 Hi everyone, I have an interview coming up in a minute with Riz virk The author of the simulation hypothesis and a guy who keeps popping up more and more these days in all the right places Super smart super accomplished with a fresh new very imaginative and very challenging angle on This simulation are we living in a simulation hypothesis? He comes at things from a very advanced computer MIT cutting-edge gaming virtual reality AI Perspective and that really brings a lot to the table. Here are some clips from the interview If you can do it, you will do it and the Luddites never Really win do they? Yeah, I mean if that's one thing that we generally learned in history is that if something can be done Technologically, it's likely that it will be done when you talk about simulation It's the kind of thing that you know I lay out in in my book the ten stages to the simulation point So these are stages of technology that we would have to develop and of course I look at it from a video game perspective So stage one is the creation of the first text adventure games stage two are graphical games like Pac-Man Etc getting to virtual reality and augmented reality where we are today But what I like about the simulation Hypothesis is that it provides a bridge between the materialist worldview and the worldview of the mystics and people who think that Consciousness is fundamental and that's why you know, I'm glad you the first thing you brought up was this distinction between neo and agent Smith Because that really is the fundamental tension that I tried to explore in this book is that you know, is consciousness just reproduction of neurons Which in which case they can be a consciousness can be reproduced or is it in fact a conscious entity? Outside that's playing a role or playing a game But that's something that I can discuss, you know with physicists and people at MIT and I can discuss it with Buddhist monks And I can discuss it with you know, biblical scholars as well because you know There's lots of aspects to AI and this idea that the world around us isn't quite the real world Right that perhaps there is another world that we cannot see Same thing with spoon bending right people say it doesn't exist, but many people have seen it so, you know, I think it's showing us that the material world is not quite what we think it is but It's so far out of the paradigms So getting back to Jacques valet and UFOs, you know, I had lunch with them recently and he told me he investigated a case Where there was supposed the UFO and they said it came down at a 45 degree angle and it actually left some marks on the ground And so there was some physical evidence So Jacques went back after the original investigation and he looked at me He said you said it went at a 45 degree angle. That means it would have had to go through the trees They said, yeah, but we don't want to tell anybody that because nobody would believe us Which gets back to you know, is this a virtual phenomenon that gets materialized when it's needed And it's something that we see and so, you know, I think that's where kind of explaining how all that works is is The task that's ongoing Stay with us for skeptico Welcome to skeptico where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers thinkers and their critics I'm your host Alex a carous and today We welcome the amazing Riz virk to skeptico Riz is a super successful entrepreneur and video game creator Who became a super successful high-tech investor and a super successful movie producer and okay This is getting a little ridiculous, but it's all true folks One more throw in there super successful author of several best-selling books Including one that we're going to talk about today the simulation hypothesis. So Riz fantastic to have you here. Thanks so much for joining me and welcome to skeptico Thanks so much for having me out you know the simulation hypothesis is something that All of my listeners are going to be familiar with but jumping right into the middle of this not wasting any time one of the things that I thought was interesting about what you did in your book is I love how you kind of brought in the idea that there's really more than one simulation Hypothesis out there and I thought was particularly interesting the way you gave it from a kind of matrix perspective and difference between Neo and Agent Smith so jumping right in the middle of this Do you want to kind of tell us why there are really more than one simulation hypothesis? And how will you might break that down as a video game guy? Yeah, sure And so you know the simulation hypothesis is the idea that we live inside the computer simulation Which as you said many of your listeners have probably already heard of and are familiar with the concept So it was considered pretty much science fiction for many years, especially when the matrix came out But that is very much the most popular. I think incarnation of that idea And so I like to use matrix references as much as possible just because it's a easy way for people to understand that And so I break it down and that there's actually two different versions of the simulation hypothesis they're not entirely mutually exclusive and I call those the NPC version or the non-player character version of the simulation hypothesis where everyone is an AI and So this would be I guess you would say this is what the materialist view of the simulation hypothesis would be That consciousness arises from simulating neurons on a computer and therefore everyone is a computer program Or shall we say just a computer program? The other version of the simulation hypothesis I like to call it the RPG version or the role-playing game version is where players exist outside of the game and then they play an avatar Inside the game. So very much like I might have a character in World of Warcraft or in Fortnite or in the matrix and so I like to use the The distinction between Neo who exists outside the matrix and Morpheus who was named after the Greek god of dreams Lawrence fishburn Who also exists outside the matrix versus agent Smith who is simply a computer program? And even though he's in the simulation appears to have godlike powers within the simulation as well He is just an AI and so what most people don't realize is that when a lot of academics are talking about the simulation hypothesis They are talking about the NPC version The agent Smith version. That's exactly right. Yeah, and the reason is if you go back to you know One of the events that made this a popular topic of conversation was Nick Bostrom's paper In 2003 are you living in a computer simulation? He's a philosopher at Oxford and you know He laid out three possibilities one is that a civilization never reaches what I like to call the simulation point Which is the point at which we can create a simulation or a video game That's so realistic that it can't be a distinguished from physical reality The second is that it reaches that point, but it never creates any simulations and the third Possibility is that we are most likely living in a simulation And he says that is because if a civilization ever gets there anywhere in the galaxy Then they will create lots and lots of similar simulations Inside those simulations will be billions if not trillions of beings in each one And you might have billions of those so if you just add up all of the beings in the universe There's more likely to be more simulated beings than there are You know beings who actually have a player associated with them multiple agent Smiths like we see and then Multiple simulations and one of the things that I really thought was was quite you know Great that you drilled this home is the if you can You will kind of thing And I think it plays into so much of what we've experienced both Not just in computer technology, but in the advancement of technology and the advancement of civilization If you can do it you will do it and the Luddites never Really win do they? Yeah, I mean if that's one thing that we've generally learned in history is that if something can be done technologically It's likely that it will be done And you know when you talk about simulation It's the kind of thing that you know I lay out in in my book the 10 stages to the simulation point So these are stages of technology that we would have to develop and of course I look at it from a video game perspective So stage one is the creation of the first text adventure games stage two are graphical games like pac-man etc Getting to virtual reality and augmented reality where we are today And by stage 10 we would get to downloadable consciousness where we can actually Get right into a Character that's based on silicon And that might come through