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Are You Living In A Simulation? Consciousness, Quantum Physics, & The Matrix with Rizwan Virk

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What can video games teach us about real life? In this episode, we explore the science behind the concept that we may be living in a simulation, look at the hard problem of consciousness, explore the relationship between quantum physics and consciousness and much more with our guest Rizwan Virk. 

Rizwan Virk is a successful entrepreneur, angel investor, bestselling author, video game industry pioneer, and indie film producer. Riz is currently Executive Director of Play Labs@ MIT, a startup accelerator for playful tech, and Partner at Bayview Labs, a Silicon Valley startup investment firm. Riz's startups and articles have been featured in Inc. Magazine, The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, and many more! He is the author of Simulation Hypothesis (2019), Startup Myths & Models (2020), Treasure Hunt (2017), and Zen Entrepreneurship (2013).

  • From playing Pacman and space invaders back in the day all the way to becoming a gaming industry pioneer 

  • If you look at human social interaction, play is the oldest form of interaction. Playing games is one of the oldest human endeavors. 

  • Playfulness is one of the key parts of human social interaction (even without computers and video games)

  • The history of technology is intertwined with the history of video games. 

  • The first practical AI ever built was basically a chess-playing computer. 

  • The first graphics were developed for a video game called Space War.

  • The entire concept of cryptography is based on game theory. 

  • Are we living in a simulation?

  • Getting to the Simulation Point

  • Nick Bostrom’s simulation argument. 

  • “The NPC Version” of the simulation hypothesis vs the “RPG Hypothesis"

  • Going all the way back to Plato’s allegory of the cave.. religious have often told us that we are not in the “Base reality” 

  • The “hard problem” of consciousness 

  • The primacy of matter vs consciousness.. 

  • Descartes… Where did the doubt come from?

  • Lucid dreams and Tibetan dream yoga 

  • What’s the difference between living in a simulation and living in base reality? Is there any difference at all?

  • Are you really conscious or just a reflection of consciousness? 

  • There is no such thing as matter, there is only information / energy.

  • What does the double-slit experiment in Quantum Physics tell us about the existence of consciousness?

  • What does quantum entanglement tell us about the nature of consciousness? 

  • The measurements in quantum physics don’t exist until there is someone observing them. 

  • The “delayed choice” experiment shows that what we observe now can change the past. 

  • Homework: Think through this issue for yourself!

Thank you so much for listening!

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Want To Dig In More?! - Here’s The Show Notes, Links, & Research

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Episode Transcript

[00:00:04.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success. Introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[0:00:11.8] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success; the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the Internet with more than five million downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries.

What can video games teach us about real life? In this episode, we explore the science behind the concept that we may be living in a simulation. We look at the hard problem of consciousness, explore the relationship between quantum physics and consciousness and much more with our guest, Rizwan Virk.

Are you a fan of the show and have you been enjoying the content that we put together for you? If you have, I would love it if you signed up for our e-mail list. We have some amazing content on there, along with a really great free course that we put a ton of time into called How To Create Time for What Matters Most In Your Life. If that sounds exciting and interesting and you want a bunch of other free goodies and giveaways along with that, just go to successpodcast.com. You can sign up right on the homepage. That’s successpodcast.com. Or if you’re on your phone right now, all you have to do is text the word smarter, that’s S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44-222.

In our previous episode, we explored the science of networks and human relationships, uncovered how people you've never met have a huge impact on your life and looked at how we can respond effectively to the COVID-19 pandemic with our previous guest, David Burkus.

Now for our interview with Riz.

[0:01:41.6] MB: Rizwan Virk is a successful entrepreneur, angel investor, best-selling author, video game industry pioneer and indie film producer. Riz is currently Executive Director of Play Labs at MIT, a startup accelerator for playful tech and a partner at Bayview Labs, a Silicon Valley startup investment firm. Riz’s startups and articles have been featured in Inc., Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal and many more media outlets. He's the author of Simulation Hypothesis, Startup Myths and Models, Treasure Hunt and Zen Entrepreneurship.

Riz, welcome to the Science of Success.

[0:02:15.1] RV: Thanks for having me on. Great to be here.

[0:02:17.1] MB: Well, we're super excited to have you on the show today. I'd love to start out with your story and your journey, because you have such a fascinating background. As somebody who I'm self-admittedly super into video games, it's such a cool story and journey, so I'd love to hear about that and then unpack that into all the fascinating work that you’ve done from there.

[0:02:37.7] RV: Well, depending on how far back you want me to go. I started playing video games back in the Atari days, back in the 80s and I used to play classic video games like Pac-Man and Space Invaders. Even back then when we had more realistic games, like there was a racing game called Pole Position and I used to always wonder what was beyond the track? What was beyond the mountains? Was there an actual virtual world in there or not? Back then, I didn't really know how to build video games. I was just playing them.

