Joe Rogan Experience #2151 — Rizwan Virk Transcript

Transcript

0:00 The Joe Rogan Experience. She's a strange person to talk to because you start like, you start Harvard and Gary Nolan is running. You had Gary on your video game industry, my background's in computer science. paddle down on the table, and I tried to lean against the table, but of course there But then I started to research things like quantum physics and some of the mysteries

3:10 Well, that's the big question, right? Okay. So you exist outside the game, and then you have a character or avatar inside the game. And so depending on how you look at it, you might come to different answers about who's fiction writer named Vern Ravindji. In fact, he just passed away like a month ago or something. But I think this idea of the simulation point where we can create simulations that are indistinguishable

6:04 We're at the beginning of that whole thing. Yes. So where will computers be in a thousand years? a whole bunch of simulations. And you can't tell the difference whether you're in the Right? Have you ever checked into a vacation rental and wondered if the host planted a hidden With ExpressVPN, you don't have to. ExpressVPN is an easy way extra months of ExpressVPN for free. Just go to expressvpn.com slash rogan that's

10:31 Right. I'm assuming it is because I have all these detailed memories of the past. I see my dog Movies like Total Recall, even in Blade Runner. he said, and it's a pretty famous quote, he Maybe I've talked to you before in a different run the variables, and we would go forward. It basically gets rendered for us like a video game. the West Coast is run by the Japanese, and you see this kind of fascist type world. And so he later came to believe that this actually happened and somehow the simulators

14:48 I think with the question you were asking, because you're like, if I just remember x, that I was talking about, but one of them And the light is coming from that quasar to here. It's a lot closer, but it's still a million light years away. choice experiment tells us is that that decision is made now when we measure that light, when I'm not sure I totally understand this.

17:52 after an hour or so. And so after an hour, the chances that the cat is dead or alive This is why, you know, Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize winner, said nobody understands quantum But quantum mechanics, through the double slit experiment and the observer effect says I kind of understand what you're saying, but isn't it really just that we don't know But what all the physicists have been telling us now for almost a hundred years, right,

19:56 Right. He's like, look, you can't have a cat that's both alive and dead. So then it could be like left rotated or right located or right rotated. That's it. It has to be one or the other. It can't be both. Zero and one. So a qubit is a superposition of a bit, like cracking encryption, the story of how big that number gets when you have exponential growth. So there was

23:30 because there's 64 squares on the chessboard, that basically it was more rice than would There's a game called No Man's Sky. I don't know if you ever played it. Yeah, it was kind of boring at first. that is, what, 64 bits. But the basic idea, and I don't know what number we're up to for a while, it was like But the idea is if you can have 64 qubits, you can instantaneously solve a problem that is exponential because you can explore

26:21 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. splitting the universe into two different universes. You've got your different versions of Batman, your different versions of Superman. were trying to explain Superman, like how does Superman get his powers? You say, oh,

28:37 And so people said, how can a quantum computer take you down you know many many different rabbit holes. Yeah. And I think because the reason scientists like this multiverse idea is that mathematically Like, is it the act of observation? But the problem with the multiverse idea is that it's not what scientists like to call So think about, now we're talking exponential growth,

31:28 Simulation hypothesis gives you a way to look at both of these, a framework that makes it This table seems pretty physical, right? Like, it's not really there. It's like you go to the very smallest of the Russian dolls, no questions. which is called digital physics. So in the past, physics was about physical objects moving around. You look at it as a computation,

35:01 It gets more weird and it starts to look less like the physical world exists and more like looking at how the world gets rendered as you observe it. And then what happens is we render only the part see and those get cached on the server. really wondering what the heck that means. But with computer science you only But even if you measure it somebody's got to look at that measurement before you know

38:20 little bit of time doing some AI research and I ran into this Nobel Prize What's the argument against it? Against simulation theory? Even though quantum mechanics is telling us that, you know, there was a famous guy named Bishop Berkeley, the city of Berkeley is named are saying. The physicists are the one telling us that the world doesn't really exist, that

