally nature going, I only have two levers, pleasure and pain. And I've got to find ways to get these guys to have sex and protect. I mean, it's one of the options. This is one where we probably have to be careful to stay in base assumptions. My base assumption is that we operate on a finite set of rules and those rules run on a computational device of some kind. The computational device has a nature meaning that there are, I'll say, circuits. Who knows what it actually does? But like electricity can only travel in so many paths on the circuit. And to your point, if this is bits of information, it's either on or off. So like, once you boil it down to its simplest, we're a very complex automata, but I don't see any way that we're not atom.
- [42:59]
C
Right. But if you think of automata and how they work, let's look at AI today.
- [43:04]
B
Yeah.
- [43:04]
C
So for example, LLMs are based on essentially a very simple architecture at the, at the bottom level. But they get incredibly complex when you start talking about layers of neural networks. But I mean, even back when I was studying computer science, back in the day, they, you know, we had this idea of taking a neuron and a neural net type approach even back in the 90s where they were using this approach where the neuron fires or doesn't fire after a certain period of time. But if you look at AI, most of the AI in what I like to call wave one AI was a rules based AI. So it was more about expert systems and defining rules and how to do things. And then they realized, oh, we have to use a bunch of different data. And so today's AI is more based on machine learning, algorithms, deep learning, all of this stuff. And it's based more on neural networks.
- [43:56]
B
So it's more based on. You don't think neural networks operate on rules?
- [43:59]
C
They do, but they operate on, on very small rules, very simple rules. Yes, but it's not always predictable at a high level. What even today we have hallucinations, right, because of those rules.
- [44:11]
B
But it's, we have those. Is it the level of complexity or the pre programmed set of probabilities? Because to me, and maybe where we're disconnecting, I have the base assumption that probability does not equal free will. Randomness does not equal free will.
- [44:27]
C
So then what does equal free will?
- [44:28]
B
There is no free will. So free will would be that you're not using a processing device that has a nature. And this is why? To me, do you know Phineas Gage?
- [44:38]
C
No, I don't.
- [44:38]
B
To me, this story just literally shuts the argument down. People always push back. I find it crazy. But Phineas Gage, real person, he was working on a railroad, hit a tamping rod and it misfired. It shot a three foot metal rod that was about that big around up through his cheek and out the top of his head. He lost a of ton cups worth of brain matter. Never lost consciousness, but was never the same again. Now the reason I would say it was never the same again is that even if we're in a simulation, the simulation has a set of rules that go all the way down to the cellular level. How cells combine and we pull in mitochondria and all that through a process of evolution. It's like you just set those rules and they go. So any, you get to the point where this NPC processes data through. Again, it's all, it's all synthetic in the sense that it's a simulation. But their cells are used in this incredibly complicated NPC in his brain. The brain has physics, so it will respond to traumatic force and all that has an inflammation response and all that. And so if in the game you cause that trauma, then it's going to alter the way that that NPC processes data. And so I'm just saying, whether I'm an avatar somewhere else, like matrix style, logging into this body, I'm still now processing data through this body. I have lost sight that there is anything else. My base assumption is that there is nothing else. Everything is a simulation on this level.
- [46:05]
C
Yeah.
- [46:06]
B
And there's just a set of rules. And the set of rules gives birth to what we call biology. And if you disrupt that biology, there are consequences.
- [46:13]
C
Right. And so, so you know, you lean towards the NPC version and that means
- [46:17]
B
I'm locked inside my biology. That's my punchline. And if I'm locked inside my biology, I don't have free will.
- [46:22]
C
But if you're in a video game, you know, I have these rules of what will happen if I do X. Right. Because that the rules define the game. But as the player of the game, I still choose whether to do just like those old choose your own adventure games or in a game. Okay. I still choose whether to take this quest or that quest. So if you want to think about
- [46:41]
B
computer programming for real, if you want something to happen randomly, you have to assign a random number generator and it literally rolls the dice and says, okay, you do option 32. It's not by my definition I would not consider that free will. Do you consider that free will?