Then years later, I went to MIT to study computer science and started to learn a little bit about logic and how we build games and how they branch out probabilities. Then I was doing a lot of enterprise software startups. About 10 years ago, I got involved in actually building video games back when Facebook games and mobile games were becoming popular. The iPhone was the hot new platform.

I co-founded a company. We created a game called Tap Fish, which was one of the top games in the iTunes App Store when they came out with top-grossing charts and was called a simulation game. Then after that, I ended up investing in quite a few different video game companies like Discord, which you may have heard of, which is used by a lot of gamers as a chat. What many people don't know is it started off as a game company and the game didn't do that well and then they transitioned to the current chat app that they have, which has become hugely popular. It's become one of my very first unicorn type investments.

Then I started a accelerator at the MIT game lab for helping entrepreneurs bring their video games to market and using video game technology and virtual reality technology in different ways. It didn't really matter what industry they were using it. It was around that time when I was playing a virtual reality ping-pong game, where I saw that the responses were so engrossing that I forgot that I had these goggles on and that I wasn't actually playing ping-pong, so much so that I put the paddle down on the table at the end of the game and then I tried to lean against this table.

Of course, the table wasn't there, right? Like they say in the matrix, there is no table. The controller fell to the floor. That's when I really began to think that we were on our way to being able to build something like the matrix, to really build a virtual world that is indistinguishable from the physical world. That led me down this path of exploring this idea that we may already be inside a video game and that led me to writing the Simulation Hypothesis.

[0:05:05.3] MB: It's so fascinating. I want to get into a lot of the physics, the spiritual side, all the things that play into that. Even before we dig into that, I'm curious the play labs that you created at MIT is focused around this idea of playful tech. What does that mean to you and how do you think about the place of games, both historically in the context of human society and today's society?

[0:05:27.2] RV: Yeah. Before I started play labs, I was building games. At the MIT game lab, they really study the history of video games. One of the points that they make is that if you look at human social interaction, play is really the oldest form of interaction. It goes back many thousands of years. You can find little stone pieces that were used as board games. Of course as kids, a lot of how we learn to interact with other kids is through games. You can see that playfulness is a key part of human social interaction, even when you don't consider video games, or computers.

As I looked at the history of technology, I realized that it's really intertwined with the history of video games. Turns out, bringing playfulness onto computers first, PCs, mainframes and then onto the Internet for more social interactions really has pushed the limits of computer software and hardware for many years. Going back to the first practical AI was really a chess-playing computer built by Professor Claude Shannon at MIT back in the 50s.

The first graphical anything really was a game called Space War, which was built in 1961 on a PDP computer, built by Digital Equipment Corporation back at MIT. I'm in Mountain View California right now. Just down the road, we have the Computer History Museum and turns out, the gentleman who built Space War, Steve Russell, he's in the area and he comes in and they fire up the old mainframe for little Space War tournaments.

If you think of a lot of interaction, today a lot of these ideas were built over MUDs, or multi-user dungeons. Back in the day, chatbots really have their origins within NPCs, or non-player characters within video games. Of course, graphics processing units were created for gaming and entertainment, so that we could see graphics better. The reason we can render entirely 3D worlds when we play World of Warcraft or Fortnite on our game is because of techniques, and because of processing optimizations that were made by GPUs, which were really all for gaming.

Now, GPUs are used for AI and cryptocurrency mining and everything else. Even if you think of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, the whole idea of cryptography is based on game theory, which is where you game out the scenario of what one person will do and what the other person will do. That's how you come up with a trustless system, like a blockchain.

In many cases, gaming and entertainment really led to the development of a lot of technology that we use today. I found that fascinating. When I talk about playful tech, it's really any videogame type technology that could be used in any industry really.

[0:08:16.9] MB: It's so fascinating how many of the biggest breakthroughs in really the history of computers have all been centered around, or driven, or connected in some way with video games.

[0:08:26.3] RV: Yeah. People don't always realize that at first. Then as they think about it, they realize, “Oh, yeah. That's very much the case.” I mean, as we think of even graphical user interfaces, like the Macintosh which came out in 84 was based on a GUI built at Xerox PARC and it was this idea of bitmap graphics on the screen and rendering and a lot of that has its origins in playfulness and creating images using bitmaps and things like that.

Gaming and entertainment I think are actually a very important driver. Today, video games are a bigger industry than Hollywood, right? I mean, there's over a 100 billion dollars as an industry and perhaps, even more than that. Now I haven't looked at the numbers in a year or two.

[0:09:08.7] MB: So fascinating. As an avid gamer, I really enjoy all this stuff. I mean, now that we have a little bit of context for this and then for your situation within the video game universe, let's come back to the simulation. Tell me about the core thesis around this idea that we may be living in a simulation and what that means.