41:02 And those lines are actually fuzzier than you might think, right? can find some evidence that these things actually happen or that these things exist. Like a couple hundred years ago, there were stories of rocks falling from the sky. they got a whole... There was some huge meteor storm outside of Paris, and some guys went out But at the same time, you can design experiments which might indicate to you that there's something

43:38 possibilities exist. I mean, you basically are watching that game, right, as the player. It's what we did when we created video games. But the server logic is deciding that. Buddhist traditions and the yogis and they talk about the term Maya. It's almost like if you go to a magic show, you know the guy's not really sawing that into this illusory world in order to have these experiences, right? Sometimes people

46:59 You're not going to go out there and do all that crazy stuff in the real world, although And for the characters in the game, And so they used whatever metaphor. The metaphor of the dream was a key metaphor, that the you put like a series of clothes. And so they use that metaphor to try to describe something It was like the book one of those books that everybody passed around. Yeah, and Steve Jobs, you read it? Oh, great. Yeah. In the 60s, it was like the book, one of those books that everybody passed around. And Steve Jobs, you know, it was his favorite book. At his funeral,

49:59 are happening to them. don't know what's going on other than maybe, you know, maybe having some popcorn or something. And HarperCollinsIndia asked me to write this book about, you know, what can you learn from And so if Yogananda were alive today, and I wrote this in my new book called Wisdom RPG version of the simulation hypothesis. And how do you go through life with this information?

53:03 Like this seems like something that would freak people out to the point on you're here, computer gets shut off. human and my occupation is a wizard or a barbarian, right? That we end up choosing a character But he was pretty much the the grandfather of the video game industry, you know that keeps people playing the game. Tough roles. they use this Arabic word, el-Gururi, which means a delusion, but it means like an enjoyable

57:13 I don't know if you had any on your show. heard all of this. But the most important part for me in these stories, he was in special forces in Vietnam and he actually killed people. He said he had to You've probably heard a League of Legends like the most popular at least it was eSports game, right? And so literally, you could go back and replay that game from the point of view of the person you shot, right?

1:00:16 Because how are you going to replay it if it's not being recorded? No, I want to watch that man and that woman play the Star Wars game on YouTube. Exactly. They call it the scroll of deeds. say, okay, this religion is right and that one isn't, but to say what's in common across it doesn't mean there's like angels with a feather pen They're sitting there, there's a screen, and then suddenly they get pulled into the

1:03:38 my kids or, you know. in life, right? We go through financial difficulties, go through health difficulties, right? And What karma is actually about is about your thoughts, your desires and your actions which You know, I'm from Silicon Valley. I like to say it's in the cloud, right? That's what we store all our information And so I like to think of it as the reason we call it the cloud

1:06:19 You would say, this is how many 386s we have. Like you got the HUD, the heads up display, that we still need to have. it, it's like a, I like to think of it as like a raid or a guild in a video game, right? when we have tough experiences,, I think, something that can So there's a story of this guy named Babaji who supposedly lived for hundreds of years

1:09:00 And now I'm going to reinitiate you. that came out of nowhere, you know, right in the middle of the Himalayas. And so I've created this dream palace for you. I don't know. right? Rarely do I find interesting people that haven't experienced something difficult. And what happened was after the heart surgery, I couldn't do anything for a while. Yeah. on the simulation hypothesis, which for me was a way to bring together all the threads

1:13:48 years, I just focused on writing. And that led to this book, The Simulation, I found So I had already like, I was still in Silicon Valley, right? during that time. And then, as my health recovered, So, it was like these things that I kind of wanted to do before and I never got to, but And so now we're getting into like the personal philosophy us a way to say, you know what, maybe what all those religions were saying wasn't bullshit, right? It wasn't just stories that

1:17:05 And the metaphor side is what I think, actually for me personally, and that was your question, of people interface with problems, you go, okay, this is the challenge that I'm presented whenever, why would it choose this particular challenge at this point in my life? The Greeks talked about the river of forgetfulness, Lethe. in my view and I think within this way of viewing the world as a video game, in order

1:19:39 There was a hypnotherapist who wrote a book called Journey of Souls, Dr. Michael Newton. So these are sometimes called pre-birth memories now. because I'm going to have on this avatar. I'm using the term avatar because I talk about video quests, I would say. game will give you clues as to how to play it and you'll have experiences that you can One way or the other.