brain computer interfaces. So if you remember the matrix Neo had that wire connected to the back of his head And so with the simulation hypothesis the idea is if anyone ever gets there then it's likely they've already Made many many different simulations. So I think you know that that that's a really interesting point And it's a good way to think about You know how things might evolve It's kind of eye-opening for people too because you know, some people will will buy the concept that we will get there And we will create realistic simulations But making that leap to well, then somebody else has already created one or more is It is a conceptual leap Now we'll come back to this in a minute because you know, the one thing I also think or the kind of thing I would interject in there is I think there's a lot of different permutations and combinations along that path that are interesting too including augmented Consciousness augmented reality all those things and I don't know that it really breaks down as just those two but Interesting stuff to talk about but let me jump to another topic that again is a real head-scratcher but adds so much to the conversation and you bring this To the fore in a really cool way because you do have this super great background in computer game development and AI and that's this idea that You only render what you need And then you do a fantastic job of linking that back to like physics like the most Important experiment in quantum physics ever, you know like the double slit collapse the wave function thing Tell us You'd beautifully link those two together. Tell us about that Yeah, you know One of the reasons I wrote this book and and you know about a third of the book is about the technology about a third is about the physics Including what we're talking about here and a third is about religions and consciousness and we can talk about that in a minute But you know when I look at the really big mysteries in quantum physics The question that doesn't get answered is why do these exist? Right? And so, you know with the idea of the double slit experiment There's this idea that a particle will go through one slit or the other But you don't know that until somebody is there to observe it And probably a better way to explain that is through Schrodinger's cat, right? The cat is either alive or dead and common sense tells us That it's one or the other but quantum physics tells us it's both possibilities until and unless Somebody actually opens up the box to look at that cat, right? And so that reminded me a lot of video games and how we develop video games So if you were to ask a video game developer in the 80s Can you render a fully 3d world like world of warcraft or like fortnight? Or like call of duty and the answer is no There isn't enough computing power to render all of those pixels and to keep track of every single one of those On you know the 286's or whatever laptops or We had back in those days and yet today We have fully 3d virtual worlds that are rendered on your laptop or are rendered within goggles And the reason we can do that is because of optimization Right and one of the first games to really do this was doom back in the 1990s which became popular in college campuses And if you look at doom, you'll see it's a first person perspective And they shift to the left or right so they optimize and they only render Those pixels which can be observed by your avatar All right, so that is the golden rule for optimization Which allows for what I what we call conditional rendering in the world of video games Now looking at it, you know as a video game designer, that's a lot Like what quantum indeterminacy Is like in in the physical world. I mean why Do things only get rendered When they're observed, right? Why is it that the the particle makes a decision At some point when somebody looks at the interference pattern and only then has it gone through one slit or the other Oh, and so, you know, it seems like the golden rule in quantum physics is Only render pieces of the world which can be observed So so that's one of the big linkages, you know that I like to talk about So if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there Well, we wouldn't render the sound of the tree. So there's kind of no need to go there, right? Right exactly. So there's this idea of the rendered world And then there's this idea of information in the cloud So there might be some information about that tree in the cloud But if nobody is logged into that particular scene in the video game, right Then there's no reason to render it. So this brings up an actually bigger question Which is is there a shared rendered world? That we are all seeing at the same time And you know, one of the pictures I provide in the book is a picture from a game in the 80s called kings quest And kings quest was kind of a 2d adventure game And what happens is all the render all the pixels of every scene are there on disk They've already been rendered and when you move your character around they just you just move over the pixels And you show the next set of pixels Well, that was how we used to do video games and that was very memory intensive Now we don't have a shared rendered world We only render the part that you're seeing and we only render the part that somebody else is seeing from their computer So each of us has a rendering device, which is our computer or our phone And it's kind of like you and I having this conversation, right? And we are not in the same room And yet it seems like we're having a conversation because each of our machines is rendering a set of pixels Based on information that's being sent from the server Now the materialist point of view is that there is a shared rendered world Right that the pixels of the world are already there and we just move around it And the big mysteries and quantum physics are saying is that that's not necessarily the case and we don't know why But so much of computer science and video game development is about optimization and compression And it turns out, you know, these are really good explanations for why these things might actually exist That's fantastic and it leads into this whole question of materialism versus idealism Philosophically, but it's just the same questions. We've been talking about it probably 200 shows on skeptico about consciousness But what you're really bringing To the table, I think is this fresh perspective that people are already getting a sense of that When we look at it from this cutting edge AI artificial intelligence information systems perspective I swear you almost make me want to come back around and re-examine materialism Even though I think I already know that it's kind of Completely out the window and it's been falsified by every experiment that's ever been done I mean every experiment that's ever been done on the double slit experiment is confirming of it, right? There's no disconfirming experiments. So they run it one way then they run it another way and then they Reflect it over everything they do it always comes out the same way. It's just really really hard to accept And I'm wondering if at the end of the day Do you really come around to Being friendly to the materialist idea or as this quote suggests quote from your book the most important aspect of the simulation hypothesis May not be scientific at all and what I took that to mean is If we really take this stuff seriously Then it brings us to the point of whether we can really measure Anything at all and if we can't measure anything then Isn't science kind of Obsoleted in a way Well, you know, I view science as trying to discover the rules of the physics engine of the game, right? And when we make video games, you know, we have a rendering engine We have a physics engine that controls how you move and there's some kind of a design or layout that's inherent in the system And so, you know, I view most scientists still working on trying to discover those rules But they haven't necessarily asked the big questions, right? And you know, even within quantum physics, there's the The famous quote of just shut up and calculate, right? Don't try to think about what it means And, you know, the double slit experiment In various versions gets weirder and weirder And from my perspective, one of the weirdest aspects of it is the delayed choice Experiment, right, which is this idea that it's not just a matter of whether it went through slit a or slit b But something else happens down the road another choice that happens in the future And you know, probably a better way to explain this is if you have light from a star coming Or a galaxy coming at us, there's a black hole in the middle. Does the light go to the