Rizwan Virk

How the Hippies Save Physics.

I don't know if you ever heard of that book, but it was an interesting book about how people in quantum mechanics stopped thinking about what the heck does this mean because it was too complicated back in the 60s.

And in the 70s, a group of hippie physicists, all PhD physicists in Berkeley, used to have this group and talk about what does this all mean.

One of the guys was Fritjof Capra, who wrote The Tao of Physics.

Another, I think, was Gary Zukav.

And a bunch of these guys ended up looking at

what does this all mean as opposed to just calculating, which is what physicists were doing at the time.

So one of these guys talks about these futures are sending us information, and sometimes what we get are clues, right, saying that, oh, this is a possibility.

Maybe I should choose this over that.

It's almost like the futures are sending back these messages to the past, and I think of that as different runs of the game, right?

And it's possible there's a part of us

that might be running the game forward as a simulation to try to see what might happen and then come back and then you make a choice based on this idea.

There was some guys who wrote a paper recently about dreams as a sort of way to simulate 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 than once, right?

You can try out what might happen if you did X or what might happen if you do Y. Kind of like you watch the Lord of the Rings movies, right, probably.

If you look at what they did was before Peter Jackson, what they did was before they actually filmed the scene, they would create a pre-vis, pre-visualization, right, using like crude graphics and stuff.

And, you know, you can see they played out what it might look like before they got around and did the act because it's so expensive, right, in a movie to shoot a particular scene.

So they would do this pre-visualization.

And so, you know, perhaps there's a part of us that's watching the game that's doing this pre-visualization and they're sending us clues about what might happen if we do X or what might happen, you know, if we do Y.