#2151 - Rizwan Virk

The Joe Rogan Experience.

Stream by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night! All day!

Yeah.

She's a strange person to talk to, because you start, like,

you start really considering some of the things she's saying.

It's just all the UFO stuff.

I go back and forth on the UFO stuff,

from it being complete bullshit to, like, maybe there's something there.

You know, I'm peripherally involved with it.

Turn your mic off.

You know, Avi Loeb is running the one at Harvard,

and Gary Nolan is running that.

You had Gary on your show, right?

Okay.

I've talked to him quite a bit.

Explain to people your position, if you don't mind, on simulation theory.

What do you think is going on?

So, you know, I was a video game developer in Silicon Valley,

Now, these headsets were even bigger than they are now, and they were wired,

so there's no mistaking you're in virtual reality.

But what happened was that the ping pong game was so realistic

that for a moment my brain forgot that this wasn't a real game of table tennis,

so much so that I tried to put the paddle down on the table,

I had to do one of these double takes, like, oh, wait, I'm just in VR, right?

So I started to think about how long would it take us to build

that you were inside a video game.

which is a kind of technological singularity.

But then I started to research things like quantum physics

and some of the mysteries around the observer effect and quantum mechanics,

and then I started to look at all the world's religions,

depending on how you look at it.

if we are inside of it?

And there's two versions of simulation theory.

And I teach a class on this at Arizona State University,

and it kind of pulls in science fiction, religion, philosophy, and technology.

But one of the key distinctions I tell my students to make,

because it's not talked about a lot with simulation theory,

is what I call the NPC versus the RPG versions of simulation theory.

So those are the AIs in the video game, you know, the bartenders,

the people you're beating up, the opponents, all of that stuff.

So it's just like what we would consider an MMORPG today,

except with more sophisticated technology.

And so in that case, you know, you get a little bit of a different answer

than if you talk about an NPC-only type of simulation, right?

Because that's just running on a computer, and we're all AI in that case.

Now, we've heard the term singularity mostly because of like AI

And, you know, AI is going to take over the world.

who became a science fiction writer named Vernor Vinge.

Most of us talk about only one, which is AI starts to become super intelligent

And I lay out like 10 stages in my book of all the technology we would need,

Yeah, we're very close.

We're at the beginning of that whole thing.

And so that's stage 8, stage 7 and stage 8 on the way to the simulation point.

And, you know, being able to read, but also then being able to write memories as well.

So the definition of the simulation point is being able to create a virtual reality

that is indistinguishable from physical reality with AI characters

that are indistinguishable from biological characters.

So, you know, you wouldn't be able to tell you're talking to an NPC, basically.

We're getting closer to that already, right?

Yes.

and making either a hypothesis or suggesting that that has already taken place?

Yes.

Which is to say that if we can do it, now let's imagine a civilization that was a million years ahead of us.

A thousand years ahead of us.

So where will computers be in a thousand years?

They would already have created these types of simulations.

We didn't know if computers could get to that point.

Right, today we're pretty sure we can get there.

In fact, I'd say that I'm 70% sure that we will get to the simulation point,

which means I think there's a 70% chance we're living inside a simulation.

And so the point is if they already got there, they created a whole bunch of simulations.

But you can't tell the difference.

Just statistically speaking now, we're not even projecting the technology forward.

We're just saying it's more likely you're in one of the 99 than the one because there's so many more of these.

But there's so many things you have to think about, right?

There's so many things you have to take into consideration.

One of them is we don't have a straight linear line from the moment that we're born to the moment that we exist in currently.

The reason being is that we go to sleep every night.

We shut off every night and we wake up intermittently and you go back to bed.

Maybe you have to pee.

Maybe you're thirsty.

You go back to bed and then you wake up again.

But when you wake up, you are just waking up.

When I woke up this morning, I don't know if this is the life I've always lived.

Right.

I'm assuming it is because I have all these detailed memories of the past.

I see my dog.

He reacts the exact same way he always does.

I see my wife.

I see my kids.

I see my house.

It's the same house that I remember.

But I'm not sure.

I just woke up.

Right.

I'm a little foggy already.

This might be the first day of my life.

I interviewed his wife while I was researching my book.

In fact, all the way back in 1977 in Metz, France at a sci-fi convention,

he said a pretty famous quote.

But if you listen to the rest of the quote,

and we would change some variables, right?

Maybe I've talked to you before in a different run of the simulation.

And this idea, like after I wrote my first book on this topic,

Simulation Hypothesis,

this idea wouldn't leave me that, well, if you can run one simulation,

you can certainly run it multiple times.