1:23:06 That's the way to do it. body that is telling you your intuition, right? in quantum mechanics stopped thinking about what the heck does this mean because it was So one of these guys talks about these futures are sending us information, and sometimes simulate like weird bad experiences, traumatic experiences, maybe preparing you for things in life. But when you start to think about the world as a simulation, again, you can simulate more

1:26:01 to shoot a particular scene. So they would do this pre-visualization. And his idea that the universe, what happens is we actually go and we change variables Yeah. die in prison, right? You can look it up, right? He got out of prison, became president Barents and bears. And then there were entire episodes of Star Trek where like the Trekkies in the audience

1:29:09 which was a movie that he supposedly made called, Like do you remember Tiananmen Square? Like this vivid memory of this thing, right? I don't remember it. this particular line, you know. And so, you know, and there are websites that track these And I always wondered, why do you need to memorize it? That would be the djinn. But there are other physical objects, like the thinker, okay?

1:33:08 And we could even bring it up, right, if we can find it. tourists just doing it for fun, but it's really weird. So there's actually a picture that I found Okay, so there's G.B. And he was probably standing right next to where the statue was unveiled. And and so there's like there's almost three versions of this Okay. But what you find is that the more significance that something has to you, the less likely

1:36:20 you just went to South Africa to interview Nelson Mandela and then you remember him dying, MIT who was working at Google came to me and said, you know, hey, have you heard the Mandela effect? So the Mandela effect is not something And if you think of all the Mandela effects, Right? That's actually a good one. Curious George is a monkey, right? Does he have a tail?

1:38:45 Yo. have is this network graph of possibilities of the past, right? You have many different memory. And so I think it becomes harder to just dismiss some of these, you know, fruit loops, fruit It's not just a movie line. And they were sitting there and they were movie where it looked like that was real. Isn't that strange? But it brings up the possibility, in fact, you may have seen the movie The Adjustment Bureau with

1:42:34 They kind of look like angels in the movie but they had like these little books that I think, Fullerton or somewhere around there, I forget where. And so he kind of theorized this whole idea that there, as we run different versions of the simulation, little things can end up years ago. But the weirdness with quantum mechanics is telling us that decision is made now

1:44:26 So those are multiple possible futures. guy in Tiananmen Square got run over by the tank? And what if there's a past where the guy in Tiananmen Square got run over by the tank, and what reaches the satellite so they can measure it. And it turns out that it A decision would have had to have been made a million years ago, whether to go left or in today's world with some people, because some people have this memory of a different

1:47:21 through now, let's say Schrodinger's cat is alive or dead. Now if we think of this as a simulated reality, then it becomes a little more understandable. physical universes. Now, I've never seen a planet clone itself, let alone an entire universe, a physical universe. So we don't just run an infinite number of anything, And so in that case, it'll pick the best scenario, right? And so in that

1:50:18 Right we could even run them on parallel like today's processor right today's laptops have like parallel processors, right, YouTube, and then all these other processes are in the background. just appears like they're all running at the same time, right? Yeah. Right. So this is an idea I'm playing with, which is that people could be players, they could

1:53:08 But if you think of NPC as a collection of neural networks in AI, right? You may know there's something else coming up And that gives us an intuition. And so this is a fundamental debate within science and religion as well, right? And I think it's a big, big open question. If you think of it as a video game, it's the moment at which you've put on the headset

1:56:38 to me and said, oh yeah, when I did DMT, I saw the lines, the grid lines of the simulation, both of us presumably are experiencing the same thing. you're seeing when you do it. I'm just imagining that you see the same thing that I see. And a lot of people describe it in a UAPs the UFO phenomenon? Loeb with the Galileo project. you don't know what to make of them, right?

