American Alchemy with Jesse Michels - MIT Scientist: “UFOs Prove We Live In a Simulation” (ft. Riz Virk)

Episode Date: November 22, 2024

🔒Remove your personal information from the web at https://joindeleteme.com/JESSE20 and use code JESSE20 for 20% off 🙌 DeleteMe international Plans: https://international.joindeleteme.com In today's episode of American Alchemy, Jesse Michels sits down with Riz Virk to explore the provocative idea that our reality might be a simulation, blending cutting-edge physics, ancient mysticism, and gaming theory. They dive into topics like quantum mechanics, free will, and the Mandela Effect, offering a fresh perspective on the nature of existence. Riz Virk's Book "The Simulated Multiverse": https://tinyurl.com/rizvirkamazon Support American Alchemy by Becoming a YouTube Member: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuG2KzrIMe3qoNcuDVpwnXw/join SPOTIFY ➤ https://tinyurl.com/jessemichelsspotify DISCORD ➤ https://discord.gg/jessemichels INSTAGRAM (Personal) ➤ https://www.instagram.com/jessemichels INSTAGRAM (Show) ➤ https://www.instagram.com/jessemichelsofficial TWITTER ➤ https://twitter.com/AlchemyAmerican EMAIL/BOOKINGS ➤ [e-mail] Produced by Jesse Michels and Bryan Felber Written by Jesse Michels Editing and Animation Bryan Felber Additional Animation Ross @FlatPackFX Featuring Jesse Michels and Rizwan Virk Cinematography Isaac Rodriguez Additional Cinematography Mario Kidd Appearances from Jacques Vallée Garry Nolan Rob Rinehart Brian Muraresku Graham Hancock Paul Schatzkin Special Thanks Roger Penrose The PEAR Lab Philip K. Dick The Simulated Multiverse and The Simulation Hypothesis by Rizwan Virk are available in print, ebook, and audiobook now! Timestamps: 00:00 - Introduction 03:32 - Are We Living in a Simulation? 07:10 - The Physics of Simulation Theory 12:08 - Evidence from Fine-Tuned Constants 18:14 - The Mandela Effect and Changing Realities 20:40 - Information Theory 30:42 - The Role of the Mind 35:57 - Free Will 37:17 - Time 39:50 - Parapsychology 48:32 - Donald Hoffman's Theory 56:10 - Mystical Practices and Simulation Overlaps 01:02:55 - Psychedelics and Altered Consciousness 01:09:23 - The NPC Hypothesis 01:15:47 - UFOs, Timelines, and Simulation 01:22:30 - Choosing Your Quest in the Game of Life Original music: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LlLRudDi60Uy4jcmOSEs1 *** AMERICAN ALCHEMY is an original series hosted by Jesse Michels that explores the frontier of science and tech. Each week, we bring you exclusive interviews with some of the leading thinkers of our time. #podcast #simulation #aliens #uap #technology #quantum #physics Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition, First Citizens Bank. So basically, the rule of thumb in video games for 3D MMRPs is render only that which can be observed by the avatar. There. What is real? How do you define real? You live like this! It is now passe and conventional to say that we live in a simulation.

Elon Musk says that we're... Most likely in a simulation. We live in a computer simulation. It's like the Truman Show. Nothing matters. Go crazy. It's all just a video game. Man, I played video games before, so... You know, I know it up there on a little bit. These sentiments are mostly just a product of postmodern nihilism, the absurdity of modern life.

Yeah, it's the guy I feel like a cowgirl. I'm ready. Huh? One in which... society feels purposeless, docile, and domesticated, and which were hypnotized by material game, stupid status games, and mere survival. Look at that subtle off-way coloring. Oh my God.

It even has a watermark. We know it's all kind of fake and ephemeral, but we continue playing the game for some reason. Frozen by our desires and paralyzed by faithlessness in higher worlds that have been relegated to mythology that few people actually believe are real. Post-pandemic, we are forking from this zombie path. Everything is speeding up and the future is fracturing at an accelerated pace. Artificial intelligence war in Gaza. Ukraine war.

The post-pandemic timeline is a forcing function for us to reconcile with the ugliest parts of ourselves. Our Jungian shadows. Every one of you are terrorists, I don't care what you say. Perhaps we're, our player, is saying, okay, now I need to make some changes. Or now I need to take control and make sure it doesn't go do this thing. The simulation is breaking. We're glimpsing the light beyond Plato's cave. And that light can either eviscerate us or save us.

But where did we get this idea of the simulation in the first place? We are living in a computer programmed reality. And the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed. Well, there were some early and very important proponents like sci-fi authors, Philip K. Dick, and William Gibson. But the theory wasn't given its coveted academic stamp of approval until Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom wrote his 2012 book, Superintelligence. The hypothesis that we are literally living in a computer simulation. We used to say in artificial intelligence that the Turing test was the Holy Grail, that developing an AI, indistinguishable from another human being would be near impossible to achieve.

And then, at least in the realm of text, we've done just that with OpenAI's chat GPT. I think like just this is the arc of human technological history as we build bigger and more complex systems. So why shouldn't we expect the same thing to occur with virtual reality? The creation of a virtual world as high fidelity as ours, one that's even totally indistinguishable from it. This was Bostrom's essential thesis. You know, I know this steak doesn't exist. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss.

So in a future war-torn, resource-constrained world, why wouldn't everyone begin opting into these brain-machine virtual simulations? Wouldn't infinite resources at your fingertips be more pleasurable than walking around microchipped in a shanty town without access to clean water? But maybe that future isn't inevitable. What about a resource abundant world? That's always possible, too. Well, that resource abundance would be achieved through technology that is probably dual use.

In other words, tech that can either save humanity or destroy it. This technology has the chance to either bring us together or completely rip us apart once for all. Take nuclear fusion. It can destroy humanity with a hydrogen bomb or theoretically save it. with controlled free energy. And the costs, barriers to entry, and civil engineering required to build all of these technologies are exponentially dropping.

We're not at the point where a kid in his bedroom can blow up the world just yet, but we might be uncomfortably closed soon. Who should we nuke first? How about Las Vegas? Las Vegas, great. So in a resource abundant world that anyone can destroy at the drop of a hat,

if you were an elite member of that world, Or a guardian, maybe you would send the average citizenry through a simulation before they can enter base reality, a test to ensure they adhere to the right higher virtues before giving them access to such possibly destructive technology, a sort of global scale initiation process, if you will. Maybe we're all just vying for access to get to the next level, a world of immortality, resource abundance, and infinite love. How do you know you don't have an incredibly high fidelity biological skin suit headset on right now in the form of your body.

Our senses are a filter to stop our brains from being overwhelmed with reality. And so what we see is a limited aspect of everything around us. But that is a different model of reality than people currently have today, but it's one I'm sympathetic to, which is that the sensory organs are not necessarily productive,

they're reductive. On a default state of almost greater omniscience, but an inability to make it. sense of right things. Even Elon Musk, America's chief industrialist of SpaceX, Tesla, and X fame thinks that we're living in a simulation. There's a one in billions chance that this is based reality. Oh, okay. Elon's and Nick Bostrom's arguments are so easy to comprehend in common sense and so hard

to argue it that even a totally closed-minded midwit like Neil deGrasse Tyson accepts that we are 50% likely to be living in a simulation. It's hard to argue against the possibility that all of us are not just the creation of some kid in a parent's basement, programming up a world for their own entertainment. In-Wox Riz Verk, an MIT and Stanford-educated computer scientist with a very successful career as a video game entrepreneur. We are most likely inside some kind of a computer simulation. Merck takes Bostrum's work on the simulation theory to the nether. next level. He points to all sorts of phenomenon in physics from the finely tuned physical constants

to quantum indeterminacy to show that reality is likely based on information theory or quantum code that humans are rendering in real time. The more I looked into the idea of the physical universe, the more I realized that many physicists are telling us that the physical world doesn't really exist. and start with John Wheeler. He said that physics went through three phases in his life. In the first phase, they thought everything was a particle, meaning they thought it was like a solid thing. Then when quantum mechanics came along,

they thought everything was a field. And the conclusion he came to finally was, the more he looked into what an actual particle is, the only thing he could find was that it was an answer to a series of yes, no questions. But he also said, also points to Christian, Islamic, Vedic, and even classical Western texts like Plato, that all point towards a proto-architecture behind religion, one that depicts life as a sort

of painful yet joyous, carmic game in which we must learn repeated lessons. In the Sufi traditions, you know, they talk about the 70,000 veils. These veils are put between you and ultimate reality, between you and God, and you're trying to remember who you were and who God is. also discusses time, timelines, and time loops as the core variables in the simulation. Probability really only exists if you do something multiple times. So how is it that we can talk about the probability wave and collapsing if it's only going to happen one time?