In fact, that's what we would do.

If we were running a simulation of weather, we wouldn't just run it once.

And if we were doing a simulation of whatever, right?

Pandemic, anything, name it.

That someone was altering with our reality

This is the topic of my second book, which is called The Simulated Multiverse.

So with the Simulation Hypothesis, we're saying that space doesn't really exist.

Because what you remember could have been either implanted memories

or it could be a specific run of the simulation, right?

So if you run it again, maybe things are slightly different the second time you run it.

So Philip K. Dick came to believe that his novel, The Man in the High Castle,

which was turned into a pretty cool series.

I don't know if you've seen it.

It was on Amazon a few years ago.

The West Coast is run by the Japanese.

And you see this kind of fascist-type world.

And somehow the simulators re-ran it again.

And the current timeline is one that was allowed to go forward,

like further forward than where that one might have ended.

And so he says that at some point, all these memories came flooding back to him of this other timeline.

He used this Greek word.

It's called an anamnesis, which means a loss of forgetfulness.

So he said, we might be able to remember these other runs of the simulation.

So anyway, that gets us into this whole idea of, is the past what we think it is?

That's, I think, the question you're asking.

We can talk about the observer effect, but this was like even weirder than that.

And he was a bit younger than Niels Bohr and Einstein and all these kind of forefathers of quantum mechanics.

But one of them is the delayed choice experiment or the cosmic delayed choice experiment,

So imagine there's something like a quasar and that's a billion light years away from us, right?

And the light is coming from that quasar to here.

So it's going to take a billion years to get here because it's a billion light years away.

And then suppose there's something in the middle, like a black hole that's in the middle or a galaxy,

It's a lot closer, but it's still a million light years away.

Well, it turns out that decision is in the past as we think of it.

But what the delayed choice experiment tells us is that that decision is made now when we measure that light,

And until we do that measurement, both of those possibilities still exist.

Why is the decision made when you measure it?

Just like – let's start with Schrodinger's cat because it's a simpler version.

So Schrodinger's cat is this experiment where there's a cat in a box theoretical experiment.

And there's some radioactive material that has a 50% chance of setting off the poison.

The cat is both alive and dead until somebody looks at that box, the observer in this case.

And so until then, the cat is in the state of superposition.

And this is what makes quantum mechanics so weird.

This is why Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize winner, said, nobody understands quantum mechanics.

And Niels Bohr said, if you're not shocked by this, then you haven't understood it.

Because to us, the cat has to be alive or it has to be dead.

It's one of those.

But quantum mechanics, through the double slit experiment and the observer effect, says both of those possibilities exist in the present until the time when someone looks and someone measures that result.

So then we say the superposition, which is two states, comes down to one state.

And it's not that the cat is both alive and dead.

The cat is either alive or dead.

We just haven't figured it out yet until we open the box.

That would be like common sense.

Point of view, right?

But what all the physicists have been telling us now for almost 100 years, going back to the 1920s when quantum mechanics first started to get formalized, is that that's not actually the case.

What happens is you have this probability wave and that there are different probabilities of the cat being alive or dead.

Now, of course, they weren't talking about cats.

It's like a placeholder.

You know what I'm saying?

So Schrodinger, who was one of the founders of quantum mechanics through his wave equation, he basically came up with this because he thought the whole idea was ridiculous.

He's like, look, you can't have a cat that's both alive and dead.

Right.

So this is a ridiculous experiment, except it's become the way in which we explain this weird effect about quantum mechanics.

So you've got all these properties, but they can be in different states.

And this is the basis for quantum computing, by the way.

You've probably heard about new quantum computers.

Zero or one.

That's it.

That's like the basic unit of information.

Like on my iPhone or my laptop, if you look down all the way down into hardware, you can look at the registers.

Like when I was at MIT, we actually built a computer in class from scratch.

You'll see there's some voltage that says this is a one or this is a zero, right?

That's it.

All the computing, everything we're doing with video streaming, like all that stuff, comes down to having a bit that can be either a zero or a one.

So quantum computing has these things called qubits.

Okay, Q-U-B-I-T-S, qubits, which a qubit is like Schrodinger's cat.

So how many possibilities are there in a bit?

Two, right?

Zero and one.

So a qubit is a superposition of a bit, which means it has both values, zero and one, until someone measures that bit.

You can set up your laptop to crack.

It will take like a thousand years or something, right?

Because you have to go through every single possible value.