[0:09:29.5] RV: In my book, I very much tie it to the development of video games. A few years ago, this idea got a lot of popularity because Elon Musk talked about how video games developed. He said that 40 years ago, we had Pong, which was developed by Atari. It was the very first widely available video game. It was basically two squares and a dot. Today we have MMORPGs, we have fully 3D worlds with avatars and of course, we have virtual reality and augmented reality and that also ties to my ping pong experience, so like the latest iteration of Pong, if you will.

He said, if you assume any rate of improvement at all, pretty soon we'll get to the point where the resolution is so good that you can't really distinguish between what is physical and what is virtual. The idea was put out there by a philosopher a few years ago from Oxford, named Nick Bostrom. He came up with the simulation argument. We can go into that in some depth later. Basically, he said that if any civilization ever got to that point, which I call the simulation point where it can basically create a world like the matrix, then it's more likely that we are inside a simulation than not.

The argument basically went that the number of simulated worlds and the number of beings in those worlds will be way more than base reality, which might only be one. Even the number of beings in base reality would be less than the number of simulated beings, because you can just create another billion, another trillion beings by having more computing power, right? Statistically speaking, if you are being, you're more likely to be a simulated being than a real being.

Those two ideas I think gave much more popularity and discussion to the simulation hypothesis. When the matrix came out literally 20, 21 years ago now, it was considered straight science fiction. Today, many people are taking it seriously. I mean, not everybody believes in the idea, but people are at least discussing it in academia, scientists, certainly in Silicon Valley and technologists are discussing it. That led me into saying, “Okay. Well, what are the stages of technology we would need to get to the simulation point?”

About a third of the book is about looking at video games past, but also looking at how the technology might develop to get there. Then the argument goes, if we can get there and my estimate is we can get there in maybe a 100 years or so to what I call stage 10, the simulation point, then it's very likely that civilization on another planet, in somewhere in the galaxy with a 1,000 years longer than us, or 10,000 years or a 100,000 years could certainly get there, which means they've already gotten there, which means we're probably inside a simulation already.

[0:12:14.6] MB: The core chain of logic that's at the root of the simulation hypothesis is basically and correct me if I'm misunderstanding this, but it's basically this idea of if you have – we’ll just use round numbers. You have a 100 “base reality” and 10 of them get to the simulation point, then those 10 civilizations could essentially produce an infinite number, or an asymptotically approaching infinite number of simulations, and so there's infinitely more simulations than there are base realities. Is that the core logical construction that the hypothesis sits around? Is that a correct understanding of it?

[0:12:47.9] RV: That's one of the core propositions. That is we tend to refer that as the simulation argument that was put out by Nick Bostrom. A lot of folks in academia when they discuss simulation, that is the core argument that they're discussing related to that. I actually like to make a distinction that there are actually two versions of the simulation hypothesis. There's the NPC version in which case, we are all non-player characters as in video games.

If you think about that core argument, that's what it's implying, right? Because if we're creating billions and trillions of beings, they're all basically AI and bits running on a computer. Then there is what I like to think of as the matrix version, or I call it the RPG version of the simulation hypothesis. In that version, you have a player that exists outside the game who is playing an avatar, a role playing, just like in The Matrix. Neo and Morpheus who was named after the Greek God of Dreams, existed outside of The Matrix, but they were so fully associated with a character in there that they forgot that they had this other part of themselves. That's how immersive it was. It was enough to make you forget.

That's a slightly different variation. Now they're not necessarily mutually exclusive, but I like to make that distinction, because I think it gives a different perspective on a simulation and because the arguments around the idea that we are not in a base reality have gone back thousands of years. It's not necessarily a new argument to the world's religions, but going as far back as Plato, who gave the allegory of the cave, right?

He said that if we are all chained inside one wall of a cave and we're looking at the other wall, which faces the entrance to the cave and the only thing we see on that wall are shadows from the light outside when people do things outside, to us we think reality is the shadows on the wall, but that's not really the reality. If somebody actually were to break free of their chains and go outside the cave, they could come back and tell the rest of us this is what it was like. Of course, no one would believe them at first because we all come to believe that reality is the shadows on the wall.

That type of argument has been presented in many different forms over a long time. Actually, I like to say that it forms the basis of most of the world's religions as well. Those tend to tie better to the RPG version of the simulation hypothesis.

[0:15:18.7] MB: I want to get into some of the spiritual traditions that really support this thesis and also some of the really interesting connections within physics, because all that stuff is so fascinating. Before we do, there's a couple questions that I just want to understand about the simulation hypothesis that don't necessarily make sense to me that I want to wrap my head around.

Starting with the RPG version, which I think makes more sense to me than the idea that consciousness would arise within simulations itself, the RPG version, the tenet of that is basically that there are beings in the base reality, but then they're immersed in a simulation. Is that correct?