The only way that is real probability is if it was run multiple times. Much of this points to a simulation theory that in my mind is far more life-affirmed. empowering and meaningful for the average individual than the typical nihilistic frame it, that you were just a cog in a computational machine and that your life has no meaning. So without further ado, please enjoy this special life-affirming documentary with this week's amazing American alchemist, Rizwan Verth. This episode is sponsored by Delete Me. Online privacy is no longer a luxury.

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join deleteme.com slash jesse20 and using the code jesse 20 at checkout. Thanks to delete me for sponsoring today's episode. Use my link in the description to start protecting your data today. So you can think of simulation theory as having many different flavors or axes. And one of the axes is whether it's we're all NPCs, non-player characters, or we're all avatars. of players, which I call the RPG version or the role-playing game version. In this version, a more expanded, more fundamental, and more primordial soul is voluntarily porting itself into low-level reality. It goes back to Plato, you know, maybe the myth of air or something, he's sort of zapped

into a body, you know, you experience anemnesis where you forget your sort of former primordial self. But there is that self, and that self has real agency in this world. So I think that's more life-affirming. I do too, and that's why I tend to lean more towards the RPG version. But it also, you know, one of the reasons why we can't remember is perhaps that's the way the game was set up. Why? Because you have been down there, Neo. You know that right?

You know exactly where it is. Physics itself, which involves very finely tuned physical constants, feels like it was perfectly constructed. to create the conditions of our solar system and the Earth. As the great Stephen Hawking even admitted, the laws of science, as we know them at present, contain many fundamental numbers, like the size of the electric charge of the electron

and the ratio of the masses of the proton and the electron. The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life. Take water, one of the most basic resources for intelligent life on Earth. It's comprised of hydrogen and oxygen. Hydrogen and oxygen happen to bond in a way that forms a perfect crystal lattice structure

when frozen. Normally, solids are more dense than liquids, and so they sink below them. But in the case of water, these perfect hexagonal crystal structures, space H2O molecules out more in ice than in water, making it less dense. That's why you see water floating above the surface. If that weren't the case, and the Earth would flood many times over. But that's just the tip of the iceberg, no pun intended. If Planck's constant or the strong nuclear force were slightly different,

it would drastically change the formation and stability of basic elements, like hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen in the first place. Elements that, as we just discussed in the case of water, are essential for organic life. If the gravitational constant were different, the Earth might not be able to retain its own atmosphere, and the lifespan of the sun can be drastically shorted. than it is now. This wouldn't even allow for enough time for life to form in the first place.

And what about the Earth's Van Allen belt? It protects us from cosmic radiation that would wipe life off the planet. The Van Allen belt is created by Earth's magnetic field. And if you think the Earth's magnetic field isn't finally tuned to support life, try growing organic life in a Faraday chamber, removing the Earth's natural electromagnetic frequencies. Grow a frog embryo in a a fair day chamber and it comes out pretty messed up. This is why astronauts need to bring human resonance machines up with them to space to mimic the Earth's magnetic field. Otherwise, their bodies will stop functioning properly.

And the magnetic field of the Earth blocks just enough solar radiation to ensure humans don't get eviscerated by overradiation, but lets in just enough to create some of the genetic mutations necessary for natural selection and evolution to occur. The conventional dogma in academia is that these are all just happy accidents that eventually occur with enough time, solar systems, and planets across eons. But thinkers like Riz-Virke think these perfectly fine-tuned conditions point to intelligent creation or simulation. In fact, all of the possible values of these constants have been run through within a timeline

of the multiverse. I call it the simulated multiverse, so they've been simulated, and we happen to be in the one. that has the constants that are well fine-tuned for us to be able to live in it. But there are other universes out there where we would not be able to live. We have more evidence for the simulation. In information theory, which is the basis for the simulation in computers and video games that we code up every day, you would use repeating consistent structures to build programs. Think about it.

If there are a few lines of code that help the people at Activision build, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater that they can just reuse for Call of Duty, they'll just copy and paste that code. While in nature, we see all sorts of repeating patterns that seem to represent the building blocks of organic plant and animal life. The Fibonacci sequence is a sequence of numbers in which each new term is the sum of the previous two terms, one, two, three, five, eight, etc. As of the sequence progresses, the ratio between...

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Co-pilot shows Hank where the money's going and which little extras make the dollar slice work. Now, Hank has a line out the door. Hank makes the pizza. Co-Pilot handles the spreadsheets. Learn more at M365, copilot.com slash work. It's time to refresh your yard during spring backyard days at the Home Depot. Get low prices guaranteed on propane grills starting at $179, like the next grill 3-burner gas grill.

Or get $50 off a select Weber Spirit grill and bring big flavor to your backyard. Then set the scene with Hampton Bay string lights that bring it all together. Shop spring backyard days for seven days at the Home Depot. Now through May 6th. Exclusion supplies to homedipo.com slash price match for details. When consecutive numbers in a Fibonacci sequence approaches the golden ratio, or roughly 1.618. The dimensions of DNA follow Fibonacci numbers. The arrangement of leaves on plant stems often follow Fibonacci numbers to maximize sunlight exposure.

The even trippier thing is that these biological patterns often look like fractals of larger cosmological patterns in our solar system. The arms of spiral galaxies often form logarithmic spirals displaying the golden ratio. This includes, by the way, our Milky Way galaxy. It's sort of like an infinite Russian nesting doll system. But how exactly does computer science and information theory work? Well, the basis of information theory involves bits, or ones and zeros, or on and off switches, or yeses and knows, which become abstracted into higher level symbolic language and eventually into icons and images that we see on the graphical interfaces we call computers.

So where might we find ones and zeros in nature? Plenty of particles have matter-antimatter pairs, take an electron. Electrons themselves are perfectly interoperable. They all have the exact same atomic mass and properties, and they all have an antimatter inverse called the positron. The antimatter, or the zeros, are not really detectable. Maybe these binary switches are being actively rendered by an observer. And what about human beings themselves?

Well, we all have four nucleotides that make up DNA. Adonine, guanine, thymine, and cytosine, or A, G, T, for sure. But we call them base pairs because A always bonds with T and C always bonds with G. So two base pairs. Sounds like bits or ones and zeros to me. I don't believe. Is it really so hard to believe? But there is also this issue of the fact that we all think we're in the same reality, right?

And are we in the same reality or not? Is an interesting question. It's like a consensus collapsing function. Yeah, it's like a consensus collapsing function. You know, we could get into a whole discussion if we had time about the Mandela fact. Mm-hmm. A phenomenon in which a large number of people remember events that don't seem to match reality. It's called this because a big group of people remember Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 80s,

even going into detail about his wife walking in a funeral procession beside his casket for two hours that day, an event that never happened. Mandela went on to be released from prison. He united South Africa and he died in 2013. Other people swear that in Star Wars' empire strikes back, Darth Vader says, Luke, I am your father. What he actually says is no.

I am your father. A little less iconic. Sex in the city is actually sex and the city. The Flintstones is actually spelled Flintstones. There are countless examples. One of the interesting aspects of the Mandela fact that I found was when scripture changes. Because people take their scripture pretty seriously. Right.