2:00:34 And so, he and I sat down a few years ago when I was trying to think about all this This was really interesting. Once all the other investigators left, he said, well, there's something I don't quite there's the alien theory, extra-terrestrial hypothesis, there's aspects of the religious we're asking the wrong question, right? Because it's a question of when is it physical and

2:03:49 but then once they become physical, once they render, they're actually physically here, to the case where one person sees the UFO and one person doesn't, I was than we think. And that's where the intersection between the UAP phenomena and the simulation theory It's like trivial to do that in a video game, right? don't. a video game somewhere else at different X, Y coordinates, right?

2:07:12 universities and talked about how their colleagues reacted. And the problem is I think in the Because what happens with this topic is it goes through these waves where scientists But Congress isn't buying it. because that's how science progresses, is when people don't set artificial boundaries in the 80s that this is all solved, this is all nonsense, like we shouldn't talk about it. And I believe that is the kind of dogma that is preventing this topic from being

2:10:00 way and if it did, we've already solved it. Like that's so... The arrogance of assuming right? Right, now that's where I think you start to get into, you know, more interesting areas. back in the 1800s, there were these things called the airships, right? Nobody really understood what they were. And if you go back to biblical planet Krypton, right? Right?

2:13:15 So for example, I was talking with Whitley Strieber recently. got into a physical relationship and then one day she calls him over to her house. Right. that exist outside of our physical reality and they're able to come in and out? more advanced users of the simulation than we are. or maybe they're already projecting into our simulation. been within Congress around, do we have a reverse engineering program? Is it in the

2:16:31 they're working reverse engineering things, where do they think these things came from? That would frustrate me to no end if someone said it's too complicated. Well, so, I mean, I've met many people who've seen these craft, right? about where, because they're not allowed to say that, right? If a thousand people say they've been to China and we have scientists saying, there's no

2:18:29 There's plenty of people who have sightings. metallurgy and especially, you know, what we call collective, colloquially we call within the academy and within scientists, and then there's another physics that the much more advanced than what we're capable of today, but also I think they That have seen these things. Levitation. basic levitation. So 90s, 2000s this year, but that doesn't mean exactly when that might have happened.

2:21:53 something like this, but he was saying it as somebody who was more hands-on as part somewhere. Okay. I can't discuss it openly. Yeah I'd love to know but his basic story seems You know? So I think that's reasonable to assume he was there. That it's extra trust. All right, that's a very what would be a reason for such extreme reality or changes time? I mean, you can't have everybody time traveling and changing

2:26:06 I think of it that this sort of iconic thought, this image that we have in our head is essentially I mean, we're less and less physical, right? It doesn't look like something from like, did you ever see Arrival? They look like what we could become. They're created biological beings, right? Right, right, exactly. It makes much more sense. There was something called von Neumann

2:29:10 I don't know if you ever read Rendezvous with Rama, which was Arthur C. Clarke's novel. It's so strange. It laughs, it talks to you. This guy did a video where he was talking Yeah, I saw that video and you know, there were other ones where it was translating in real time What about humans? You know And so it sounds intelligible, but it's not be in a URL. And so then I looked at the professor's names who wrote this article. And so we emailed

2:32:28 It tries to invent an answer. useful. of... But what it does is it shows that as AI becomes the way was there's this sense that chat bots and AI will replace search. Like there were all these ways and then search became the dominant paradigm for the last, that'll always show you a woman as the generic picture. Yeah. called like the Alice chatbot, I think.

2:36:14 I didn't watch it. But the AI decides to go off on its own. And so you mentioned the arrival. wander around. What do we do with these? So they actually prefer to be in this free form virtual world. you investigating it so thoroughly that you can describe it so well. And I mean, it's And that's part of why I like this subject and like even when I teach a class on it it's about all that stuff it's about as interdisciplinary