[0:15:52.4] RV: Right. Just like we might be playing Fortnite and you have an avatar and I have an avatar in-game. Now to the avatars, it looks like that's the world, right? The 3D rendered world. But really, those of us outside the game understand that that's only the rendered world, but there's another world beyond that that is watching or outside of the render world.

[0:16:12.4] MB: In that instance, is the idea that the beings or the consciousness and this is where it gets so interesting is that the conscious beings within the simulation, are they the same as the beings in the base reality, or are they independently arising consciousness within the simulation?

[0:16:27.0] RV: Well, I like to say that they're not necessarily mutually exclusive when we talk about the NPC version and the RPG version, right? Just like if I was playing PUBG or League of Legends, I will have some characters which are associated with the player, PCs, player characters, and some characters which are NPCs. You can have both of those in the same world, right?

The best-selling video game of all time is actually The Sims, when you don't consider free downloads, but you look at paid games. Within The Sims, they'll have these characters. You're playing the character, but there's also these little cut-scenes and little things that they do on their own, right? It's really a blending of the two, I think. It depends on how far down the access you want to go. If you go all the way towards the matrix side, then the player outside the game is completely unaware of the outside reality and is completely immersed and is totally controlling and has – it's his consciousness, or her consciousness that is controlling the character.

They think the consciousness is limited for the period of time that you’re plugged into the game. Totally on the flip side, if you go all the way the other extreme on the axis, the NPCs have their own version of consciousness, or they think they do, right? This gets to what, a famous philosopher, David Chalmers, called the hard problem of consciousness, right? It's something that science doesn't understand. In the materialistic view, consciousness arises simply from a collection of neurons.

In that point of view, we should be able to simulate those neurons and silicon and therefore, we will have what we call consciousness. Consciousness seems to be a lot more complicated than that according to a lot of different people and that consciousness must exist for us to be talking about doing this stuff in the first place. In that model, there was a physicist named Max Planck, who discovered the Planck Length, which is the smallest measurable distance which many people now refer to as the pixel of our “physical world,” who said that who felt that consciousness was primary and matter was derivative. There are others who feel that matter is primary and consciousness is derivative.

What's interesting about discussing the simulation hypothesis as we get into that same argument, but we have these different ends of this axis of consciousness, if you will, and of control and freewill and deciding on what type of game you think it is.

[0:18:55.3] MB: Yeah. This may all devolve back to just the debate about the primacy of matter versus consciousness and which came first. We may explore that more deeply. I want to stick with this, because there's two questions I have about the simulation hypothesis that I haven't been able to really understand. One of them is let's assume we're in the matrix side of it for now. We'll put aside the question of whether or not consciousness can arise within a simulation via the NPCs becoming conscious, with AI becoming conscious or whatever and just focus on the base reality. The idea would basically be you and I are beings in a base reality, but we're in a simulation, we just don't know it. Is that the contention of that side of the equation?

[0:19:33.1] RV: Yeah, that's exactly right. That is the RPG version or the matrix version, right? That we have been deceived by the world around us into thinking that it's a real physical world.

[0:19:44.8] MB: In that world, the thing that I struggle with on that side of the equation is if you have to have a base reality being to be in a simulation to begin with, doesn't that basically collapse back all the math about how many billions of simulations there are and basically say, well, it doesn't really matter, because to be in a simulation, you still have to be in a base reality, and so the whole thing unwinds on itself. Does that make sense?

[0:20:07.2] RV: Yeah. Well, I think that does cut at the heart of the issue, right? What most people don't realize is that the simulation argument that's commonly used, this idea of multiple worlds and having many more simulated worlds than a physical world. It relies on having lots and lots of NPCs, right?

As I said, they're not necessarily mutually exclusive. It's possible that each person has their own subjective world, which gets back to this philosophical idea of a brain-in-a-vat, or gets back to even Descartes’ idea. He said back in the 1500s I guess or whenever it was that if he was being deceived by an evil demon and sent all these impressions of what we think is the physical world, he wouldn't know what reality is. The only thing he would know is he thinks, therefore – he goes, “I think, therefore I am.” Then later, he revised that to say it could be a dream, or a dream-like reality. We really get into the discussions of what is the nature of reality, what is the nature of consciousness.

Dreams is an interesting area, because if you look at my book, I lay out that the stages of the simulation technology to build something like the matrix, well it turns out we already have a lot of that technology in our heads. It's biological. We all dream every night and we create these mini-simulations. While we're in them, they seem real. There's lots of oddities, but there are all these NPCs who are characters we created in our dreams. We forget that there's a part of us that's laying in bed in physical reality.