left or the right of the black hole? Well, if that black hole is a thousand light years away from us, that decision was made a thousand years ago But the delayed choice experiment is telling us that It doesn't actually get made until there's an observer Looking at the light. So now you have this situation where it's not just a matter of slit a or slit b, but The whole past Can be changed From today from the present moment, right? And so this sounds, you know, much more like what the mystics have been telling us all along That the present moment is the only one that exists and that consciousness is fundamental But what I like about the simulation Hypothesis is that it provides a bridge between the materialist worldview And the worldview of the mystics and people who think that consciousness is fundamental And that's why, you know, I'm glad you the first thing you brought up was this distinction between neo and agent smith, right? Because that really is the fundamental tension that I tried to explore in this book is that You know, is consciousness just reproduction of neurons Which in which case they can be And consciousness can be reproduced or is it in fact a conscious entity outside that's playing a role or playing a game But that's something that I can discuss, you know with physicists and people at mit and I can discuss it with buddhist monks And I can discuss it with, you know, biblical scholars As well because there's lots of aspects to ai and this idea that the world around us Isn't quite the real world Right that perhaps there is another world that we cannot see Yeah, you can discuss it with them Bruce because you like to play nice That's really what it amounts to because all the experiments and all the evidence points in one direction And I you know, I mentioned to you that I just had an interview not too long ago with Donald Hoffman, who was of course a very very skilled and accomplished physicist and he's kind of more direct, you know And I always like this quote I have up on the screen, you know, Stephen Hawking Famously said at a Google conference that philosophers have not kept up the science and their art is dead and I think what Don Hoffman and really everyone in psi research and near-death experience research and cutting-edge consciousness research has told us for the At least the last 20 years is that materialist scientists have not kept up with The art and that their art is dead, you know, because Like on this show one things we've done is examine near-death experience Every near-death experience researcher serious near-death experience researchers people have published in major medical journals and published in major peer-reviewed psychology journals that all come to the same conclusion The one that I have up on the screen here from Dr. Sanparnia, who's one of the leading Resuscitation experts in the world. I mean, he's a doctor. That's his full-time job is Resuscitation they kind of on the side does near-death experience research And the conclusion is the same Is that consciousness seems to in some way we don't totally understand? survive bodily death, so I mean Aren't we really just kind of propping up these Materialists because we don't want to because they own the mic right now. That is the dominant paradigm and number two We're just not Comfort none of us are comfortable with the implications of all this which are that space time is doomed Like you said the idea that there is this we're living in this linear space time Well, that's out the window neo Darwinism no one ever talks about it But that's completely out the window with all this too Science as we know it is out the window. It's doomed because we can no longer measure There's no longer really anything to measure and as don Hoffman says, you know quite directly in his Ted talk that's got three million views Reality is doomed. So are we kind of Propping these guys up because that's what playing nice means right now Yeah, that's one way to describe it. I mean, I would describe it also though as a way to provide a bridge And to provide an understanding. I mean, I think one of the reasons why is even in your quote you said you know the self Exists beyond death in some ways that we don't quite understand, right? And so, you know, I think the current paradigm, you know, it reminds me a little bit of You know scientists used to say that there's no way that meteorites could fall from the sky And scientists said that's because there are no rocks in the sky. Therefore, there's obviously no way rocks could fall from the sky Even though there were many People that had seen rocks fall from the sky and there was even evidence where people said here's a rock that fell In the sky, but they had no way back then they didn't have the tools to verify that Right. So eventually there was a huge meteor shower over pairs And at least the scientists said, you know, one of the universities there were forced to admit that rocks were falling from the sky And so it's like when something is outside the current paradigm people have a hard time getting there I think the current paradigm is very much like stuck In the 1980s world of pcs and there's a famous quote from steve jobs where he didn't want to put a network connector In the first macintosh because he said who would want to be connected to their office when they're at home So it's like each one of us is a separate pc that's not connected But what happens with technology is it's gotten much more advanced and we realize that by connecting these We can come up with something much more powerful. We can do many things that we couldn't do and so getting back to You know, if nature Is always moving towards more sophistication Then probably just as we took our computers and made them network There is a networking element to life itself that we haven't yet discovered So but I think, you know, the bridge really is information All right, uh, so in the in the world of the simulation I about this is I like to say that, you know, the physical world Is a world of information and I think that agrees with what You know, donnell hoffman would say I like his analogy that if you have a desktop You see a file But really that file doesn't exist as like a blue square That's just how it happens to be rendered You know within your agent of consciousness It really exists as a series of bits And as they said of information And I think that you know, the more science looks for matter, right? They keep opening the you know, they open adam And it's 99.9 percent space They look for the electrons and find they're not really there and then they go inside the protons and the neutrons And at the bottom level, you know, what they're getting is information Right and and there's a famous quote from a physicist named john wheeler that I use in my book Which is he coined the phrase it from bit Right that Everything that isn't it that is a physical object is actually a representation of bits of information Right, and I think that that is the bridge Uh, so computer science becomes in a way the bridge between the materialist point of view And sort of the consciousness point of view because what we think of as something real Just doesn't exist but gets rendered for us, you know when when we need it for whatever reason But even people in consciousness Haven't quite been able to explain the nature of this shared reality Right, so I think this is where things become, you know, slightly complicated But I was very intrigued by near-death researchers and in fact During this writing of this book I interviewed danian brinkley Who you may know of who wrote saved by light he was struck by lightning and you know He said that one of the things that happened to him After he was dead was that he had a life review and he called it a panoramic 360 life review where he saw in vivid three dimensional detail every event from his entire life I accept that he had to see it from the point of view Of the people that he had done things to and he was in the military So he literally had shot people and so he had to experience what that was like From the other point of view, you know, I'm a video game designer So I like to say well, how would this work? If this is in fact the case and the life review has been reported by many not necessarily all but many near-death Experiencers and In order to do that you how you would have to record everything that's been going on And well turns out in video games. We do that all the time I mean, there's a whole industry now of streaming on twitch and youtube Esports has become like the the the news Sports right people under 30 don't really watch football as much as they watch people playing competitive video games And in one of my