Rizwan Virk

Yeah, sure.

So the simulation hypothesis is basically the idea that what we think of is the physical world, you know, like this table, this chair, that all the physical reality is actually part of a virtual world, a computer-generated world.

And probably the most popular expression of that in the media has been the film The Matrix, because, you know, Neo thought he was in a real physical world, but turns out he was actually in a virtual world.

Now, there's a lot of different flavors of

of simulation theory when you delve deep into it.

For example, in the case of Neo and Morpheus in The Matrix, they existed as players outside of The Matrix, and then they had an avatar or character inside The Matrix.

I call that the RPG version or the role-playing game version of the simulation hypothesis.

And then there's another flavor, which I call the NPC version, which NPC stands for non-player characters.

Anyone who's played video games knows that terminology.

And in that scenario, everybody in the game is AI.

So it's just code that's controlled by computer programs.

And of course, those two are not completely exclusive, mutually exclusive, because you can have player characters or avatars, and you can have NPCs within a virtual environment.

So I think of it more like an axis.

And, you know, I use the metaphor of video games, that the world is a type of massively multiplayer online video game because that's sort of my background was in building video games in Silicon Valley before I came to write this book.

But when some academics and scientists refer to simulation theory, they're talking more about the NPC version where we're all running on a computer and you don't exist as a player.

You're just one of the beings being simulated.

Yeah.

In that version, we'd be running on some much more advanced computational system, which could be some type of a quantum computing system.

There have been a number of physicists who are looking at the world as information now.

So there's a whole branch of physics called digital physics.