- [46:56]
C
I don't consider it free will, but I consider it free will. The only way to have true free will is to step outside the system and have somebody make the choice whether to be that thing or not.
- [47:09]
B
Outside of any system, that guides your behavior.
- [47:12]
C
And that's.
- [47:12]
B
Right, and that's biology. Guides your behavior.
- [47:14]
C
Not necessarily. I mean, that hasn't been established yet that, you know.
- [47:17]
B
Hasn't it? I don't think so. I just told you the Phineas Gage story.
- [47:21]
C
It's still in. No, and I'm not saying that. But what I am saying is that there is still debate about whether consciousness survives, for example, death. Right. Now we're back.
- [47:30]
B
Yes. This is, this is exactly what I want to argue about. So, first of all, I want to, I want to, I want to say my fundamental belief in life is nobody knows anything, least of all me. So while I'm going. You seem pretty sure.
- [47:42]
C
You seem Pretty sure.
- [47:43]
B
100. And I think that's the only wise. I have strong convictions loosely held, so I know I'm wrong about something. We may not even be in a simulation. I could be wrong that foundationally. I'm super open to that. I love this stuff so much. But I, I, I can't follow anyone's train of logic that is saying that we have free will, we can talk. Panpsychism, where we're like an antenna radio with an antenna that receives consciousness. Like, we can talk about it however anybody wants. And I still don't see how we ever end up with anything other than we're, we're a processing plant that follows a set of rules. And that, to me, isn't free will. And I don't know that. Maybe the audience doesn't care and we don't bog down a free will, but to plant a flake. So I can track your base assumptions. You believe we have free will.
- [48:30]
C
Well, the reason I wrote this book, interestingly enough, is because I think that the simulation hypothesis provides a common language between those who believe we have free will and those who believe we don't have free free will. Because there is this spectrum right in the NPC version. I agree. We don't have free will because it's just a set of rules. In the video game version, the player has some amount of free will. So, for example, I might choose as my player, you know, to go on this particular quest to, you know, go fight the Goblin King. Now, if I, as a player, never decide to go down that path, then that specific set of circumstances never happens. So you still have this opportunity to choose. And that's where I think in the religious side there's this idea that consciousness exists beyond the body. And in the materialist world there's this idea that it is just physical and that's all it's based off of. It's just simple biology. Right. And so what's interesting to me about simulation hypothesis is that it could actually accommodate both of those. If we're inside a simulation, you can have all of the rules of the game that are there. All of the quantum physics starts to make at least more sense. Right. We're not 100% there. And you know, I've talked, as you mentioned, about how we tend to use the latest technological metaphors. I believe we're in a simulation, but I don't believe we're in a simulation on a simple computer like the computers we have, or like my iPhone computer. Those processes. Right. I believe it tends to be more like a quantum computer, which is a new type of computer that can accommodate things like superposition, etc. But I believe that the video game metaphor is a way for those who believe we have free will to think about a physical world and yet to try to ground that in some level of a techno scientific basis, if you will.
- [50:34]
B
Do you believe that we have a soul?
- [50:36]
C
I believe that our player is the soul, yeah. I mean, I tend to believe that
- [50:40]
B
more really fast and we'll come back to the simulation for a second. But does the player outside the game have a soul?
- [50:47]
C
Player outside the game may be the soul. I don't take a strong position on that. Or the player outside the game, maybe just the soul. The player outside the game may be an alien, they may be future humans. So once we start to think about what's beyond the simulation now we're really speculating, right? Because we're barely figuring out what's inside the simulation and we're still having a debate on whether it's a simulation or not. I mean, you and I aren't, but other people are having that debate. Sounds like you've come to a very similar conclusion to me.
- [51:14]
B
Thing I really don't know. So I like to step inside the frame of reference and go ham to see what's there. I but the honest answer is I don't know. But I'm going to keep going as if I really am convinced. It's more interesting for me to find the edges of my belief. But I, I really, the life after death thing is really, really interesting to Me. So I believe, simulation or not, that when the lights go out for your character, that's it. But I've heard you talk very eloquently that there might be a better way to see that.