startups, we would take a three dimensional game like league of legends or counter strike go CS go is a good one since we were just talking about shooting someone Where your character might actually shoot someone and we took that and we recorded it in 3d Even though I was playing it on a 2d screen and you're playing it on a 2d screen And then you put on virtual reality glasses and we could put you at any point Inside the game so you could literally see what it was like to be the person that you shot Right now. We don't have emotions In our video games, but it provides I think a pretty good model for how this material reality might actually work and how some of the things that People who've been studying consciousness and near the experiences have been telling us You know how those might work and and this is where it ties to religions and some people get upset that I included A whole section in my book on on religions And of course in the in the eastern traditions, you don't even have to draw an analogy, right? Basically, they're telling us that we exist outside of the physical world You download into a body you play a role for a period of time you upload out And then you have a set of information Karma that's stored What happens to that information? Well, it's used to create situations for you in your next role And so you go back into the physical world is in another role And so you've got kind of buddha's endless wheel is better described as an algorithm Turns out we don't need the lords of karma We just need a very sophisticated computer generated reality And in the islamic traditions, there's this idea of recording angels and in the christianity and judeism as well I think I have a picture of you know recording angel. It's a statue in washington dc Who are supposed to be writing down everything that happens to your life? Well, we don't need 14 billion angels writing down all our good deeds and our bad deeds What we really need is just ai to record What's happening inside this game so that it can be played back And so, you know, my approach to this was how well does all this work? How can we come up with an explanation that we can at least understand? Well, I love all that and you and don hoffman might be the white knights in this whole process, but I'm not so sure that there everyone is playing the role of the of the white knight in terms of The bridge to the more enlightened kind of thing But I did want to come back and touch on this idea of karma And ai and you wrote a very excellent article. I don't know how you do everything you do I don't know how you crank out this stuff, but it's amazing But here's an article you wrote religion and the simulation hypothesis is god and ai But you know where I kind of pulled up short on this is don't we get into the problem of kind of infinite regress and turtles all the way down. I mean If I look at it kind of from a different perspective If there are rules if there is karma karma is rules for a computer gamer like you And rules suggest A moral imperative And a moral imperative suggests a hierarchy of consciousness And a hierarchy of consciousness suggests god So I'm not sure Where in there There's any room for ai other than as a You know tool for god to kind of keep tracking notes or something Yeah, well, I mean that's kind of how I presented it not so much that the title was is god and ai but really It's more are a lot of the things that the religions have been telling us You know Implemented through some ai I mean if you think of the term angel angel means messenger, right and in computer science We have this we use an old greek term the daemon Which is used for processes that run And so angels are supposed to be beings outside of the matura world who are watching us And who are recording things and perhaps you have this idea of guardian angels So you have all of these different aspects of beings that Are not In the physical world And so the simulation hypothesis actually makes that so that these angels might in fact just be ai And you do get into this idea of regress sometimes, right? So if we can create a simulation We would appear to be gods You know to those people inside the simulation Because we can change the rules of that simulation and we can make things appear, you know in mid-air for example, right? And the people in the scene they would be like wow, that's a miracle like where did that thing come from? It wasn't there a minute ago. I mean we do it all the time in video games, right? In fact, we even render do conditional rendering based upon the level So if you and I Are inside a scene and you're a level two character and i'm a level 30 character The server can decide that a level 30 character will see this being or angel and a level two character will not see This because they're all being rendered inside each of our computers Which is kind of like us rendering in our brains or as part of our own consciousness, right? So so there is this idea that what appears supernatural To people that are stuck inside the simulation might actually just be rules That are being determined by someone outside the simulation now the question of levels isn't an interesting one Because if you say well, there's a level outside this could it be that there's another simulation outside of that, right? And then you get back to this Well, you can't hold on. I mean you can't you can't not ask that question I mean that is the first question that pops up is the problem of infinite regress, right? So it's turtles all the way down. Well, it's a simulation of what? Well, it's a simulation of a simulation of a simulation of a simulation But then as soon as you get into that game eventually you're saying that they're you're talking about god then You know, so it's like it doesn't matter how many intermediate Steps to really have and that's the other problem with this base reality that kind of creeps into this Yeah, I always call it backdoor materialism, you know, it's kind of like okay We're going to get away from materialism until we need it and then we're going to come backdoor it in here again It's like no if consciousness is fundamental then all of this is In consciousness. So the simulation is in consciousness. The rules are in consciousness. God is in consciousness It's not we can never be outside of it if we're if it's fundamental Right, but so, you know, that's one way to think of it is God is in consciousness But another way to think of it is if you if you take the rpg version, right? because obviously if you take the npc version You're limited by computing power and you can have so many versions simulations within simulations within simulations, but in this case If you think the rpg version, you know You say, okay, there's a version of us that's outside that In in base reality But if that's the simulation, there's another version that's outside in base reality But what is that version? My point is that it becomes less material not necessarily more material Although, you know within a lot of simulation Discussions base reality means a physical world outside of the simulated world In the in the rpg version. It means Who is the entity that is playing us, right? So it's more about the consciousness of that entity just like in the matrix, right when neo had the The wire connected into the back of his head When you woke up in the pod, right? That was the connection. It was a conscious connection Between that person and another entity and at some point you get conscious entities And perhaps that is a better definition of god Then what we get in the religions is that pure consciousness is god as opposed to god is in pure consciousness Meaning that each of the individuals are like droplets If pure consciousness is the ocean It is what's playing all of these characters in the first simulation and each of them are allowed to go down and experience things Just like people say to me. Well, why would I make a simulation? So well, why do you play video games? We do it to experience things that we cannot experience outside the game, right? I mean, I can't be uh fly on a dragon and fight, uh, you know orcs In physical reality, but I can do it, you know inside a fantasy type game or fly spaceships, etc And so then the question becomes will What would be the purpose of this video game? Well, now we get into things like emotions and interactions Perhaps things that are not possible God forbid we talk about love or emotions or anything right things that don't exist according to a lot of material Right, but but these things may in fact I mean, I view most religions as Uh starting when someone peeks outside the simulation, right? And then they came back and they told us what they saw and it's kind