Riz Virk, expertise in computer simulation, gaming and AI push the simulation hypothesis beyond materialism.

photo by: Skeptiko

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.

 Alex Tsakiris: [00:00:46] If you can do it, you will do it and the Luddites never really win, do they?

Riz Virk: [00:00:53] 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. When you talk about simulation, it’s the kind of thing that I lay out in my book, the 10 stages to the simulation point. So these are stages of technology that we will 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 I’m glad, 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, is consciousness just a reproduction of neurons, in which case 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 with physicists and people at MIT, and I can discuss it with Buddhist monks and I can discuss it with biblical scholars as well, because there are lots of aspects to AI and this idea that the world around us isn’t quite the real world, that perhaps there is another world that we cannot see.  

The same thing with spoon bending, right? People will say it doesn’t exist, but many people have seen it. So, 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 Vallée and UFOs, I had lunch with him recently and he told me he investigated a case where there was supposedly a UFO and they said it came down at a 45 degree angle and it actually left some marks on the ground. So there was some physical evidence. So Jacques went back after the original investigation, and he looked at and he said, “You said it went in a 45 degree angle. That means it would’ve had to go through the trees.” They said, “Yeah, but we didn’t want to tell anybody that because nobody would believe us.” Which gets back to, is this a virtual phenomenon that gets materialized when it’s needed? And it’s something that we see. So, I think that’s where kind of explaining how all that works is a task that’s ongoing?

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