I mean, now we're getting into a couple of other areas, like the Tibetan Buddhist traditions who teach a form of lucid dreaming called [inaudible 0:21:47.1] yoga, where you learn to wake up and realize in the dream that this is a dream and you remember that there's a physical part of you that's outside the dream world. Then they contend that consciousness helps you to realize when we're awake that there is a reality outside of this one, that you can also learn to remember that you have forgotten, like getting back to the RPG version that you're talking about.

Yeah, I mean been getting back to your original question, I think depending on which side you like to go on, you can use that argument, or it becomes less convincing the more you get to the RPG side of it.

[0:22:24.3] MB: This is why I love this topic because I mean, to me it really probably does come back to this whole debate about the primacy of whether matter or consciousness came first and the whole Cartesian doubt. If I'm thinking – if I am an AI simulation NPC in a simulation, but I think, do I still exist? I mean, I think the answer is what's the difference between that and living in a base reality?

[0:22:44.8] RV: Right. It starts to become really fuzzy. I started to think about these issues back when I was watching Star Trek The Next Generation. There was an episode where they had a holodeck adventure of Sherlock Holmes. There was a character who was Holmes’ nemesis called Professor Moriarty. Data I think was playing Sherlock Holmes. This character was super smart, even though he was a simulated character in the holodeck, which meant he was a hologram.

He figured out that some of the characters in there were simulated like himself and some actually existed out there, like outside the cave, or outside the holodeck, or outside the simulation we would say today. He wanted to go out there, but he couldn't because he was a simulated character. It was more like an NPC.

This cuts to the question of the Turing test, which Alan – mathematician Alan Turing put out back in the 50s. He called it the imitation game. The idea was if you were talking to a computer behind curtain A and a person behind curtain B and you can't figure out which one is the computer and which one's the person, then that computer has passed the Turing test, or the imitation game. Today, we would say it's an AI, not a physical computer. We would use voice or text messages. Back then, he used teletype in his example.

Then you say well, it basically appears as if they are conscious and real, then are they? This gets to some really fundamental questions and these are big debates that we don't have answers to right now. In the book, I like to just raise these questions and give the different perspectives. Then that's where it also ties back to the religious idea as well.

There are many people who were sworn atheists who after thinking about the simulation hypothesis, realized well, here's a more scientific and technological basis for what the religions have been telling us all along, that the physical world is not the real world. That of course ties into the physics as well.

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[0:26:20.1] MB: The example of the Sherlock Holmes hologram coming to life, I mean, again we circle back and we're circling round really the fundamental question, because is that being in that particular example is it actually conscious, or is it just a reflection of consciousness that's just a bunch of algorithms running that to us, appears to be conscious, right? Is it actually truly experiencing reality, or does it just look like it from a human observer’s perspective?

[0:26:43.5] RV: Right. That gets back to the question of what is consciousness, right? Which is a very difficult question to answer. Is it having subjective experiences? Now the question is if you and I are playing Pokemon Go or we're playing Fortnite, do our avatars have consciousness? At one level, you might say no. On the other hand, we're playing those characters, right?

If you were so fully associated with that character that you forgot, there was a part of you outside, your conscious experience would be the conscious experience of that character. That's why I find the RPG version quite fascinating. Like I said, if you talk to a lot of other academics, they would focus only on the NPC version, because that's the accepted view within the materialist worldview that's prevalent with a lot of scientists today. I find the RPG first quite interesting to discuss for that reason.

[0:27:34.0] MB: I want to come back to the NPC version now, because I have a couple other questions about that that I don't really fully grasp. One of them at the simplest level to me is – I think there's two. One is let's say, there's infinite simulations basically that then get created by a number of base reality civilizations. To me, saying that there's an infinite number of simulations and then saying that – and by the way, those simulations happen to have consciousness spontaneously arise within them is a massive logical leap. I just don't understand how those two things are even related necessarily and how that gets bridged from – that becomes one thought in a lot of people's description of the simulation hypothesis. To me, those are fundamentally different issues, which is can consciousness arise within a simulation? If so, is it the same thing as real consciousness?

I mean, I know we're getting back to the same questions. To me, that jump really seems like a big logical leap between just because there's millions and billions of simulations, why are they conscious simulations? Or why is consciousness within those simulations?

[0:28:32.1] RV: Right. Well, there is a concept and Bostrom gets into this in his original paper, are you living in a computer simulation, called substrate independence. The idea is that consciousness is really a function of the computation of the human brain. Therefore, if you can model all of those connections, you can then put those in silicon, like it doesn't have to be in a biological medium. What we're learning with computer science in general is that a lot of the other sciences are boiling down to algorithms.

A lot of biology is really about algorithms for how to reproduce, whether it's genes, or cells, or organisms, trees. There's a lot of fractal algorithms that are used within video games to recreate the look and feel of the natural world. There's this idea that much of the physical universe actually comes down to information. There's a famous physicist named John Wheeler who was one of the last to work with Einstein and others. I think he was at Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies. He said that physics went through three phases in his life.

