Rizwan Virk

And then when I focused on it, suddenly it was like I got the message pretty clearly during that time.

You know, this is sort of a mystical experience.

I was going in and out of consciousness a lot while I was recovering.

And I would just get the message from...

You're supposed to be writing.

You're supposed to be writing.

What the heck are you doing still out there trying to make money?

That wasn't what we agreed to.

This is what you were supposed to do.

When I did that, things just flowed much more easily.

The book went on to be quite successful and I was able to write another book.

Then, as my health recovered, I realized there was another thing that I'd always wanted to do, which was be a professor in academia, and that's kind of what I'm doing now.

So I went back for a PhD after many years, and now I'm teaching classes on the simulation hypothesis, doing research on AI.

So it was like these things that I kind of wanted to do before and I never got to, but they were optional parts of the story.

And we still have the ability to make choices.

But sometimes a quest hits us or a situation hits us with a lot of difficulty.

And maybe there's a bigger purpose to that.

Maybe it has something to do with how we set up our character in the game and the choices that we're making.

And so now we're getting into the personal philosophy side of simulation, which I think is quite valid.

That's probably the biggest questions I get asked are, are we in a simulation?