of like the three blind men and the elephant Right, each of them saw a different part of the elephant and they tried to describe it and say oh It's like, you know a snake which is the trunk or it's like a tree which is like a legs or it's like a house Which is the body, uh, but they all seem to have this idea That the purpose of life Is love and to be kind to each other Uh, whereas it gets more intricate in the ideas of karma that you are here to create experiences Uh, which then you have to go and resolve down the road So I view it as a tree of quests and achievements and the more you play The more of these you create for yourself. And so that's what leads to Uh in the eastern traditions And now there's actually some debate even in eastern traditions between buddhism and hinduism in hinduism. There is this idea of a pure eternal soul Right, which could be the conscious part that comes in And it plays different lives within the buddhist point of view The thing that goes back and forth is not necessarily A soul but a bag of karma if you will So it's a set of information if you think of it is you keep increasing the size of this file But then as you remove things from the file eventually it goes down to zero and it becomes Pure back to pure kind of whatever the you know, the original thing was which gets back to this issue of What is god? What is pure consciousness in and of itself? But I think that simulate simulated world kind of better describes how that process works Well, yeah, or at least gives us a new way of kind of looking at it and exploring it Which is really cool because you are certainly, you know hitting on all the main points I mean even the analogy of the the ocean and the wave and the droplets and all those things that is The way a lot of people have offered is the best explanation for what that Pure consciousness god spirit being would be is kind of everything and that we see the Individuated kind of self as these little droplets but I'm still not sure I buy off on the idea that this bridge idea is going to work It seems to me that we're all the fun is we're all the action is is over in this Extended consciousness stuff that we're just not allowed to talk about because it's all taboo and yet it seems the evidence It's overwhelming that there's a reality to it I just touched on NDE's because they're safe and we have all this science published in these great journals But the evidence for out of body experience comes right along with the near-death experience But it also extends beyond that after death communication sigh I always point to dr. Dean Raiden's double slit experiment where he said well, let's Screw all that. Let's go right to the end game Here's a photon beam generator and I'm going to bring in a meditator and tell him to meditate and change the beam And he's going to do it or not do it and lo and behold he can do it He gets a six sigma result. So the evidence is in all over the place also with remote viewing Our friend men who stare at goats and the mk ultra stuff all the et stuff which at this point is just I don't know how we we kind of are even allowed to kind of keep that in Out of discussion zone. There's you know, we have the department of defense is coming out and Throwing the holy holy water on it. And then we have the whole shamanic journeying DMT stuff. So Is this bridge idea Really the way to go here and is the simulation hypothesis and all the great stuff you're offering us Is it a bridge or is there a chasm there that you just have to jump over on the other side? And then that would lead to the next question is is there a reason that we're not on the other side? I mean what I always point to is You know Russell targ and hell put off at sri They were doing extended consciousness stuff for 30 years. They weren't bowing by these kind of Oh, it's we have to be materialist we can and the same with the minister it goes. I mean the cutting edge consciousness Weaponization has been going on for a long time and it's just this kind of Winking a nod like oh you you guys in academia and in science go continue on your little materialist way kind of thing Any thoughts I threw a lot on the table there and yeah, you threw a lot there A lot of thoughts about each of those areas, but I think you know Science has been built up by having a series of models, right? And so we don't have a good model To explain how some of these phenomenon work. So let's take et's for example, right? So if the model is they came here on a spaceship from another galaxy You know, that's where I think a lot of regular scientists You know get lost a little bit and they say oh, yeah, we're sure there's life out there But we don't see how they could have possibly gotten here because We don't know anything that goes faster than speed of light, right? So again, we're caught inside these models and so in order to move science along We need to think of a different model now. I think one of the reasons why the et phenomenon is so Weird and not accepted is it may actually be weirder Than that simple explanation So, you know one of the people that I talked to you in writing this book was dr. Jacques Valet Right who you know has been around since the sri days and was part of project blue book Back in the day and you know, one of the things he told me was that UFOs are not a purely materialist Phenomenon and they're not Purely a conscious phenomenon. They're actually both and he said there are many instances Where two people will be spending standing next to each other And one of them will see the UFO and one of them will not Right. So again, there's no model in the materialist point of view for how that happened either The craft is there or it's not you can't have a situation Where both are well turns out if you start thinking about, you know Video games and how they work you can I mean I mentioned it earlier if a person is At level 30 versus level 2 they might see the UFO and they might not And so I think they're just inexplicable It gets to a level of inexplicable inexplicability To the point where you know, many scientists will individually Admit to being interested in these things that you're talking about but as a group You know, they seem not they don't want to be the first to kind of jump outside this paradigm And you know a great example of this is because I talk about the matrix people ask me all the time Well, you know, how do you hack the matrix, right? And I bring up the example of the spoon bending from the movie right where You know that the little monkey kid tells Neo Remember there is no spoon and that's how you can bend it I believe another gentleman who was involved with sri back in the day was jack hawk And he started to do these spoon bending parties And you know, one of my favorite stories is when he went to los alamos And he did this spoon bending party with a bunch of physicists And their wives and he found that none of the physicists could bend the spoons, but their wives could Now that was interesting Because turns out it was because the physicists were together And that any one of them individually went to a spoon bending party with their wife Could bend spoons sometimes and so it becomes this kind of Weird morphogenetic field if you will that that people are stuck, you know in this model So I think to get people there we have to present them with a model that might Make some sense. I mean science has been built up and has had a lot of successes in the physical world right building rockets computers All of these things because you create models and then you validate the models The problem is I think most scientists say because it's something that can't be reproduced In the laboratory 100 of the time and it's outside of our paradigm. Therefore it must not be real All right, same thing with spoon bending right people will say it doesn't exist, but many people have seen it So, you know, I think it's showing us that the material world is not quite what we think it is But it's so far out of the paradigms So getting back to Jacques valet and UFOs, you know, I had lunch with him recently and he told me He investigated a case where they were supposed to the UFO and they said it came down at a 45 degree angle And it actually left some marks on the ground And so there was some physical evidence So Jacques went back after the original investigation and he looked at and he looked at he said you said it went at a 45 degree angle That means it would have had to go through the trees They said, yeah, but we don't want to tell anybody that because nobody would believe us, right Which gets back to you know, is this a virtual phenomenon that gets materialized When it's needed, uh, and it's something that we see