I mean, it's one thing to have one letter change. somewhere, which is a big deal, like in the case of the Bernstein bears, versus the Bernstein bears, or one word in the case of the Empire Strikes Back. Luke, I am your father. But people remember their scripture almost word for word, and so there are all these Bible changes, like Isaiah and the lion and the lamb, and that line is not there anymore. And in Islam, they memorize the Quran, word for word. I mean, that before you become a priest, there's a designation called Hafez, which is somebody who literally can go through the entire Quran word for it. I always thought that was kind of stupid. Like, why do we need to memorize word for word? We have the

books. Now we have computers. We can do a search. It doesn't seem to make sense. And I looked around to see if anybody had claimed any of the words had changed. And there was this one Sufi Imam who claimed that the reason why, even after the introduction of writing and writing down the Quran, that it's still memorized word for word, is that there are these entities. out there who don't live in normal space and time the way we do, they can go back and change physical objects, but they're not allowed to change our memory. And those beings are called gin, the gin. 10,000 years will give you such a crick in the neck. Now would probably be a good time to pay homage to the great Claude Shaman, the architect of

information theory, which led to modern computation principles and the great physicist John Archibald Wheeler, one of the first proponents of information as the basis of physics. It was Wheeler who coined the phrase, It from Bit, and the more recent and probably more accurate version, It from Cubit, to suggest that physical reality arises from a base substrate of information. I know he's a proponent of kind of it from bit, but I'm more familiar with the Schrodinger, you know, it's just a probability function. So how do you get from probability function to like a binary yes, no? question sort of thing. Right. Well, okay, so you might have to do a little bit of bridging there because if you think of the probability wave, what it's actually saying is that particles are in superposition.

It's like a wave or an interference pattern. Now, that's just weird, right? So why would the universe be in states of superposition until there's a measurement or an observation? There's no good reason for that as far as we can tell. It's just one of these mysteries of nature. And so for me, it very much reminded me, quantum physics very much reminded me of how we build video games today and virtual worlds. And so if it becomes what we sometimes call a lazy evaluation in computer science, which is you don't evaluate anything until you need to and don't render it unless you need to, you render only those pieces you need to, that could very much provide an interesting explanation for the why of this quantum indeterminacy.

That kind of reminds me of if you have Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, you know, the measured position, momentum gets fuzzier and sort of vice versa. It's almost like a computational caching function or something. Like only so much can be stored in local memory. And what about how light travels? Would that follow information theory principles? Vermont's principle of least time states that light follows the path that takes the least time to travel from one point to another. If the universe were a simulation, then the rendering of light,

which is the foundation of everything we see, seems like it is governed by algorithms that seek the most efficient outcomes. In computers, you have a client side and a server side, a front-end interface, and a back-end database. Well, that actually might be how consciousness works. We may be nodes in a larger network. When one person learns a new concept or achieves a breakthrough, they might make it incrementally easier for others to reach these new heights. It's like Rupert-Sheldrakes, you know, morphic resonance, where if 100 people do a crossword puzzle and you do a crossword puzzle tomorrow, you're a little more likely to do it accurately,

where you're pushing information to the server as well. It's almost as if all scientific and material world accomplishments get uploaded to a central repository. Once that upload occurs, a new node downloading that information becomes that much easier. Also, if you make a new chemical compound for the first time and you crystallize it, that crystal form won't have existed before because it's a new compound. And the more often you crystallize it, the easier it should get for crystals of that kind to form. That's amazing. This might also explain the banister effect, the idea that when a significant barrier is broken in athletics, it can lead to a mental shift that opens the floodgates for others to achieve the

same new heights. The Bannister effect is named after British athlete Roger Bannister, who broke the four-minute mile record in 1954 at Oxford. Within just two and a half years, ten other runners had all broken the four-minute mile. I was barely aware of the fact that Chris Chatterway was now going into the lead. If humans are the client side, and there is a server side, storing information for us, how would that client-server communication take place? Well, if you recall from my video, the man who built UFOs for the CIA, I interview a Navy whistleblower who discusses an extended version of electrodynamics that involves a far more faithful adherence to James Clerk Maxwell's 21 original equations instead of Oliver Heaviside

simplification into four vector calculus equations. When you introduce the scalar field, you now have the possibility of at least three of completely new kinds of waves. Some of these waves might involve faster than light communications. And one of those exotic new wave types is called heliacoidal. So maybe that's how biological life gets downloads from the central server. And what about humans? Every human body has an electromagnetic field. And if this extended version of electrodynamics is real,

Maybe that's how we call information from the larger field or server. This fully comports with the phenomenology of thought way more than saying that thoughts are just locally produced. And it might even explain some very interesting ancient and biblical depictions of holy figures. The symbol for the crown is called Corona Radiata. It's nerve endings inside the brain. And we were thought of a neurology. we cannot control this.

We cannot activate that. And then I came and I showed how to enlighten activate the corona radiatta, white mass inside the brain. I know I'm a king, man, the real king. You and all of us, we should be kings. When I first heard about you, it was actually from Jacques Valet. He was like, there's a guy named Riz Verk. and he has this crazy theory, and he sort of, you know, he took me through it, and he was like, it's impossible to disprove.

Like, I think it's right. I read his first book, and I wasn't completely convinced. Yeah. I read his second book, and then I, and then I, he asked me to write a forward for the French version, which I did, because by then I was hooked, and I couldn't find a flaw in what he was seen. Wow. Okay. is the simulated multiverse? What is the core loop engine? Why run many, you know, kind of simulation

functions? Yeah. So, you know, let's start with the multiverse interpretation of quantum mechanics, which was put forth by Hugh Everett, who was a student of John Wheeler's at Princeton, and he basically came up with a way to explain one of the problems with the Copenhagen interpretation. And so one of the problems was you have this probability wave and you have it collapsing to one possibility. But nobody understood how that would actually happen. There's no math that brings you from this to this directly. It was like magic. Well, it's a Schrodinger's equation, I guess.

But it's like square of the amplitude of the... Yeah, that's how you get the probability. Yeah. But nobody really understands how do you go from that down to just one? To the one. Yeah, absolutely. So the collapse is the part. So the particular eigenstate.

Yeah. Everybody knows why. Yeah, right. And what happens to the other possibilities at that point? Yeah. Right. Well, so, you know, as I began to think about it, if you look at the original definition of probability, it was one of these French mathematicians.

I'm forgetting which one. But somebody asked him about rolling dice. He basically said, if you take a die, a single dice, it has six possible futures. Right? So he said, if you roll this dice, you know, you're going to get one of these possible futures. And so probability really only exists if you do something multiple times. Otherwise, what does it mean? There's no meaning to probability.

Right. How would you know if you hadn't flipped the coin so many times? Right. And the idea is that over time, the more you do, the more it's likely to get into the situation. It's a great point. And so how is it that we can talk about a probability wave and collapsing if it's only going to happen one time? The only way that is real probability is if it was run multiple times. And Everett said, well, if you tick these different possibilities and the amplitudes,

what you have is a wave that is basically a superset, a superposition of all these ways. And he said, you can separate one of the waves. But then you still left with all the other subsets of that wave. It turns out you can separate all of them into different physical universes. And so, you know, he put out this idea. that when that collapse happens, what's really happening is we are in one of those universes and the other universes exist out there.

The problem with that approach, according to many physicists, is it's not parsimonious. That's a word they like to use because it's basically creating a new universe all the time. We're talking about at the quantum decision state, right? So much smaller than a second,

we've been creating new universes. And so that idea seems absurd. to some people that we have to create these entire physical universes. And I like to say, well, there's really nothing in nature, no big object that can clone itself so quickly, unless there's one scenario in which I could conceive it happening. And that is that the universe is actually information. Computation. So you don't actually have to clone the whole physical universe.

You just have to clone the information in the universe. It seems like if you go back to the actual Copenhagen school, a lot of them were flirting with the idea that the mind was part of the collapsing of the wave function. So you could even read like Heisenberg and he sort of muses about this, you know, it all has to go through the mind. And then you had Max Planck earlier and von Neumann, Vigner, that was sort of part of their interpretation. And then later on it turned into this, you know, if you talk to most quantum field theorists now, they would say that, you know, it's just when particles sort of collide, they collapse into an eigenstate. And that's independent of, you know, any sort of human observer. And I do find it interesting that a lot of the, you know, all the early proponents, the people that actually

made the equations that govern, you know, quantum mechanics and then quantum field theory, were proponents of this. And then it kind of turned into this, you know, shut up and calculate thing. Right. And I think that is something we should. shouldn't try to lose. I think sometimes we try to have too much certainty because we think the other thing is absurd, right? I mean, Wheeler was one of the ones who talked about this idea that in quantum physics, there is no subject-object separation. You can't have, like the scientists like to think there's a window here, and I'm watching

the observation over there, and what I'm doing here doesn't affect that. Right? That's kind of the basis of scientific experience. You can't have science if you can't have that, but Wheeler was one of the promoters who said, there is no such thing that basically we are in a participatory universe. So if we are observing this experiment, we are affecting the outcome. Even Erwin Schrodinger, the creator of that wave equation that basically governs all subatomic behavior, said consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms, for consciousness is absolutely fundamental.