In fact, there's an old story about the Indian king and the wise man who played chess that illustrates the story of how big that number gets when you have exponential growth.

And finally, there's this wise man.

He's like, please play chess with me.

And the wise man says, OK, I'll play chess with you.

If I win, for the first square on the chessboard, you give me one grain of rice.

And then the second square on the chessboard, you double that, two grains of rice.

And you double that to four grains of rice and six grains of rice.

So we're doubling in each square, right?

King's like, OK, sure.

No big deal.

It's just a bunch of rice.

And so it turns out when the wise man won, by the time you get to two to the 64, because there's 64 squares on the chessboard, that basically it was more rice than would fit in all of India.

That's an exponential problem.

It just grows so fast.

And the reason it grows is there are too many possibilities.

But now this new thing called a qubit is coming along.

It's two to the 64.

It's a very big number.

It's 18 quintillion, right, is the number.

There's a game called No Man's Sky.

I don't know if you ever played it.

Yeah.

It's kind of boring, I heard.

I mean, I haven't played it in a while.

Because there's no way a team of – like, I was in the video game industry, right?

There's no way a team could create 18 quintillion worlds.

And it turns out that's exactly the number of worlds they have in that game because that is, what, 64 bits.

Okay.

It's just too big.

And so with a quantum computer, theoretically – and these are pretty new right now, right?

Everyone's trying to figure out how to make these qubits stable and work.

But the basic idea – and I don't know what number we're up to.

And that's where quantum computers are today.

But the idea is if you can have 64 qubits, you can instantaneously solve a problem that is exponential

because you can explore all of those at the same time.

And then when you measure the result, it's all – now, nobody knows exactly how this works.

But the two explanations – okay, coming back.

Sorry, I know I'm kind of wondering a bit.

Coming back to Schrödinger's cat, we say there's two possibilities, right?

So with 64 qubits, there's two to the 64 possibilities if they're all in superposition.

They have all the possible values of it.

And so basically when you measure that, it brings it back.

And so physicists call this the collapse of the probability wave.

So there's a probability of all these possibilities, and then it comes down to one.

And that's sort of the best – one of the accepted ways that people think this whole thing works.

But nobody totally knows.

So another guy who was John Wheeler's grad student at Princeton came up with another idea.

And we've heard about this idea from the superhero movies, right?

And this is the multiverse idea, right?

And so basically he said that if you've got Schrödinger's cat,

what happens is you're splitting the universe into two different universes.

So that's the multiverse idea.

But if we happen to be in this other universe, the cat would have been dead, right?

You've got your different versions of Batman, your different versions of Superman.

And they have the different actors.

So that idea has started to catch on now.

It's what I like to call it's past the 10-year-old test.

And the 10-year-old test is when a scientific idea gets out there so much

that even 10-year-olds can kind of understand it because of superhero movies.

Like in the 1930s, when people were trying to explain Superman, like how does Superman get his powers,

you say, oh, he came from another planet.

He came from a planet called Krypton, right?

So even a 10-year-old in the 1930s could have understood that.

And so people said, how can a quantum computer theoretically solve a problem that would take thousands of years for a regular computer to solve?

And one explanation, a guy named David Deutsch out at Oxford says, well, because it's looking at all the possible values of the bits,

there's that many different universes, right?

This subject does tend to take you down many, many different rabbit holes.

Right.

And how do we know that the memory.

So the reason I went down this rabbit hole on the quantum physics stuff and the multiverse, which, by the way, that's the subject.

I wrote a whole second book on simulation theory just for that, which is the simulated multiverse.

Because the reason scientists like this multiverse idea is that mathematically you can figure out how the equations work in all these different worlds.

You know, whereas with the first idea, which is the Copenhagen interpretation, you have you have all these possibilities.

You have a probability wave.

Nobody can say, how does the collapse occur?

Like, is it the act of observation?

So all these physicists are debating with each other.

Right.

So they don't like the Copenhagen interpretation because it seems to rely on consciousness or some kind of an observer.

And scientists kind of hate that.

Right.

They hate to talk about consciousness being real.

And we'll get into the whole religious aspects of the simulation hypothesis in a little bit.

So they're like, well, this one's nice because it's the mathematics over the multiverse idea.

But the problem with the multiverse idea is that it's not what scientists like to call parsimonious,

which means that what's happening is there's a new universe splitting off like all the time.

Every time there's a quantum, we're talking about quantum decisions.

We're not really talking about big things like cats.

We're talking about little decisions that occur within a nanosecond.