- [51:49]
C
I think some of the phenomena of quantum mechanics suggest that we don't live in a physical world or a pure materialist paradigm. And I think at the same time, there are other phenomena in other areas of human experience that also suggest something similar. That there is no physical world, but that there is possibly a consciousness that survives past death. And I think, you know, there are many researchers who have been working on these areas where there are just glitches. I mean, and one of the areas that I find most intriguing is near death experiences. And so these are situations where someone has died, someone has had no, not just their heart, not far function, but has had no brain activity for a period of time, who end up coming back to life and they end up coming back and reporting similar things. Many of them not 100%, but there's enough commonality across what different people who have died or have been in had. NDEs, as they referred to, which was a term, you know, that was coined by Raymond Moody all the way back in 1975. And one of them is that they're kind of floating above their body. Another is that they see a tunnel or a light. Another is that they encounter a light being. And they're very familiar with that being. And then the phenomenon that intrigues me the most about NDEs is this idea of a life review. So many of them report having had a life review. And what a life review is, is a replaying. So it's of every single experience in your life up to that point. Now, I first learned about this from a guy named Danny Brinkley. He was struck by lightning again back in the 70s or so, and he had like a pretty full account of an ND eventually he wrote a book called Saved by the Light about it, but he called it a holographic panoramic life review. And what he meant by that was he felt not just that he was watching his life flash before his eyes, so that's the old terminology for this thing, but that he was embodied within that experience of replaying every single moment of his life. But he had to experience it from the other person's point of view. And so he got to see what it was like not just to be himself, but to be the other person. And he was a bit of a bully, you know, when he was.
- [54:26]
B
He was growing up, this guy that was In Vietnam?
- [54:28]
C
Yeah, this was the guy that was in Vietnam. He used to beat up other kids. He was kind of a big, tough kid. And then he went to Vietnam and he actually shot people while he was there. And he said he had to experience what it was like to have that bullet come at him from, let's say that his character, but from the point of view of the other person, he also had to experience what it was like to be shot. But more interesting than that was he often saw the ripple effects of that across that person's extended family, or if that person had a wife and had kids, what was the effect that that person being dead had on them? And you know what people who've had a life review report is that they come back with a complete, completely different sense of purpose in their lives. But they also report that where they were was so familiar to them. It was more real than this feels real. Like once they come back, they say, this doesn't feel that real. And to me, that just reminds me so much of like when you play, let's say a professional football team plays a game, what do they do afterwards? They watch the replay and they say, oh, you shouldn't have done that. And of course back, you should have done that. And what he said was he realized that his behavior was causing certain things to happen, bad things to other people, and he decided to change his behavior. And he's not the only one who's had this experience. But to me, I started to take it more seriously. And in fact, this. This whole idea of being in a virtual reality or a simulation, I started taking it more seriously when VR started to become a thing and I put on a virtual reality headset. And I've told this story many times online, but for those that haven't heard it, this was back in like 2016. So VR headsets were big and bulky. We didn't even have the meta quest yet. It was still, you know, wired headsets, basically. And so I was in this room, maybe about the size of this room. The wires were coming down from the headset. I put it on and I started to play this ping pong game. And after a while, it started to fool my body into thinking that this was a real game of table tennis, right? So much so. And it wasn't the graphics. I mean, if you look at the graphics that were used back then, they were terrible. So. But it was clearly something about it. It was the physics engine, it was the responsiveness of the game to my commands. 