It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else. Schrodinger had a lecture series called What is Life, in which he expounds upon his view of consciousness as being fundamental to physics, biology, and even life itself. He also had a dog named Otman, which is the primordial soul or eternal self in Hinduism, but I digress. So that is the big debate in physics, and it's one that still hasn't been solved. In my opinion, yet we like to think it's been solved.

And so we come up with ways in which we say, oh yeah, It's only when the particles intersect with each other and measurement, not observation, because observation is what requires an actual conscious entity to observe it. Measurement, you might say, doesn't. But turns out that's not quite true either. Because the measurement could be in a state of superposition until when, until somebody actually looks at that measurement, which could happen in the future. Yeah, there's no epistemological way around it having to pour itself through a human mind.

ultimately. And so like you can say it's the quantum detector, but that is as much speculation as somebody saying it's the mind. It's sort of the speculation versus speculation. And I think the sort of smug, you know, dismissal of the mind being the collapseer of the wave function doesn't, never sort of made sense to me. It feels ideological in, you know, part of our sort of, you know, age of disenchant, or materialist reductionist sort of age. But what about respected mainstream physicists? Do any of them have good theories about the mind and how it relates to wave function collapse? Renowned Nobel Prize winner and mathematician Roger Penrose constructed such a theory of mind called orchestrated objective reduction, or Ork-O-R, for short.

It argues that within the brain's microtubules, space-time itself exists in superposition, and that there is a gravitational component of that spacetime superposition that builds up until it reaches a threshold. Once it hits this threshold, the microtubules lose their quantum coherence and the wave function collapses. But before the collapse, and during the gravity buildup,

there is a fleeting window of time, a space where nothing is set in stone, where all outcomes exist in a quantum haze. Could this be where free will comes into play? So consciousness is the other way around. It depends on. that choice which nature makes all the time when the state becomes one or the other rather in the superposition of one and the other. And when that happens, there is, what we're saying

now, an element of proto-consciousness takes place. Protoconsciousness is roughly speaking the building block out of which actual consciousness is constructed. Henrose believes his theory of orchestrated objective reduction preserves free will. So consciousness is not a pure computation. Or to put it differently, mashing up Penrose and Wheeler, reality is a computation, but free will and intention is driving that computation. It's in the command center.

Free will itself is computationally irreducible. Also, if we have free will, that seems computationally irreducible. Yes, and so that's the other part of it is if you add free will into a computational process, which, by the way, most computer scientists don't want to do, and which both scientists don't want to do because they think a free will

as just being randomness, quantum randomness. In fact, in computers, there's usually in every language there's a command to generate a random number. But technically it's not really random because it's using a well-defined algorithm based on some key phrase and maybe the time in nanoseconds

or milliseconds that you actually made that request. And so the only true randomness in computers comes from quantum computing because quantum computing is relying on the actual quantum effect of superposition collapsing into a position and that is like the only true

randomness. And so scientists try to define free will as the same as that kind of randomness. But if you take a different approach, which is this is a computer program that's running, but there's a player and an avatar, the player can actually make the choice. So you have now introduced free will,

but you need to step out of the system to introduce free will. And that is the same problem why scientists didn't want to deal with consciousness. They prioritize assertion. Now let's get back to quantum mechanics. In general relativity, time and gravity are coupled. In quantum mechanics, gravity becomes so weak that it basically becomes a negligible force. So again, if time and gravity are coupled, why wouldn't time also become negligible or

superpositional at subatomic quantum scales? In Schrodinger's equation, you have position and momentum superpositionality. The idea that, before their observations, subatomic particles don't exist in discrete locations. Their locations are probabilistic. Excuse by French, but that never made any fucking sense to me. Now I'm going to propose something very speculative and probably a bit heretical. That at subatomic levels, just as gravity breaks down, time breaks down.

Okay, maybe gravity is a force and time is not. But the two are still coupled, and it banks the important question. Why do we take time for granted as a classical action? You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost.

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Start comparing hundreds of sites with kayak, and get your trip right. Kayak, got that right. I see him on a subatomic level when we don't understand gravity at all on a subatomic level. So maybe time superpositionality is what causes position and momentum superpositionality. In other words, there's probably some time-based wave function

that is upstream of our position and momentum wave function. Well, that would change the Penrose theory a bit. Maybe the brain actually decoheres time into a singular linear timeline. The brain might be the reason we experience linear time. And when the brain is in a particularly coherent state, it might be able to do some interesting things related to time. If the brain is a quantum system, as Penrose thinks,

it likely has access to shards of the future. It's almost like your mind is like a stylus, and there's like an LP player or something, like a record, and it's choosing the particular timelines or something. and those sort of already pre-exist. You know, maybe it's just up to the mind to move the stylus or something. Yeah, yeah.

Well, I think that's an interesting way to look at it. You know, I look at it more like its runs of the simulation and the universe is, in fact, a quantum computer. Right. And you can run the game state forward, but then you can come back and change the game state as well. Like, you can save the game state and say,

okay, I ran that. Now I'm going to run this other one. Let's see which one is optimal for me. and then that's the one that I'm going to let move forward. But there was an even more heretical branch of physics that began to grow in momentum mid-century, one that won a bit farther than Wheeler, although he did actively entertain it at times. This is the notoriously murky field of parapsychology, where the study of mind-matter interactions,

The mind is no longer limited by the parameters of the body. The person's consciousness and awareness is able to transcend space and time. and describe what is going on hundreds or thousands of miles away or hours or days in the future. If you believe the findings of parapsychology, maybe the mind is collapsing Schrodinger's wave equation. Despite the modern stigma around studying this stuff now, it was popping up at many elite universities across the United States. Duke, Stanford, Washington University at St. Louis, even Princeton, all had vital parapsychology departments. A friend of mine who will remain anonymous but now runs a multi-billion dollar hedge fund happened to help run that lab at Princeton.

It was called the Princeton Engineering Anomalous Research Lab, and he was an expert in one of its staple experiments, the random event generator. Take a well-calibrated device that produces binary outputs based on conventionally thought of as random processes in quantum mechanics. For example, radioactive isotope decay, photon interference, electron-tebron-tebron. tunneling, all of these things have a known statistical distribution. And so if you imagine something like, imagine you have a wheel that's spinning, it's like a roulette wheel, let's call it.

You either have a black marker or a white marker. And so this wheel, it's spinning, spinning, spinning, spinning, when the radioactive particle decays, it stops the wheel. So basically, you've created this perfect digital coin flip. By tying a digital coin flip to a random quantum mechanical process, we are guaranteeing even distribution between ones and zeros over a long enough time scale. Finally, you bring an observer present to see the ones and zeros output on the screen. Hey, Jesse, how are you doing?

Good, how are you doing? Thanks for having me. Come on in. All right, let's do it. The observer comes in with an intention. They're trying to skew the output on the screen towards either ones or zeros. I can see you're already trying to influence. Yeah, should we all try?

Ready? Mm-hmm. You'd expect the observer not to matter at all, for the output to be. be evenly distributed between ones and zeros with an expected standard deviation, no matter who is present, when or where the experiment is done. But my friend, who helped run this Princeton lab, has a ton of corroborated evidence showing that there is a skewing effect, and that an observer who comes in with the intention of ones, or another observer with the intention of zeros, can often achieve a skewing towards those outputs in a statistically significant way.