and so, you know, I think that's where Kind of explaining how all that works is is the task that's ongoing. I think yeah all great points and uh, I I have tons of respect for Jacques valet and he's been on the show as has Diana Walsh Posolka who also wrote a really nice blurb for your book and you know and both these people A lot of and I love the way you you kind of laid it out there Risks a lot of people don't get it Jacques valet isn't saying it's just consciousness He's just saying it's not just nuts and bolts And I do think in that sense you do offer a bridge and a beautiful unique wonderful bridge of saying I like your term, you know the augmented reality augmented consciousness kind of thing because that's also what's reported From the the et experience, right is that they have an ability apparently put to manipulate consciousness Like an app, you know, it's on there. It's on their iphone, you know Scram your memory. There it goes, you know, be here be there all that stuff and again, it does fit nicely inside of The model that you're laying out that all the things that you just said I won't try and repeat them But the one kind of caveat I keep coming back to is the white hat black hat kind of thing Again, if you can you do right kind of thing isn't that what we kind of said with this whole thing? Well, if you can Control this level of consciousness upgrade Then aren't you likely to do that and aren't we likely to be already living and experiencing a world where there are Individuals groups around us that have mastered this At least a couple levels up if you will and are somehow controlling the game to me That's a much better explanation for this Just absurdly kind of infantile view we have of consciousness Materialism nuts and bolts you're a biological robot in a meaningless universe. That just seems like such a scripted Narrative by a control group Right. So the question is are there super users who are then Saying trying to manipulate the game to keep us thinking that we're inside the game, right? Well, and let's just be clear because we brought up Diana walsh basoka She says she's already met some of those people With that are a couple levels up and it begs the question Okay, if you're that if you're able to uncover the couple levels up just by going to a couple conferences Are there five 10 20 levels up? Right. Well, that that's a good question and it gets you know, I'm a big fan of Diana walsh basoka and her book and you know What I liked was that she brought this point of view that they have in the religious traditions, right? When they're investigating claims of miracles and things, you know, she mentioned the the nun sister maria That supposedly was in new mexico at the same time. She was in a monastery in in spain. I think it was Right and they they say well, let's start not by disbelieving these Let's just set aside whether that happened or not and let's study the social implications Of this particular belief system and then she went into the you know The ufo world in the same way to rather not be a skeptic or a believer From day one but to set aside that question and to study, you know, the actual phenomenon I think that ties to you know, jack valet has been saying for a while that he thinks there's some kind of deception going on Right. It's almost as if there are they are testing us to see how we would react To certain things as a civilization Who's the day right in his case? He mentions, you know, there have been, you know fairies reported and otherworldly beings reported, you know, for thousands of years like this isn't a new phenomena People have been seeing things in the sky for many hundreds of years because we're in a technological Age we tend to to associate things with spacecraft Let me just interject something just to make sure we're talking about the same thing because I just am going Just talking we're just having an inside baseball convert kind of conversation, but that's what I like to do People can catch out, you know, but diana walsh basoka Is also talking about the invisible college that's been referenced a lot of times and she says I ran into it I read hint ran head into it where there's all these people who are in academia Who don't know what's going on and they just are allowed to not know what's going on And then there's a small group who are the super users who do know what's going on So she goes out in the desert and tyler takes her out there and they find pieces of an alien spacecraft, which As well as they can verify it with the best science That's what it seems to be and tyler's able to reverse engineer it and get all sorts of biotech patents and make all sorts of money which good for him But it then this also goes into the invisible college this small group that talks to each other and doesn't talk to anyone else Who knows this stuff is going on and then if we extend that invisible college over to some of these Extended realms that seem to be playing here There seems to be an invisible invisible college of et an invisible college of shamans an invisible college All over the place that's interacting with us that may be taking us from this kind of Super user to I don't know what the super super user is But that seems to be at play and I wonder if when we talk about The bridge You know, is it a bridge or is it a chasm? You know is the chasm so big there that you can't Really just get your little walking stick or your little rope bridge and climb over it. It's just like forget it man Yeah, and I think you know my understanding of the invisible college Reference was more to a group of researchers that were open to these ideas and knows there's more going on But they're not necessarily the ones that are manipulating People to not see it. They're just continuing their research In private because they don't necessarily You know want to be public about it because of their concerns That's that's not actually that's not what she says I mean what she says is she goes to a conference and one of these guys speaks up and everyone else goes Hey, what the hell are you doing? The rule is you know the fight club rule and that's why she says tyler You know the first rule of fight clubs. You don't talk about fight club And I've gone across academics who tell me that at first, you know, for example, I was speaking with A researcher in quantum physics who was at Harvard MIT and you know, you told me that at first He thought it was just a case of well, they're you know People don't want to say this stuff because you know that they don't want to look ridiculous In front of their peers And they want to be able to continue to publish so it was more like a systemic thing As opposed to a coordinated effort right kind of a decentralized system Right, it's kind of like when when when people say Oh my god, there's a silicon valley conspiracy and they're all doing x Well turns out it's not a silicon valley conspiracy It's just a bunch of people trying to make money and they're all following the same set of rules But there's not necessarily a big conspiracy They're all trying to get people addicted to the technology because that's what makes them more money, right? So people are just following the rules, but then this particular researcher told me That he was now beginning to suspect That there was a coordinated effort That whenever somebody went to talk about These unexplained phenomenon That they would be steered away Right, which would be closer to what you're saying and and perhaps what diana Wasp is saying and and I just met with a fresher caltech Who you know told me that you know, he was told in no uncertain terms by The trustees steer away from this right so there may be a coordinated effort I I don't have as strong of an opinion on that. I think it's some of the conspiracy guys do Well, I mean, I think I I think in a way your your book Kind of Validates that in the if you can you would kind of thing which is what I always wind up telling people who don't believe in conspiracy theories I was never conspiracy theorists at least when I started skeptical 10 years ago You know my background I had an ai company way back in the day mind path technologies I was getting my phd and And information systems at the university arizona got into ai and expert systems started doing consulting for texas instruments in dupont And way back in the day. I was doing ai, but I kind of make any money yet Well, you know, it was tough back in the day nowadays. It's uh, the whole thing has ballooned right It was bullshit back in the days to be honest that expert systems were kind of bullshitting but I digress with that little bit of story because I was just so excited about all the stuff you've done and then the