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 the VR controller fell to the floor. And of course I knew I wasn't playing a real game of table Dennis. You. How could. Could I not? We had what we called a toaster on your face back then. And even now, you know, whether it's the Apple Vision Pro or it's the Metacos, we're still dealing with big form factors. But it was then that I began to consider how long would it take us to build something with rules that are so realistic and that the world looks so realistic that we wouldn't be able to actually distinguish between a physical universe and a material universe. And then at the same time, there was a startup in Silicon Valley that was able to take a gameplay session of a game like, I think we had World of Warcraft. League of Legends was another one, a popular esports game, and particularly Counter Strike Global Offensive. And so that's a first person shooter. I mean, it's set in like a, you know, place like Iraq or someplace, let's say. And in that, you know, you're shooting people. But we could go back and replay that entire game from any XYZ coordinate. And so literally, we could see what it was like to be shot by our character if we wanted to. But with the VR headset, it felt like you were on the actual League of Legends playing field. You look around, you're not looking down on it like many games do. You can have that first person point of view. And that started me thinking, you know, is that what's really going on here? So not only would we be able to create a world that's indistinguishable, could we also step outside that world and replay what's happened and then use that to actually learn from our mistakes so that we might actually change our behavior. And that's when I started to dig into the world's religious texts and realized, oh, you know, they were all saying something very similar, but they were using different metaphors. I mean, what's the essence of the golden rule in Christianity? Do unto others as you know you'd like to have done unto you. Well, how would you understand what it feels like to be those others if you're able to replay those? That gives you a sense. And in the Quran, which is a little more recent than, say, the Bible, the Old or the New Testament, they get very explicit by saying that the. There are these angels that are writing down everything that you do, all your good deeds and your bad deeds, you've probably seen like, you know, little cartoons with the angel and the jinn or the demon that's sitting on your left shoulder and your right shoulder. And so they use a metaphor of a book and they say that the scroll of deeds contains all of your everything that you've done, but also the impact of your actions. So it's not just what you did, but what happened because of that. And even though we simplify the religious traditions to say, okay, you know, you did a bunch of good things, did a bad things, you're going to go to heaven or hell, when you really look at it, like even in the Quran, which is very much in that Abrahamic tradition, it says your own book will be open to you on the day of judgment and you yourself are sufficient to be the reckoner, meaning you judge yourself. And that's exactly what's replaced reported by these near death experiencers that, you know, they said, oh, I shouldn't have done that. It wasn't like, okay, you're going to hell, you're going to heaven because of this. It was more, oh, I see now the pain that I caused and the more people that I've met, like I remember recently meeting somebody who had a life review and they said, they said something to their mother, they didn't think anything of it because, or their aunt, they were supposed to meet her, but she had a garden and somehow as a, as a little girl, she just ran across the garden and then ruined it. Or I forget the exact story, but it was a case where she stepped into being her mother or her aunt and then she understood, oh, this is why I shouldn't have done that. And so to me that's yet another indication that what we're living is some kind of non physical reality, but one that can be replayed. And how would that work if we weren't in a simulation? It also indicates to me there's a part of the game, when you step outside of the game that you can learn lessons from it. And I believe that all the religious texts of old used metaphors, they use technical metaphors. I mentioned earlier that the soul coming in the body, nobody knows how that works if you try to dig down on it, but we can think of it almost as, as a metaphor of putting on a virtual reality headset. And they all agree that there's a level of forgetfulness. So while we're here, we go into NPC mode. Often we forget, but when we die, we remember, oh yeah, this is what I was going to do. I was going to Be an entrepreneur. I was going to be a writer. And I myself have had this personal experience when I had my health crisis, which was I had heart surgery. Now you can come up with the logical reasons why I had heart surgery. You know, you could say, oh, cholesterol, genetics, heart disease. You know, my father had heart disease, my mother was diabetic. Therefore I got a double dose, right. And of course, you know what I ate all of these types of things. But what was interesting to me was during that experience I had this strong sense that I had already laid out my storyline and that I wasn't to going getting to the second part of the storyline. Like I was spending all my time on the first part of the storyline, which was being in Silicon Valley, because at that point I was actually running.
- [62:27]
B
Are you sort of. I know at one point you said you'd sort of dip in and out of consciousness. This wasn't a near death experience.
- [62:32]
C
It wasn't a near death experience in that technically I wasn't dead. And I don't remember what happened during the operation itself. But so this started to happen to me while I was recovering in an
- [62:43]
B
awake state or, or half awake, half asleep asleep.