To the extent that one can summarize, what we find is that the human mind and the information processing machines seem to be entering into some sort of a dialogue which influences both the machine and the human mind that is interacting with it. These experimental trials are very well run and they adhere to strict scientific. protocols. And trust me, I've thrown the kitchen sink of skepticism at it with him. Survivorship bias, pee hacking, file drawer issues, all your typical issues with experimental protocols and data. He has pretty solid responses to all of these. If you look at it as sort of a social process in science, like if you look at it as a social

political process where establishment means that a large cohort of people agree with you, I would say it was never established. It was always very rejected. If you say established means, did you run a well controlled experiment that got a result at the level or multiple oil control experiments that got a result at the level that for an example would allow them to say that a new particle exists in physics or something like that, then absolutely. I did do an episode with him and maybe when the world is ready, I'll drop it. But for now, I should just say that this is a bridge too far for a lot of people in science. It's an epistemological paradigm shift, not a scientific paradigm shift. It says that the intention and internal state of the observer matters for what's observed.

The implications of this are literally impossible to list, but they include and are not limited to an allowance for all sorts of air pockets of different consensus realities. This might explain UFOs, the Mandela Effect, and a whole host of other anomalies we experience in our everyday lives that we explain away because we're told that those experiences are fake or can't happen. The crazy thing I've found about random event generators is that there are very few people who've studied them, who don't come out believing that they're essentially. some sort of mind-matter effect.

Even Erwin Schrodinger himself, who again developed the famous wave equation, said that measuring a particle in its present state could affect its past, clearly entertaining parapsychological or parapsychological adjacent ideas. Perhaps one of the better compendiums of parapsychological data is Courtney M. Block's Encyclopedia of Parapsychology. But the Ryan Institute from Duke, the Perlab at Princeton, and Dean Radin's Ions also have good data on random event generators. The reason random event generators aren't taken seriously, even if they show paradigm shifting,

mind-blowing effects with their results alone, is that we can't figure out some clear causal mechanism, or turn the mind-matter interaction into math, or instrumentalize it into any sort of useful technology. I think the existing paradigm is it serves some purpose, but I think we are in this don't age. I think the philosophical toolbox that we're using to enact our existing scientific method is way behind or it would have to be to ever account for this stuff. But that doesn't mean the effect doesn't exist. It just means we're in the Stone Age on it, and it's likely pointing to a new paradigm.

For another example of this in the past, take Mercury's orbit. Newtonian math couldn't describe it. We needed to understand the space-time curvature effect of the Sun, and for that we needed Einstein's relativity, or take black body radiation, an object that absorbs all electromagnetic radiation and reflects none of it. This was discovered in the 1860s by Gustav Kirchov, but back then it was an anomaly. Theoretically, an object that only absorbed light would exponentially heat up and create an ultraviolet catastrophe, a cataclysmic explosion.

We needed Max Planck's work in 1900 around Quanta to understand why this doesn't happen mathematically. Random event generators in parapsychology are like this. The effects are real, we just can't turn them into math. And it was not a subject that I had any background in from a scholarly standpoint. The guy that started the Princeton Parasicology Lab was a plasma physicist and propulsion's engineer named Bob John. In fact, Bob John was even the Dean of Princeton Engineering before starting pair. And a lot of his plasma propulsion systems are still used in the space. This guy basically threw away his career in order to pursue this. I'll also say that

naively he didn't expect that it was going to be received as sort of atrociously as it was. I think he thought, well, as long as I do good experiments that are well controlled, you know, it will be treated like everything else in science. So he was sort of with his age and everything else kind of coming from a time period where a lot of the early quantum experimental people were just before him. He's kind of coming out of this mindset of reality is this wide open thing. There's a lot to explore and find, and he thought that he was just kind of finding and exploring a new topic like, I think it's going to be received that way. Bob was ahead of his time, and in his book, Margins of Reality, he discusses a model of consciousness

in which waves coming from the mind help collapse the wave function. Modern scientist Rupert Cheldrach fully agrees. In fact, that's how he thinks vision works in general. When light comes in, changes happen in the mind, in the brain, and the brain, and And then the images are projected out. So my image of you is exactly where it seems to be. It's in 3D in full color, but it's located right where you're sitting. And it overlaps with you, as it were. So everything I see is projected out of my mind, so my mind is extended beyond my brain,

filling the whole world around me. Well, if you think about Penrose's model, he discusses the space-time superposition buildup as occurring within the human brain. If there's anything to this, and the idea that our minds are just graphical interfaces, then of course you'd be able to affect random quantum mechanical processes. You aren't literally affecting the material world with your mind. You're just affecting your unique computational rendering of that material world. Your mind is just an interface.

But we keep bringing up this idea that the mind is an interface. Do we have any proof of that? Surely for survival it would make sense that humans would need to be seeing an objective version of reality. Well, that's actually not true at all. Seeing the true nature of reality is not always adaptive for survival. Cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman shows all of the ways in which perceiving reality actually can hurt chances of survival.

Take color. All color is just differentiated by where it sits on the electromagnetic wave spectrum. So why don't we see the wavelengths of light directly? Because it's in a human's advantage to quickly categorize things. It's way more efficient for me to see the color rate. red than a 650 nanometer wavelength to hear a ringing noise instead of 2,000 hertz frequency waves. If you see blood, you react immediately. If you see a bunch of light waves, it might take you a little longer to jump into action. So humans have evolved to see colors and sounds. They aren't intrinsic

parts of nature. They are high-level abstractions. They're like application icons on a computer They're simple categorizations that allow us to navigate reality, not the source code underlying it. We don't even know the underlying substrate of what we're seeing, and my reality might be very different from your reality. There's an ocean of pure, vibrant consciousness inside each one of us, and it's right at the source and base of mind, and it's also at the source of all matter. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ken Wilson, who worked at CERN in its early years, developed the concept of renormalization, which essentially looks at how the behavior of a physical

system changes when viewed at different energy scales. At higher energy levels, new and deeper structures of physical laws emerge, revealing previously hidden phenomena. This process involves progressively zooming in on a system by increasing the energy, and in so doing, stripping away the superficial details of what lower energy physics to reveal the underlying more fundamental interactions. Wilson used renormalization to show that at high energy levels near critical points, such as phase transitions and materials, new universal behavior emerges that applies to a wide

range of systems. Essentially, by pushing systems to extreme conditions near the critical temperature of a phase transition, for example, their underlying dynamics become more evident. In conventional science, this mostly applies to mostly applies to materials and phase transitions. But perhaps Wilson's concepts here have more to do with the nature of reality itself than we realize. When we do atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons, we could literally be ripping holes in the fabric of reality. What if there's something about this technology that actually disrupts physical reality

or changes time? The current paradigm of atomic energy output is the Tsarmo, which exerts 80 to 100 megast. tons of TNT. When we get to upwards of 1 times 10 to the 9th tons of TNT, we can start folding space time at will. If E equals MC squared, then the only way to get this sort of spacetime metric effect is if you have enough energy. You got it. The only two ways to warp space time is with mass or a lot of energy.

Think of mass and energy is the same thing. Mass is ice energy as steam. as steam, okay? But they're both water. Yeah. Okay, so same thing kind of here, energy and mass, have this relationship. So you need to get plank scale energy or something. I cannot, if I use mass to do this, I'm going to, I need mass more than the Earth.

I'm going to perturb everything on the planet. So what's probably happening, it's a whole lot of that. Uh-huh. So for all we know, we're ripping little holes in space time now, or sending out exotic electromagnetic or scalar longitudinal waves every time we do a new This would explain why UFOs constantly show up around nuclear blasts, as documented by the great work of journalist Robert Hastings. In fact, in his seminal book, UFOs and nukes, Hastings discusses intelligently moving green fireballs constantly showing up around atmospheric tests. These were documented by Edward J. Rupelt, head of Blue Book at the time, and Dr. Lincoln-Lapause, head of meteorology at University of New Mexico.

The rumors were there probably Soviet surveillance planes. Surveillance planes, you know, and the controller told me they were basically stationary. You know, the Soviets flying helicopters over Montana? I don't think so. So again, with extreme energy output, you rip away higher levels of abstraction, getting to the root information layer of reality and breaking out of the simulation. This even makes sense in quantum mechanics. Remember Heisenberg uncertainty between position and momentum?