MIT play lab and all that cool stuff that you've done But what I was going to tie this back to is, you know, if you can You do Also applies to all the stuff we're talking about so if I can with I don't know a couple hundred million dollars direct the narrative of Academic research and just leave the cheese in the maze where I want the researchers to go Well, then I do it I don't pull back and say well, I don't want to do that because even though that would serve my interests And serve my agenda, you know, if you can You do so that's what I think people leave out of the the Conspiracy that of course it's a conspiracy. What what do we know of? What do we know of it? Is it a conspiracy like you mentioned silicon valley? Oh look, of course That's anyone who's been in business above the assistant manager at mcdonald's Knows that it's a conspiracy, you know, where you buy your hamburger buns and where you get your catchy I mean it's it all is that way then the military of course we accept that politics We accept that but then we kind of like wall off these academics. Oh, there's somehow Immune from that. I don't think so Well, you know a related question is this issue of why Would they not want us to know certain things right and In the in in the purview of the simulation hypothesis You know, there was an academic who argued recently in a op-ed the new york times that we shouldn't try to find out If we're in a simulation and he said the reason is because if we do then the simulators will shut us down, right? That was the argument and and this was in the new york times and so I wrote a response to that Uh, you know, which the new york times didn't publish but uh, you know some other Oh periodicals did did publish and you know, that is assuming that the npc version, right? So it assumes we're just bits on a computer If you take the rpg version, perhaps that's the purpose of the simulation is for us to realize that it's a simulated world And that the people who are stopping us are like obstacles because they don't want the game to end, right? So it's kind of a reverse technological version of pascal's wager, right? Pascal's wager was I don't know if there's a god or not But i'm going to pretend like there is so that if there is at least you know, I'll get in heaven And if there isn't I haven't really lost anything down the road You know, this was saying technologically We should act as if we're not in the simulation because if we if we find out we are now I'm of the view we should do experiments to find out and uh, there's a physicist named tom cambal I don't know if you've come across him or if he's been on your show and you know He's been talking about this idea of a virtual reality world for for many years And so he raised some crowdfunding to do some experiments You know down in southern california, and I visited those a couple months ago That are in progress and the idea is to try to show Through various versions of the delayed choice experiment that what you actually need Is not a measurement device, but what you actually need is a conscious observer At some point in that process, right and to say that's like a video game Getting back to the rendering analogy, you know, that's kind of where they're trying to go And those experiments are still ongoing, but I love the belief that perhaps that is the whole point Is for us to recognize what the purpose of the game is and perhaps what you're called Some people call conspiracies are agents like agent smith that have been sent to make it more difficult Because some people say well if I was going to make a video game, I would make it really easy for me I would become a trillionaire and I would you know Everything would be great If you remember in the matrix in one of the sequels, I forget was the second or the third one They revealed that the first version of the matrix was just this great idyllic paradise And the human mind didn't accept it So they had to introduce you know a whole bunch of uh, you know strife and boredom and grinding and All this stuff in order for the human mind to accept it as real And so, you know, I often like to use the analogy of an indiana joneson's film, right? What if he got the treasure map at the beginning of the film and it just said there you go There's where the ark of the covenant is go get it. Well, it wouldn't make for a very interesting film Right and and since I'm saying that you know reality is like a 3d film that's being recorded So that you can play back pieces of these later on so you can kind of review your performance if you will That you have to make it an interesting film along the way and that may be where the difficulties come in Otherwise, you know, it would just be over Hey, that's uh, that's a really a great head scratcher there But a great point. I want to make use of your time. You've been super generous and I know you're a busy guy I want to hit on two things really quick to wrap this thing up and I was going to jump right to the second one, but you're so deeply spiritual in a way I had to go back to the ecart tolly thing that I was going to bring up because I think he's pretty cool way of bringing a lot of these spiritual mystical concepts down to earth and You know, you also are into meditation to me One of the things that becomes clear to anyone who's ever meditated is The more is Self-evident. I mean as soon as you go into this state of awareness Of that voice that monkey mind you're in this different world. You are outside of the matrix Instantly and I like and I was listening to ecart tolly not too long ago and he had a great point about the whole A matrix thing. He goes, okay Maybe we live in a matrix. He goes. Yeah, maybe that's true Certainly it does seem kind of dream like what we're doing here. He goes But if we are Then there you are you're the one who's experiencing it again So again, it goes back to circles back to the first thing we talked about in here of the neo versus agent smith But I don't know how Anyone can construct the agent smith argument when it is self-evident that you are Not what you observe, right? I mean, that's like the first rule of metaphysics I am not the computer because I can observe the computer and I'm not that you know, so What do you think here about this idea that the more part of this the greater consciousness? Isn't it Self-evident as soon as you sit down on the meditation cushion Well, I think, you know, you're getting back to even Descartes, right? You know, if he said if everything was a dream or if he was being Deceived by an evil demon. The only thing he knows for sure is that you know, he's there I think therefore I am which is kind of like the fundamental idea that you're talking about But you know this dream like nature of reality is quite interesting to me And I spent a lot a lot of time on dreams Right because you know, I talk about the technology that we will develop to build something like the matrix Well, turns out it's already exists in biological form. It's called dreams every night We create these worlds and inside the world We're there, but there's a bunch of other beings who could in fact be NPCs So, you know, one thing I say is that the NPC and RPG versions are not mutually exclusive I can play a video game where there's player characters And there's other people put there as obstacles or NPCs to help you along the way Or people that look like they're there to help you but don't really Are there to help you and you know within the Tibetan Buddhist traditions. They use dream yoga Which is a form of lucid dreaming to once you learn to wake up within the dream and recognize what is real and what isn't You can do that in the physical world as well Around you. So who's to say that there aren't some NPCs around us? I had a woman say to me the other day, you know, I think my husband is an NPC and said don't tell him that He's not quite like that But you know, I may have gotten off track a little bit But you know, I find that this this this analogy of the dreamlike nature of reality Is really really interesting and it ties very much to this idea that we may live, you know, in a simulated world And I think when you meditate you realize that There's a part of you that isn't your physical body There's a part of you that isn't your your emotions and then eventually there's a part of you that isn't your thoughts And what is that part and I think that is the essence of A lot of deep spiritual inquiries What is that part and so, you know, that's when people ask me how do I hack the matrix? I say That's how you do it quiet the data stream, right? That's coming in And remember that there's a part of you that Is just as in a dream that was in lying in bed But this part