- [62:47]
C
It's like that hypnagogic state because I would just, you know, if you've ever seen, you know, heart surgery, it's about as much violence to the body, you know, as you can do and may often have unintended side effects. But as I was recovering and you know, it took a long time to recover and during that time I would kind of go in and out of consciousness. I know you'd be falling asleep, really, but it was in that, in that middle state that I remembered the most because you don't always remember your dreams. But it was during that time that I actually got a very concrete message during those visions of these other beings that were there to take care of me and help me resuscitate me back to health. Did you see them? I could see them in my mind's eye. They weren't physical because.
- [63:37]
B
So you had a sense of. I know they're not physically here with me in the room.
- [63:42]
C
Right. They're somewhere else. Right.
- [63:44]
B
Okay.
- [63:44]
C
I'm sort of dipping in and out. Right. So imagine if you were in a VR headset. You took the headset partly off. You could see what's going on here and you could see what's going on there. And then you can get fully immersed here or you can be fully out of the game.
- [63:58]
B
It was out of curiosity, as that is happening happening. Why does your hypothesis become this is tied to sort of being half in, half out of the simulation, that there are beings that look over us versus your mind making up a story that's somewhat dreamlike.
- [64:19]
C
It certainly could be that. And I think that's the conventional explanation for even near death experiences, right? That it has to do with chemicals and neurons firing. Except that what you get are very coherent instances of people. I mean, you can talk to nurses. This is interesting. If you talk to doctors who take a very materialist perspective, they'll say, oh yeah, you know, there's no such thing, you know, it's all material. But then you talk to nurses and they'll tell you stories all the time and they'll say, yeah, you know, this person while they were under surgery remembers, you know, they describe a guy coming. Somebody told me this last week, you know, they was a guy who was only, who only came in for like a second to check some measurement on some device and left, you know, while they were completely unconscious. And yet they were able to not just tell me about them, they were able to describe the clothes they were wearing. In other cases you have people who are describing things that were happening outside of the room with their relatives or that so, and so, you know, was on a plane. And there are all these coherent things that come out of it that can't be explained in a purely materialistic world. And so that's where, since I didn't have a near death experience, I don't go that far, but I almost consider that I was having these subjective little simulations or dreams, if you will, in the sense that the beings that I saw weren't necessarily physical beings, but they kind of were guiding me and telling me, okay, do you remember now? Do you remember this was your storyline. These are the different paths that you could take. Almost like a chessboard was laid out. And they said, here's the different choices you could have made in your life. And this is what you're doing now. You were supposed to, you said you were going to do this. Kind of as if I had planned with them to do this. Now this is a subjective experience. I'm the first person that to say that. And that's my interpretation of that experience. But to me it kind of indicated that there are, that there, there are quests, there are challenges, and sometimes we signed up for those. And so I've chosen to give a meaning to that. That actually aligns well with simulation theory. And that's when I started to write this book because I found that it was one way that we could bring the material paradigm and the non materialist paradigm closer together. When I feel like, you know, it's been kind of going further and further apart.
- [66:43]
B
Assuming all of that is accurate, have you hypothesized as to why? Like, if we're in a simulation and there are lessons that we're supposed to learn and that at the end we go through a review, presumably you teach somebody something that they're about to, to use, is it reincarnation? Is it moving to another simulation but with similar rule sets? Like, do you have a hypothesis about why that would be true?