Will we also have quantum indeterminacy between time and level of energy? In other words, precise measurements between time and energy trade against each other, and high levels of energy might disrupt time. You talk about Trinity and you talk about Roswell, and similar things happen in the towns after the explosions. You have people report devils chasing them around and all sorts of things. of paranormal activity. So are you opening up a window to another plane?

You say that energy correlates with information. Yes. So if you have this massive energy kind of output, then all of a sudden maybe you can seem more. Yes. And it makes an impact that continues. That's permanent. So the question is, is it a way to,

can we walk up the chain of events? Can we get back to the source in some way? So, well, the idea that they are from the future is one idea. There is an idea that's more radical, is that this is all a simulation. The same bizarre effects may have occurred with Tesla and Thomas Towns and Brown's experiments. Agnew Bonson, who helped establish quantum gravity, which led to string theory with his Institute of Field Physics in North Carolina, was also funding Townsend Brown's high-voltage gravitational experiments at the same time.

Bonson is quoted as saying strange things happen at high-megavultage across short distances. Bonson talks about anomalous phenomena that happen when you get into extremely high voltages at extremely low currents. He was clearly referring to Thomas Townsend Brown's work. Townsend Brown himself thought that his work had clear implications for time travel. And he was very aware that when you mess with gravity, you mess with time. And what about CERN? A single particle beam in the large Hadron Collider creates 6.5 terra electron volts.

Collide the beams and you're at 13 terra electron volts. I can't even begin to describe the level of energy output here. What does this have to do with breaking out of the simulation? Well, just listen to what public health expert Dr. Astrid Stuccoberger had to say about her conversation with certain CERN physicists. There are beings from portals coming in and out. It's physicists from the CERN who told me this. They've testified to beings coming in and out of portals.

Yes. Okay, so that was the weirdest thing I'm including in this video. And it's definitely not hard evidence. I've emailed Dr. Stuckelberger. If anyone can get in touch with her, vouch for her character, or introduce me, I would welcome it. So I have no idea if portals are being created by CERN's beam collisions. But what about the American particle accelerator? the Cosmetron at Brookhaven National Labs.

Cosmetron was the world's highest energy accelerator before the Large Hadron Collider. Well, apparently, there was a UFO crash collected by the lab itself in 1992. It's about 7 o'clock at night, and being November, it was full dark. And all of a sudden, it was lighter out than it is right now. And what about the plasma orbs

that people in and around the NASA Space Shuttle have described, where the controlled ball lightning that seemed to show up in Germany from 1942 to 1945 called Food Fighters. Plasma is the fourth energy state after solids, liquids, and gases. It's what happens when you apply extremely high energy to something. For more on this, look at physicist Ken's shoulders work on exotic vacuum objects. In Ken Wilson's model, an object's plasma state might reflect its true reality more than its lower energy instantiations.

So maybe we get to deeper layers of reality, deeper levels of ontological truth with high energy output. And that's just one way to break out of the simulation. But one we should probably be pretty careful with, and leave in the hand of experts. Maybe there are other more natural ways out of the simulation we have a bit more personal control over. People went to Elusis as human beings.

They walked away thinking they were immortal. This is the fight club of the ancient world. Whatever happened there, no one talked about it, under penalty of death. We have no great war, no great depression. our great war is a spiritual war how great depression is our lives

a certain percentage of near-death experiencers experience what's called a life review and you're basically replaying every single event from your life but you're doing it not just on a two-dimensional screen it's as if you're in a virtual reality or a holograph

so Danian Brinkley called it a holographic panoramic, three-dimensional review of your life. And so you have to replay every moment. But what happens is you have to replay it not from your own perspective. This episode is brought to you by Netflix's remarkably bright creatures. What if a Pacific octopus held the key to a mystery that could heal your heart? Well, that's Tova's reality. An elderly widow working at an aquarium. Tova forms an unlikely friendship with the cramudgeonly Marcellus, whose remarkable intelligence leads her to a life-changing discovery.

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NARS, better together. Visit Sephora to shop now. But from the perspective of other people in your life, so he was in the military and actually killed people during the Vietnam War, he had to experience what it was like to take a bullet from himself. And then he had to see the ripple effects of that guy who died, of his wife and kids. How did this play out?

What are the effects of your actions? And as a computer scientist, as an engineer, the question that I asked, First, is if it can be replayed like that, it has to be recorded like that. Because every single employee understands that they are part of a whole. The first thing most people think of when they hear the word simulation theory is the movie The Matrix, partially inspired by Jean Baudillard. But the idea that the physical world is an illusion shielding us from a more primordial, unseen realm,

dates back to antiquity. A lot of ancient traditions have this concept of an illusion, a great illusion, like Maya, and that would be the Hindu version. And Plato's cave, Glaucon, talks about a form of meditation or a protocol to sort of see beyond the veil. Do you sort of believe in anything like that? I think Plato's Cave was the most powerful, simplest way to show our predicament. But, you know, that's why. why we have science.

I mean, that's what Plato wanted us to do. He wanted to then develop science out of that, to calibrate the illusion and then go outside and try to see what the reality was. It was great. So it is an illusion until you can measure it. And the question is, can you? So if we're stuck in this cave, what do we do about it? This is the question the mystics faced.

In response, they devised various spiritual technologies to enable them to make this celestial ascent to the heavens, typically by inducing altered states of consciousness via sensory deprivation, fasting, isolation, abstinence, meditation, ceremonial ritual, breathing techniques, intense visualization, and sometimes drugs. I think any tradition that makes use of psychedelics, whether they want to or not, are going to make deliberate content. This is why you can find Buddhist monks in the Himalayas. and Jewish rabbis in 13th century Spain, both going into isolation at temples and following

the same eschatic protocols, as well as reporting very similar mystical experiences. The breathing and visualization protocols of the Jewish Mirkava mystics mirror those found in yoga and Pranayama in India so closely that modern-day scholars of Jewish Kabbalah are using Indian tantric texts to better understand their own texts, including the corresponding esoteric simeeric symbolic systems. And when the Dalai Lama himself met with a group of Jewish Kabbalists, he was very surprised to find that the Kabbalistic meditations and prayer techniques were strikingly similar to Buddhist meditation techniques. At one point in their conversation, his holiness interjected to ask the Kabbalists if Jewish angels had colors associated with them. The Kabbalist

replied, oh yes, some are blue and summer orange. The Dalai Lama became fascinated and urged them to continue saying he found much sophistication in their thinking. The Dalai Lama also met with Harvard psychiatrist John Mack about aliens and expressed a similar companionship of worldviews. The goal of these esoteric practices, other than instilling discipline, is to induce stress on the psyche and body, to derange the senses and lead to altered states of consciousness. The common thread between nearly all mystical practices, regardless of religion or culture, is the idea that one had to break the servitude of soul to the body in order to liberate the spirit.

And so if our consciousness, our soul is kind of contained or filtered by our body, by our brain, that would be consistent with a lot of these mythological stories, that the body is kind of like a container, almost like a prison. Like our soul has like fallen from this like very rich dynamic, the extra multidimensional world and we're kind of like stuck here. Yes. in this limited, fallen world of death. But the similarities don't end there.

All across the world, you can find an emphasis on the soul ascending through various levels of heaven. The Book of Enoch and the Merkava texts of ancient Jewish mystics describe an ascent through seven hecala, also called palaces, via the use of breathing techniques, visualization, and mantra-like prayers. Quick side note, just keep the term palaces in mind.