Originally, they thought everything was a particle and these particles followed the laws of Newtonian physics. Then he thought everything was a field and that's what the quantum revolution came about, quantum mechanics and they started to model everything as a field. Then he said, I think he did this later in his life, 70s or 80s, in 1970s or 80s, that everything was actually information.

They came to conclusion and the more physicists try to find this thing called matter, the more they can't find it, right? Even if you open up a molecule and then you open up the atoms, it's mostly empty space. Then you go inside the nucleus and yeah, there's protons and neutrons and we open those up and there's electrons. Really, the only thing they could be certain of was there are properties of these so-called particles. He came up with this famous phrase called ‘it from bit’. He said that everything in the end boils down to ones and zeros, so boils down to bits of information.

It really isn't a physical world per se. There’s no such thing as matter, there's only information. I think coming back to the simulation argument, the idea is that consciousness can be a type of information and that information can then be reproduced and it may be within this, the NPC version that what we're saying is that consciousness doesn't really exist. It's just a collection of that information.

Now we're getting into big metaphysical questions and time probably more to what the different religions talk about when we say what is consciousness. Is there a soul that has consciousness that exists outside of the simulation? In the Eastern traditions in Buddhism and Hinduism, you have this idea that you download into a physical body, you play that role for a period of time and then you upload at the end of that back to outside of the physical body, back to wherever that other area is, whatever the real world is and you have a set of information that is about what happened to you in this life and what choices you made and where does that live? It lives somewhere outside the rendered world. I like to say it lives on a cloud server. We're talking about a different kind of cloud, than we talk about when we're talking about our physical computers on the Amazon Cloud, for example.

In the end, a lot of it comes down to information. Actually, turns out within Eastern traditions there's also this debate where as in Hinduism, there's this idea that there's an eternal soul and it is the one that is downloading and reincarnating. Within Buddhism, if you really look closely at what's being said, they actually say that there is no soul, it's just a bag of karma. It's just information. That is what is reincarnating. Once all of that list of information goes down to zero, then that particular individual dissolves and disappears and there's no reason for them to get reincarnated again and again. Anyway, I know I've gotten a little out here into these metaphysical areas, but I think when you start talking about consciousness in the RPG version, they all are related.

[0:32:44.2] MB: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think the fundamental thing that this really boils down to is the metaphysical question of is the primacy of matter or consciousness? Which one presupposes the other, which one comes first and does consciousness arise out of matter, or is it independent of matter? Because to me, it seems like you're basically saying that Bostrom's entire thesis boils down to this idea that matter creates matter or information creates consciousness. If you have an infinite number of simulations, then they would theoretically have enough information to create consciousness versus the perspective that if you believe that consciousness exists outside of the physical has something beyond matter, then there's necessarily no way that those consciousness is could arise within simulations.

[0:33:28.2] RV: Right. That's generally speaking the gist of what I'm saying, although it could be that consciousness is based on information, which is not necessarily matter, right? The reason you and I are able to talk over say, Skype is because what we perceive as sounds is really being represented as bits of information, right? It almost doesn't matter if that is stored as physical bits on say, my Mac, you might be on a PC, or you might be on a phone. You might have different types of hardware.

The idea boils down to this idea that simulated beings can be represented as information, whether they're conscious or not, that gets into a bigger discussion. It's not necessary that they become conscious. They might think they are. Again, we're back in circles into this big issue. This is also the fundamental issue that has come up with quantum physics. I think it was Niels Bohr who said that if you're not shocked by quantum mechanics, then you haven't really understood it, right? Because it also gets into this same issue, what they found with the double slit experiment, if I can get into that a little bit.

[0:34:36.0] MB: Yeah, I'd love to talk about that.

[0:34:37.8] RV: Many years ago was that you would think that the particle has to go through slit A or slit B, if it was a particle. When they send beams through, it looks like there's an interference pattern and that the choice of whether the particle goes through slit A or slit B isn't made until someone observes the screen that is beyond this list.

Now probably an easier way to understand that is to use the example of Schrodinger's cat, which is this hypothetical cat that is in a box with some radioactive material. After an hour, the cat has a 50% chance of being alive, or a 50% chance of being dead. What we would think, I mean, what I would think, common sense tells us that the cat is either alive or dead. We just don't know, because we haven't looked in the box yet. When we look in the box, we'll know whether it was alive or dead.

What quantum mechanics is telling us and experiments seem to confirm this is that it's not the case that the choice is already made. The cat is both alive and dead and it's not until someone observes it, or someone records that the choice is made. In one interpretation of quantum mechanics, that's called the collapse of the probability wave. We have this wave of probabilities. Only one of those is rendered, if you will. Now that's quite interesting to me, because as a video game designer, if you had looked at back in the 80s how video games were built, when I first started playing, creating games on my Apple 2 computer and you asked somebody, “Could you do a fully immersive 3D world like PUBG, like Counter-Strike Go?”