- [67:12]
C
Yeah, I mean, my hypothesis is that there's not just a Life Review, there's also a Life Preview. When we're choosing our characters and we're choosing our particular challenges and difficulty levels that we're going to achieve and maybe some of the choices that we might have to make, we're still free to make those choices, but we choose that. So there's a Life Preview that's more like a character selection and then a Life Review. And I think the two are kind of tied together. Right. And we're working on different aspects of ourselves. So in a sense, I think of it almost as a cosmic self improvement program, in a sense that you go into a game and you try to learn the rules of the game, but you're measured based upon how you did after the game. And so one way to approach it is to say the game is totally random. Everything is random. Another way to approach it is to say it's Grand Theft Auto or the game is, I'm going to get as much as I can. But what people who've had these experiences tell us, and the mystics of old, whether it's in the Western religions or the Eastern traditions, they tell us that the way we're measured is very much about how we treat other people. So I know it sounds really simple, but if that's the point of the Life Review, that's the point of the game at the end is, you know, one, how did you treat others and how did you affect them? And two, you were here to work on your arrogance. You were here to work on, you
- [68:42]
B
know, why do you think we forget them? So if we've got these big lessons to learn, we do the review, all of that. Why make me learn the lesson and then wipe, wipe my memory before I go into the next round?
- [68:53]
C
That's a good question. And I think that's one that has, you know, many, many scholars and mystics have weighed in on over the years and the forgetfulness is something that's very common in different traditions. So it's not just in the religious traditions. Even if you go back to the Greek, not just in the modern religious river, but if you go back to the Greeks, they have this river called Lethe. And when you cross it, you know, it's called the river of forgetfulness. And when you go back to incarnate, you go back almost to start fresh, to try to relive that life, or to go in and do an incarnation. So it's almost. If you knew everything that you were going to do, you didn't have to choose. So I view it more like, you know, the old saying, tell me something and I'll forget. Show me something I might remember. But if I have to do it myself, then I really understand. So as a teacher and an instructor, you know, I know the value of making students actually do things. Right. One of the things that we talked about a lot in academia today is, you know, should students use ChatGPT all the time? The time. It was a big issue when it first came out because a lot of universities were like, okay, using ChatGPT is not really learning, right? You're just getting it to do it. We're getting to the point where now we have to adapt our strategy. So that is having ChatGPT review, you know, all the pros and cons of an argument, and then you perhaps using that information to come up with a. A reasoning against those. The process of doing that is the process of learning. So I think we would learn better, you know, when we've forgotten some of that stuff, especially if you play the game more than once. Okay? So in a reincarnational world now, if you're, like, stuck on all the bad things that happened last time, you're not really kind of embracing the game, right? So that it's not fully immersed. So it's a question of how immersive is the game. And if you remember that it's a game, then you're not fully immersed. You're not enjoying those quests in the same way that you might want to. That said, there are people who step outside the game, and there are many who believe they remember, whether it's past lives or you've had documented instances from, say, the University of Virginia in their Department of Perceptual Studies, where in India, there was a woman that died in one village, and then suddenly in another village, a woman who was about that same age, but who was married and had kids, suddenly got all the memories of the woman that had died in the other village, and now she said she was this person or that person, and. And it was just a really weird coincidence that that would happen, but she had all the memories of that other person.
- [71:52]
B
The game allows for that kind of transfer. Just not very often.
- [71:56]
C
Yeah, I think just not very often. And it may be because it's kind of like saying, here, take over my character. Okay, why don't you take over my character? And then you have the memories of the other character that you may have been playing from before. So it's a big mystery, right?
- [72:11]
B
Do you think that the memories that we have influence who we are?
- [72:17]
C
I think the tendon, yeah. The memory, the tendencies that we have tend to live across gameplay sessions. And so, for example, in this life, you know, I. As I said, I knew I was going to be, or at least I thought I was going to be a softer entrepreneur. Entrepreneur and then a writer. There was another part of me that wanted to be like a scholar or a teacher, but I never really pursued it. And again, that was something very unique to me that wasn't there, say, with my siblings who had very similar genetics and very similar upbringing.
- [72:52]
B
And you think that comes before the body, before the upbringing? That's an innate thing. From the method, by way, I mean, I assume you're taking an RPG standpoint. So whatever the soul is the person outside that's plugging into the body and wearing it like clothes, you're saying those things are inherent to that person?
- [73:16]
C
Either they're inherent to that person or they've been chosen by that player as characteristics of the storyline.
- [73:24]
B
All right, guys, that's it for part one. Make sure you're following Impact theory and leave us a review on Apple or Spotify. It really does help us grow. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care.