They also describe encountering select celestial gatekeepers at each level, to whom you had to give the proper password or sign to pass. Some of these angelic gatekeepers were dangerous if passed improperly. This is reflected in the Jewish parable of the parties, where four rabbis attempted celestial set, and only one came back alive with his sanity intact. The others either died or went insane. Some scholars even believe that the Apostle Paul may have been familiar with these practices, And he described his own celestial ascent to the third heaven in the second Corinthians,

one in which these angelic gatekeepers gave him a thorn in the flesh. Wasn't Paul supposedly, according to some scholars, kind of a Kabbalist too? Like he was in the Merkoba kind of, you know, Ezekiel tradition? It looks like it. I mean, you know, I'm not a New Testament scholar, so I don't want to go out of the limb and say for sure, you know, that he was. But yeah, if you look at his, you know, his conversion, it looks similar to Merckiwax. up, you know, and I do have friends who are New Testament scholars, and they don't feel comfortable coming out and saying these things, but they'll tell me in secret. They'll say,

yeah, yeah, you know, Jesus too, by the way. And I'm like, really, why don't you write a book about that? In the book of Acts, he goes up on a cloud. That's right. If we go back even further to the oldest religious texts we have, the ancient Egyptian pyramid text from 2,400 B.C., We see the Pharaoh's soul is guided by the priests through the seven are weep, also called, you guessed it, palaces. Again, with the priests chanting mantra-like prayers and the deceased Pharaoh being given the required passwords and amulets to pass safely through the gates of these seven palaces. In the Mithras liturgy found in Greek magical papyri, an initiate employs breathing techniques,

visualizations, chants, and ceremonial rituals to ascend through the seven. heavens, again being confronted at each by a geekkeeper who had to be supplicated with the proper passwords and signs. And in Islam, there are seven earths and seven heavens. And in Chinese Shanking Taoism, one again uses breathing techniques, visualizations, mantras, and ceremonial rituals to send one's soul out of the body and through the heavens, and there are specific incantations and talismans for each level. Compare all of these to near-death experiences and psychedelic experiences.

like DMT, where people come back from the experience saying that the place they went was more real than real. The pervasiveness of this idea, even amongst drastically different cultures and people with no background in mysticism, strongly indicates that the concepts are downstream of some sort of objective reality. So we see this metaphor of forgetfulness and of veiling across different religions. And then you can even see other interesting metaphors like in the Bhagavad Gaiiqad G. Gita, there's a metaphor that the soul puts on the body or an identity like a series of clothes, garments, and then it takes them off, just like you would take off certain clothes that you're wearing.

And it turns out in the Sufi traditions, your Rumi is using almost the exact, the exact same metaphor, right? He's saying the soul takes on the body is clothed by the body. It's like he's putting on clothes. And you start to look at all these different metaphors, and then you ask yourself, I mean, too often I think scientists will just dismiss these, not just scientists, even social scientists and religious scholars within academia are trained to just dismiss these as stories. But what if they were telling us something that is actually happening, but they didn't have

the language necessarily to describe it in a more technical way? So what would they do? They would use metaphors. And so they had to use a metaphor that would make sense to people at that point in history. So 2,000 years ago, you could easily understand the metaphors. metaphor of putting on a set of clothes, right? Or this idea that the world is an illusion. Maya is a term that's used in Sanskrit and Buddhism and Hinduism as a key part of their cosmology that the physical world isn't real.

And so if you look at the term Maya, it actually means something a little more subtle than just illusion. And so one of the things I think we're dealing with is that we're talking in English and we're translating all these terms, but we don't always capture some of the more subtle meanings that were attached to it. So Maya is not just illusion. It also means the power of illusion. So it's the power by which the gods, let's say, can make you think this world is real. But it turns out it's even more subtle than that. And someone once described it, I think the best description is, he said, if you go to a magic

show and there's a magician on stage, and you know he's not really sawing that woman in half, right? You know it's an illusion. But yet you're like, oh, my God, wow, that's cool. That's the reason you're there to enjoy the show is you actually make the decision to kind of suspend your disbelief in order to enjoy the show. And so that's the more subtle. Yeah, exactly. You take the blue pill rather than the red pill, right? You're actually deciding that you will be fooled by this world.

And turns out that concept, you know, it's not just an Eastern concept. It exists in some of the Judeo-Christian traditions as well. But in the Islamic traditions, there's actual verses that say, we have set up this world for you as a game, as a pastime, as a sport, right? And that it is a particular kind of delusion. It uses a particular word, El Gururi, and it has another word in front of it, like Matau, which actually means it's an enjoyable delusion. Like the whole world is an enjoyable delusion. Now, we all know bad things happen in this world. So why would these scriptures be calling it an enjoyable delusion or a magic show or a game or a lila, the play of the gods, which is another one of the Hindu terms that they used?

And the reason is because that's how enjoy is like quote unquote, right? When you go to watch a horror show, a horror movie, you mean, you're watching people like hack each other up and doing all these terrible things and you're enjoying it. why. It's because it's part of the illusion and part of the story. And I think the old metaphors are of the world as a dream, the world is an illusion, the world as a stage play are all powerful metaphors. But we live in a time when we have more advanced technology. So we can use new metaphors that perhaps describe it better. It's like a movie. You have a script, but you can change the script if you want. And there's other people that are in there with you. We're all the actors, but we're also the audience watching ourselves.

You basically say we're a massively multiplayer online role-playing video game. That is, I think, the best metaphor to date for this thing called reality that might be too hard to explain in words. It might be ineffable. What do UFOs possibly have to do with the simulation hypothesis? Because I know you're obviously one of the main progenitors of the simulation hypothesis, but you're also very interested in UFOs, and you know, a lot of the sort of top thinkers on that subject as well. Yeah, I spent a lot of time with different folks in the UFO community.

And, you know, I'm an advisor to the Galileo Project and peripherally involved with the Soul Project as well at Stanford. And, you know, one of the problems is that it seems that UFOs act in such absurd ways that we can't often take it completely seriously, you know, from a scientific point of view. Because it doesn't sound always like we're talking about a physical thing. Sometimes it is a physical thing and sometimes it isn't. So Jacques Valet told me about this case that really got me thinking, and it was somewhere in like Northern California or Oregon, you know, there's these tall redwood trees. And he said the witnesses said that the UFO had come down at a 45-degree angle,

he had left some marks on the ground. And so everybody came and investigated and then all the other investigators left, but Jacques stayed behind. And he asked them, well, you said it came down at a 45-degree angle. but that would mean it would have had to cut through the redwood trees. I mean, these are tall trees. They're like, yeah, it did that. But we didn't want to say that because we would sound crazy if we said that.

So when you have something that's cutting through physical matter and then suddenly it becomes more physical, to me that reminded me of either a holographic projection or rendering within a video game. Within a video game, while you're rendering, you can become semi-transparent. you can walk through walls. But then once you're rendered in the world, you can't go through the wall anymore. You're in, like, that physical state.

And so it's possible that UFOs are being projected into this world, and then they become part of the world. So I'm not saying UFOs aren't physical. In the platonic sense, they might be hyper objects that exist outside of the cave, meant to be glimpsed. So you know there's something higher to aspire to outside of the bounds of the narrow simulation you're in.

They scramble your body. brain a bit and raise your consciousness, causing you to contemplate higher realms. This is a thesis that Dr. James Madden fleshes out in his great book Unidentified Flying Hyperobjects. Empirically, it also just seems like UFOs have access to the information substrate of the universe itself. They can materialize and dematerialize at will and seem to skip across time. They're probably way more concerned with time and timelines than they are specific individuals in their lives. And maybe this whole worldview has a thing or two to do with secret UFO government programs. After all, Diana Pesolka's source in her new book encounters was the daughter of somebody who she thought was in a secret space program.

One thing that will always give me the chills from that account is that her father would constantly refer to the words simulacra at lunch tables with his colleagues. We are living in a computer programmed reality, and the only clue we have to it is when some, variable is changed. Deja vu. What did you just say? Nothing just had a little deja vu. Switch, Apoc. What is it?

Deja vu is usually a glitch in the Matrix. It happens when they change something. It was actually a speech by Philip K. Dick that got me thinking along these lines, because he had a famous speech in Metz France where he said, we are living in a computer programmed reality. And that's the famous line. But then he said, and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed. some alteration occurs in our reality.