The answer would be no, because that would be way too many pixels to keep track of. What happened in the intervening years is that we came up with 3D modeling and we came up with optimization techniques. In fact, we talked about the interplay of video games and technology. Well, the history of video games from a technical perspective is really all about optimization. That's why they're so intertwined, because computing power has gone up and algorithms have gotten better, allowing us to compute more and more to the point where we can render everything. Now if you may remember a video game called Doom –

[0:36:44.9] MB: Of course.

[0:36:45.4] RV: - which came out in the 1990s and that was one of the very first games that became really popular that had this first-person perspective and was multiplayer, right? It was doing a 3D rendering and it was sending that information out over the Internet with their deathmatch mode, I think it was called.

That idea was you only render that which can be observed by your avatar. That is the fundamental technique. That is what rendering engines are all about today. When we build MMORPGs today, we have a rendering engine, we have a physics engine, we have a quest engine, we have all these different engines that are sub-systems within building the game itself. The rendering engine is the key. 

The golden rule in video games is render only that which is observed as an optimization technique. In quantum physics, it seems like the golden rule is also, only render that which is observed. This is something that doesn't make a lot of sense, and so physicists are jumping through hoops to try to explain why this is. In fact, what happened for a while is they just gave up trying to explain why this happened. They just said, well, there's a term called shut up and compute. Just figure out what the equations say. Physics doesn’t have a lot of success in that. There's quantum cryptography. There's a lot of other applications of it, but without thinking about the broader meaning.

My big question is why does this exist? Why would we exist in a physical universe where things only get rendered when observed? Turns out, it's probably an optimization technique. Quantum indeterminacy is an optimization technique, just like 3D rendering is an optimization technique. If you think about how that works, you and I could be in the same scene, our avatars would be in the same scene, but it turns out there's no share of rendering of the world. The world is being rendered from my avatar’s perspective on my computer and it's being rendered from your avatar’s perspective on your computer. It's very possible that the physical world is also being rendered this way.

Now you're seeing even within the physics world that fundamental question is still there. There are a lot of physicists who don't like this idea that you need an observer. They came up with the idea of parallel universes. They said, “Well, you don't really need an observer. What you really need is that the universe splits itself with every quantum decision,” so every nanosecond there are new universes being split off again and again. That ties to the parallel universes theory as a way to get around this idea that you have a conscious observer and that's only rendering what that conscious observer is seeing.

My point is that in both cases, whether you need a conscious observer, or you have this idea of parallel universes that are splitting off, if you think about how that would work, well in nature, you can't have a tree that just clones itself, or a planet that clones itself in an instance, right? There's nothing in the physical or materialist view that can do that at such a large level. There are biological processes, there are physical processes, there are algorithms. Really, it comes down to information. In computer science, we can clone all the information about a world easily, right? It's called saving your game state. We do it all the time.

In fact, many processors have a base operation that is optimized for copying bits from one place to the next. Even if that were true that it's most likely the physical world is information, rather than being physical if it's being cloned. Then that gets to another question of whether these are all just probabilities and not actual physical worlds, and so that leads us down another rabbit hole, and then the physics world.

[0:40:21.4] MB: Coming back to this question of the double slit experiment. It's interesting, you talk about the rendering side of that. To me, I focus more on the observing side of it in the sense of I've heard the double slit experiment used many different times, many different arguments around the idea that consciousness almost must necessarily exist outside of matter for there to be an observer effect in quantum physics. To me, the question is not necessarily how is it being rendered and what's the implication of the rendering, but rather who is doing the observing and what is that?

[0:40:53.4] RV: Right. That's one interpretation of quantum physics and mechanics and is this idea that you need an observer. That tends to be the one that I personally gravitate towards is that you need to have a conscious observer. There are some people who say, “Well, you just need to record it,” as opposed to having a conscious observer. There's a measurement device.

Then of course, how do you know that it's been measured until somebody, some conscious observer actually looks at that measurement, right? It gets back to a lot of interesting issues. There's actually another version of the double slit experiment called the delayed choice experiment that is even more fascinating.

[0:41:28.3] MB: Yeah. That was really cool.

[0:41:29.4] RV: Yeah. What that is saying is that not only is matter not what we think it is, but time is not what we think it is. The idea is that even after the choice is made, whether it goes to slit A or slit B, another choice is made, or the particle travels a certain period of time. A good way to talk about this is to think about a galaxy that's sending light towards us. Suppose there's a black hole that's maybe, let's say a 1,000 light years away from us, maybe a million light years away from that galaxy. The light has to make a decision whether to go left or right. We have telescopes here on earth that are capturing the light that went to the left, versus the light that went to the right.