of you is consciousness outside of the matrix And that that's the way that you can do it Awesome, awesomeness Okay, let's wrap it up with a here now kind of question that a lot of people I don't know get pretty worked up about and I think for good reason the strong ai thing Like I said, I've been following ai for a long time and I was always a disbeliever, but There's some advancements in ai that would make anyone wonder and from as a silicon valley guy as a very successful investor or entrepreneur I mean, what are we to make of? I don't know. You don't have to agree with this because it's really kind of controversial, but just the reality that I have up on the screen, you know The simpson quote, you know, I for one welcome our new ai overlords. I mean we have shadow banning We have demonetization. We already have ai in place In the hands of people who when they wield that power We've already begun to see the power that they that they can exercise in this world And it goes beyond google, of course, it's in a million different places that we can't see but Should we fear it in maybe some very Real ways that we're already experiencing and second part of that is what about the concentration of this ai power And again, like we're saying if you can you would if you can you'd hold on to it. You wouldn't share it All right. Well, so I think you know, many people wonder, you know, how sophisticated ai has gotten And you remember, you know ai back in the 90s And in the 2000s and it was not very powerful and what happened is ai has gone through several waves, right? There was the expert systems in a rule based wave Then, you know, neural nets came along for a while when I was in college in the 90s You know, we studied how to make neural nets and this recent wave has been more about data and machine learning and and reinforcement learning and so a lot of the You know, a lot of the advances that have come recently have been because of the advance of computing power The availability of data and the ability to crunch this and for machines to learn in the video game world, right? You know Claude Shannon who created what what what I consider one of the first ai's which was a chess playing computer Back in 1950 He was at Bell Labs and mit Is that gaming and ai, you know are are intimately related but he said, you know that The stages of ai he foresaw in the future were you know, where a game can play a rule Ai can play play a rule based game like chess, but then eventually it can learn the rules Right, and that's kind of where we are today But we're not at you know a colleague of his contemporary Alan Turing had the Turing test right which is this idea that you know If you're talking to an ai back then it was to a computer not necessarily software They were thinking of it as hardware But if you're talking to a ai versus a person and you can't tell the difference Then the Turing test has been passed or what he called the implementation game back then and we're not quite at that Quite there yet, right? I mean in talking with an ai you can usually tell If it's still an ai in my in my opinion, there's another wave of ai That may need to come Add it on to the current technology. I don't know what that is before we get there But a lot of people are worried about super intelligence, right and that ai will take over the world I I actually worry not That the ai is so intelligent, but if we start to hook up weapons To ai and the ai is actually not that intelligent It's more intelligent than it is now, but today's ai is very limited. It's only good at certain tasks, right? We don't have artificial general intelligence yet Because you have to train it along certain things And so if you're training it just shoots, right? So it's almost like would you rather fight a Do a training match in karate With a brown belt or a tenth degree back belt Well, turns out the brown belt is more likely to hurt you Then a tenth degree black belt who will make sure you don't get hurt too much when you're doing the sparring because they not only have the power They also have the refinement and the control and the wisdom, right? That was their directive, right? I mean it depends on what the directive was It depends upon what the directive is and what the values are of the eye So I think eventually we will have to worry about ai and weaponized ai But don't we have to worry about it? This is the point though. Don't we have to maybe if we look really hard Don't we have to worry about it now? Maybe a little bit more than we think we are and isn't it creeping into Our lives in ways that we don't immediately recognize but like search right now Search is is not in the control of Google per se It's in the control of a lot of the agents that they've built and i'm not trying to be super controversial there I mean, I think right you would know much better than I am but that's just a fact I mean, that's certainly a fact in trading trading You know stock trading securities trading is not in the hands of traders. I mean that is all automated at this point Right, it's in the hand of the algorithms and you're right search Demonitization right you'll hear about people getting demonetized on youtube Because they got swept up because they said certain words Which were picked up by the algorithm But you know, I would say that we've always had an element of media control, right? I mean if you go back when I was a kid, there were only three networks and pretty much they decided You know, what was what what was on the news and what wasn't and we have a corporate controlled media And so yes, we do have these kinds of things happening With ai and algorithms But we also have more access to information than we've ever had before Right, so there are actually way more points of view now Than there used to be so you know, I yeah, I'm a little worried about that. I'm not so worried about that I think that's always been the case But I think actually there's a lot more, you know There's a lot more information flowing now than there ever was before Even with these these algorithms and and the ai and the search algorithms, etc Well, our guest again has been I said the amazing rizverk and I'm gonna say it again Amazing rizverk and the book we talked a lot about is the simulation hypothesis But you can follow him in any number of ways. He's out there. He produces so much great stuff Riz tell folks a little bit about some of the projects that you have going on right now that they might want to Keep an eye on Sure. Well, you know, this book is out there. I'm going to be working on a second edition of this book Which will probably come out next year on the when the matrix four Comes out in may of 2021 People can visit my twitter feed at at riz danford or my website at zenentrepreneur.com I also have a book coming out about startup myths and models what you don't learn in business school That's kind of the the other area where I spent a lot more a lot of my time is with startups and in the technology world And then I always have articles coming out. I even started a A podcast recently called the simulated universe at the edges of science and science fiction Awesome, we didn't talk a lot about science fiction, but if anyone is into science fiction There are all these threads that are interwoven into this book and his work in general that people want to check out Absolutely fantastic having you on. Thank you so much for joining me. Thank you so much for having me on. I really enjoyed our conversation Thanks again to riz virk for joining me today on skeptico one question. I'd have to tee up from this interview How far has if it can it will ai Advanced it's something we just kind of touched on in this show, but I think it really sparked some interesting Conversation or the beginnings of a conversation And I'd like to invite you to join in and maybe finish that conversation What a great guest so thankful for him coming on and I think his work could turn out to be really important in All these questions that we're exploring on skeptico So do join me over at the skeptico forum to discuss Anything you want to discuss about the show or you can of course reach me on facebook or wherever you reach me Be sure to check out all the other shows on skeptico. You can find them through the skeptico website You can download all the shows for free. There's no advertisements. There's no firewall. There's no anything just Hope you like them. Hope you use them. Hope they're meaningful to you And I hope you share them with other people who you think need to hear Some of the information we talk about on this show. I have some good stuff coming up Please stay with me for all of that Until next time take care and bye for now