And so basically what he was saying is you can go back and change the timeline, change the variable and rerun the timeline. And he came to believe that his novel turned into a very well-known series called The Man in the High Castle, which was about Germany and Japan winning World War II. He came to believe that was a real timeline, not just something he imagined. And he came to believe that the simulators actually decided to rerun another time. timeline, and they like this timeline better that this timeline has gone on further. So it gets back to this idea that not only could there be multiple timelines, but they could

be cut off at certain points. And that's what we do in computer science. That's what we do. Like if an AI is playing a video game against you, it might project forward to see what the best outcomes are, and then it will trim the tree, if you will, so that it will just go forward. Speaking of Philip K. Dick, I know you're friends with his wife. he wrote another book called The Adjustment Team about like, you know, somebody that,

a team that has more root access than we would, if you will, and they can sort of, you know, mess with timelines, you know, somebody gets to the office early and they're sort of, you know, they're doing their thing and it's a freeze frame. And so do you think that's possible? Do you think that there are sort of timeline manipulators out there? I think so, you know, Tessa, his wife, she told me that he came up with the idea for that story, which eventually became the movie of the Adjustment Bureau with Matt Damon

and Emily Blunt, because he went into the bathroom and there was a light that he had turned on and off many times. He thought it was like a chain, if you remember the old chains, but it had been replaced with a light switch. And so he began to wonder, did somebody change this out

while I wasn't here? Because I've turned this light on a hundred times. And I know it was a chain, and now it's a light switch or the other way around. I forget exactly which way it was, but it was different. And so that's when he began to wonder about that. And if you listen to that full speech of Philip K. Dick from Metz France, what he's saying is these alterations would occur in our reality.

We would have the sense that we were rerunning the same events, that we were saying the same things, we were experiencing the same things, we would have a sense of deja vu. And he said, this is a clue that at some point in the past, a variable was changed and the simulation was run forward. And so he ended up using almost the exact same language. And I didn't know this when I was choosing the term clue on a treasure hunt that says maybe the future is sending us clues about where we might want to end up. And maybe that's what UFOs are.

It's people from the future are sending back, or not necessarily people, but entities from the future, sending back information about where they want us to go. And maybe there's multiple ones sending us back. So human evolution is almost about being able to pick the best time, possible timeline or something. It's like you're optimizing timelines, you're improving timelines continuously or something. Right, right. That, I mean, what if today we think World War II has happened and this is, you know, it's a fixed past and there's going to be a future from here. But what if this is just one run of the simulation and we're trying to optimize, you know, something? So what is the

optimization function that we're trying to optimize by running multiple timelines that we're We are the simulators in this case. And it could be that we are doing that all the time. We are basically sensing these multiple futures. And how could we sense these futures if they haven't happened yet? Right. I don't know. Unless they actually have happened as little runs of a simulation.

Exactly. And that is the difference between a human brain and AI, as we sort of have these intuitions with low sample size data or no data. And sometimes it's a totally irrational decision, but it just sort of feels right in a it ends up working out. And nobody, you know, we don't have like a neuroscientific model as to how that works. And so this is a really interesting model. And so I guess if you are a human playing this sort of game, are you just trying to look

out for what resonates with you and like be in touch with your instincts or something? Or like, because presumably, right, I'm not Laplace's demon. And I can't know, at least in my own little branch of the multiverse or even, you know, a block universe, I can't know exactly what decision is going to end up optimally for me or for the world. And so do you just have to sort of go with what resonates with you? You have to almost develop that sense for, you know, possibly what you've experienced in the future or something. Yeah, I think so.

It's like a future memory in a sense. You're sensing what is the best outcome. Now, best is a relative term. Just like earlier I talked about an enjoyable illusion. The world is enjoyable, but enjoyable only in the sense that you're going to have to experience all this stuff. Similarly here, it's possible that as you're playing the game, the way we play video games is we have quests. And we choose quests and certain quests are more difficult than others, right? And it's possible that we end up choosing a very difficult quest or a difficult storyline.

It could be that we hamstring our character with a physical handicap right at the beginning. But maybe that's an indication of a much higher level player than those of us. who don't have physical handicaps because now they want to play it in hard mode, right? A difficult mode. So they've cranked up that difficulty level. So I think we are sensing these futures and we have to be careful. This is why I think this idea of NPC mode comes into play because sometimes we're just, we get so influenced from the people around us, right?

I mean, you spent time in Silicon Valley. I spent time in Silicon Valley and you start to think differently. You know, you start to think, oh, everyone wants to start the next unicorn, the next billion-dollar company, and that becomes the priority. Whereas if you spend time in New York or Hollywood, you're worried about the next film or whatever, but you get so influenced by the environment around you that you start to make decisions based on that

rather than an internal intuition. And Steven Spielberg says he teaches his kids that the best intuitions are like whispers. But in order to tune into the whisper, you have to tune out all the loud noise all around you. And so sometimes we're just making decisions based on this programming that we have. Oh, this job will pay me more than that.

Therefore, I'm just going to go with this job. But in fact, this other job will be in a place where you won't be stressed out and maybe that's where you're meant to be. And so I think you have to separate out what I call genuine clues, which could be messages from the future if you take sort of a quantum physics approach.

If you're more spiritual or new age, you might say, guardian angels are sending you these messages. Or you might say it's the adjustment team that's working with you from a Philip KDF science fiction perspective. But one way or another, we get these intuitions, and I think they are about the experiences that we might have at some point in the future. In our materialist worldview, the world is undergoing a constant process of entropy from order to chaos.

This is the second law of thermodynamics, and it cannot be reversed. It is also the basis for chaos theory. Everything changes and everything decays. But if the parapsychology studies I mentioned are real, maybe consciousness is the only entropy. reducer on Earth. Just look at the work of Carl Fristin, perhaps the greatest living neuroscientist. Fristin's free energy principles say that neurons are attracted to low entropy in order rather than chaos and randomness.

There is even a term coined for the biological attraction to order. It's called centripy or the inverse of entropy. Consciousness and intention are likely what makes biology attracted to order, and probably a big driver in evolution, something Erwin Schroenger himself. theorized in his great 1944 lecture series, What is Life? And something that biologist, Michael Levin at Tufts, is discovering now, that biological cells have clear goals and intentions. And so because of that, consciousness must be preserved at all costs. But if humans don't choose to remain conscious and exercise their divine right, they can get taken over by the computer

program and turned into a non-player character. One of the great founders of AI, Of course, is Dr. McCarthy at Stanford. He had the AI lab on the Hill, and he told a story. Again, this was when AI was a very, there were only two or three labs and did AI in the world. And his story was, you know, in the future, you're going on with your job, For example, you're selling some insurance or something. You're selling something.

You fill out a form and people pay you. And in the evening, you go home and you watch TV with your kids. And then the next morning, you get into your car, you go to the office and fill out some forms and people pay you and you go home. And then when you're going to get a letter from the Bureau of Simulation. The Bureau of Simulation says, Dear Sir, we have observed your daily behavior for the last six months, and you have not done anything that was not predicted by the model of the world. We run a model of the world, and you're in it. If in the next six months you don't do something that's not predicted by the model,

you will be replaced by a simulator. human. So the guy is in shock and, you know, it tells his wife, you know, I need to do something, you know, change my life completely. So he drops out of his job, takes whatever money he has, moves to the Himalayas, starts climbing mountains, meditates, does all the things you're supposed to do, you know, and six months later he goes home, a week goes by, and he feels really good. goes back to his job.

And there's a letter that arrives. It's from the Bureau of Simulation that says, Dear Sir, in the last six months, you still haven't done anything that wasn't predicted by the simulation model. And you have been replaced. So he's still there doing his job, waking up in the morning,

driving his car and so on. But he doesn't exist anymore. Yeah. He's an NPC. He's a simulated piece of software that does all that. We live in a modern world

obsessed with material things and becoming increasingly obsessed with artificial intelligence and low-level virtual simulations on our phones. As the great Marshall McLuhan once said, every media extension of man is an amputation.

If our universe is in fact a simulation, and world religions and science point to we should probably be thinking more about how to break out of it and into a higher realm by contemplating and exercising virtue instead of being obsessed with dropping into lower, more bit-compressed digital worlds to escape our pain. If we can ascend, maybe we can see ourselves. Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination

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For who we really are, in our world for what it truly is. As the great Erwin Schrodinger ended all of his lectures, Atman equals Brahman. That's our show. Thank you, Riz Verk, for your time and amazing work. And to the audience for entertaining this slightly schizzer rant. Until next time, I'm Jesse Michaels. Oh, thank you, baby. This is so cute. Mmm, that was good.

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