Now from our perspective, the decision about whether to go to the left or right of the black hole would have been made a 1,000 years ago, right? In a materialist worldview, that would make sense that the world is rendered, it physically exists, all those choices are made. What the delayed choice experiment is telling us and they’ve done versions of this is that the choice isn't made until someone or something observes that light, like the telescopes in this example.

It's almost saying, a 1,000 years ago it went left or right, but the choice is actually being made now, which brings up this question of what is history. Because if that history isn't determined until now, is it possible that the past can be changed just like the future? This gets into all kinds of fundamental issues, like false memories.

Stephen Hawking did a lecture at the Harvard couple years before he passed away, where he talked about information is being destroyed in a black hole. Therefore, you can't be sure of the past. If determinism breaks down, we were used to thinking of a straight line, A cause, B cause, C. If some of that information is suspect or lost and we can't be sure what was there, then it means we have to question our entire history.

Now it starts to look like we're in a Philip K. Dick novel, where we're characters with false memories for example, or Blade Runner, Androids. You get into all kinds of interesting issues going down that path, but the delayed choice experiment has been verified. It was a team of Italian scientists that not only had this particle make its choice of slit errors, slit B, it then went to a satellite a 1,000 miles away and they verified that that choice is not made until then which is in the future. They verified that the future actually is affecting the past.

Anyway, all this makes more sense in the context of a simulated reality, where you can change any information about any of the history, because it’s just information that's stored in the cloud server somewhere, than in a physical reality where things happen in one way that is a deterministic material universe.

[0:44:16.7] MB: It's so fascinating, because to me all of those experiments showcase almost the primacy of consciousness over matter, which in some senses would then come back if we cascade that all the way back to the earlier conversations about the NPC model and so forth, would basically essentially negate the idea that a simulation could generate consciousness. Not saying that there is a physical reality that exists outside of consciousness, because I think that that's what to me the conclusion of all of that quantum physics stuff is is basically, we don't really know what physical reality is or isn't, but we know for sure that we're conscious and that when we observe it, our consciousness can interplay and impact at a quantum level.

To me, that means that consciousness doesn't just spontaneously arise. It's almost like a property or something that's a part of the universe fundamentally. I don't think that it could just crop up in a billion random NPCs in a simulation. Does that make sense?

[0:45:03.4] RV: Yeah. No, it makes sense. It actually ties to what the world's religions have been telling us all along. I mean, I like to joke that religions are started when someone peaked outside the simulation. They've been telling us that consciousness exists outside the physical world. In the Eastern traditions, they've been telling us very much that it's an illusion or Maya, that everything we see around us is reflections and a very clear mirrors, what the Buddha said, for example.

Even in the Western religions, there's this idea that we have a soul that comes in and there's an eternal soul, which we tie to consciousness in this. It's not necessary that any one religion, I think necessarily has it right, but they're all telling us this idea that we exist outside of this physical reality and that we beam in and that we only have a view of a part of our consciousness while we're here.

[0:45:57.0] MB: Such a fascinating topic. I know Riz that we could probably talk for another three hours about this, but we're running out of time. I'm curious, for listeners who want to and I don't know if it's possible with this conversation, but for listeners who want to take action on something that we've talked about today who are interested in exploring this more, what would one piece of homework be that you would give them to take action on what we talked about?

[0:46:17.6] RV: First would be to get the book, right? The Simulation Hypothesis. It's available on Amazon, elsewhere. I have a couple chapters for free on my website zenentrepreneur.com. The other thing is I would say, sometimes people say, “Well, why does it matter to me if we're in a simulation or not?” If we exist outside the simulation, why would we want to be inside? I'd say, well, why do we play video games? Part of the reason is that we like to have experiences that we can't have outside of the game. I can't fly on a dragon and slay orcs in this physical reality. I can do it inside a simulated reality.

It's possible that we are setting up this game for ourselves and that a lot of the challenges that we face in this life, because some people say, “Well, that's all depressing.” For in a simulation, I’d say not necessarily. Some people say, “Well, I'd like to have just myself be a trillionaire and not have any obstacles, or really any issues.” Turns out, that wouldn't make for a very exciting game, right? If you think of the challenges in your life as achievements and quests where you need to level up and that is your quest roster that you're manifesting around you, it can give you a different perspective.

On the one hand, not taking so seriously. On the other hand, the challenges are the point, right? For your character level up in a video game, if there were no challenges, it would be a boring video game and the same thing is true with life. That would be my advices think of life as a video game.

[0:47:42.7] MB: Great piece of advice. In many times today, I feel we've hit on some really cool old-school Alan Watts lessons that he shared many, many years ago. Either way, Riz, this has been a fascinating conversation and I really wanted to thank you so much for coming on the show.

[0:47:56.1] RV: Sure. Thanks so much for having me on. This was a lot of fun.

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