What's it like to believe we live inside a video game?

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But even though people who are drawn to the simulation hypothesis frame it as reasoned thinking informed by science and technology, it's remarkably like religion: It is fueled by faith and works only as an allegory.
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That is my main takeaway from
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The title of the book reveals a contradiction in this idea. Start with the term 'hypothesis,' which is misleading. The claim that we are in a simulation is not falsifiable, because any evidence seemingly to the contrary could just be part of the simulation. So it's not a hypothesis in the scientific sense. No one says Christians have a 'Jesus hypothesis.' And indeed, by the end of the title, Virk is past conjecture and expressing belief.
The book didn't
My interview with Virk has been edited and condensed.
How confident are you that we live inside a simulation?
When I wrote the first edition of this book, I said it was more than 50 percent. Now I think it's over 70 percent, maybe as high as 80 percent likely that we are inside a video game.
Rizwan Virk at a 2017 event for Play Labs, an MIT accelerator program that he founded and ran.
MIT
How does this shape your worldview?
I have to explain what I call the NPC ('non-player character') versus RPG ('role-playing game') flavors of the simulation hypothesis. In the NPC version, everyone is just AI running on a computer, and that's it. As soon as the game is over or it's shut down, that character no longer exists, that world no longer exists. I think when most academics talk about the simulation hypothesis, that's what they're talking about.
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At the other end of the spectrum is the RPG version. This is closer to what was depicted in the movie 'The Matrix.' In that version, you are a player that exists outside of the game, and inside the game you have an avatar or a player character. And that would be us — our avatars would be our bodies inside the simulation.
I think you reach very different conclusions depending on where you end up on this axis. In RPG video games, you choose your particular character that you're going to play and you choose a particular storyline. You still are free to make decisions along that storyline that will affect the game. So when something happens in my life that's difficult, like a physical difficulty or financial or other difficulties, I think of it as a kind of quest: 'OK, this is a more difficult quest or achievement. Let me see if I can get through it.'
In what other ways does this play out for you?
There is this idea in quantum physics of a multiverse, where there are different possibilities and we're trying them out in different universes. There's not a good understanding of exactly how that would work in a physical universe. But in a computational universe, you can think of it as perhaps there's a part of me, the player, that's actually trying out different things.
In my life I chose to become an entrepreneur and spent most of my time in Silicon Valley, but I've also had an affinity for more of an academic path. I didn't get a PhD earlier, but that was one of those paths — I felt that there was a version of me that had tried it out and was interested in trying out that path. And so later in life, I have returned to academia as a professor, getting a PhD as well. In a simulated universe, I could try out different possibilities in my life.
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Virk writes that his intuitions about the simulation hypothesis arose from "many different threads of my life."
Penguin Random House
Then there is the question of how we should play the video game of life and what its purpose is. I don't think we're playing a game like 'Grand Theft Auto,' where your goal is to inflict a bunch of damage on other people.
Within the religious and spiritual context, there's this idea that how we treat other people matters. It's one of the core ideas across religions and even in people who've had near-death experiences: that we have to review the deeds of our life and how we affected other people. And with a virtual reality model, there's a technological basis for how that might work. It's called the life review. The life review is a replay, if you will, of the things that we did in our lives. And you're going to have to replay the game from [other people's] point of view — not just see but feel what it was like to be these other people. This changes my perspective on how I treat other people and relationships, because I think that may actually be the bigger point of the game.
I am not sure how much you're using video games as a metaphor, and how much you really believe that they describe the essence of reality. Both interpretations would apply to what you just said.
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Well, I think it's a bit of both.
I think of the simulation hypothesis as having a few basic underpinnings or assumptions. One is that the universe consists of information. The second is that that information gets rendered in a way that looks real. And then the third is that it's some kind of a hoax or a game, if you think of it from the RPG perspective. I think that's what religious scriptures have done for a long time, saying that the world is like a dream, which was the metaphor that was used in, say, Buddhism and in other religious texts as well.
I'm using our technology to describe it. I think it's the best metaphor to date for the underlying nature of reality, because video games are built on computation and information processing, and so is the physical universe. I'm not disagreeing that it's a metaphor, and it's a metaphor that may not be complete, but it's way more complete than anything else that we've come up with.
There's a meme going around that anyone who doesn't exhibit much original thought is a mere NPC — an automated, non-player character.
Right. Yes.
So are we living in a world where some of us are actual characters and other people are just filling the background?
What I've come to believe is that it's better to assume everyone is actually a player character or an avatar because that affects how you treat them. And this gets back to my earlier statement about how I don't think we're living in 'Grand Theft Auto.'
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That said, I think we all enter NPC mode. In NPC mode, we are just an AI that has been trained by our life experiences. So if you think of AI today and large language models like ChatGPT, they are a certain type of neural network that's been trained on a certain amount of data. And similarly, we also have a neural network that gets trained on our life experiences and how we've been trained, whether it's from the time we were brought up, it's religious training, or indoctrination within different philosophies and political parties. I think what happens is we get into NPC mode and then we play different roles for different people. So it's possible that other people are playing a role for us in a quest in our lives, but that doesn't mean that we should treat them as expendable.
Somebody once said to me, 'I think my husband is an NPC.' I said, 'Well, I don't think that's a healthy attitude. Assume that they have their own set of stories and quests, but maybe they're playing a role for you for certain challenges and for certain adventures that you're having in this life.'
Was that person who said that to you a woman?
Yeah.
That's interesting to me, because I think I've only ever heard the simulation hypothesis espoused by men.
Well, I think that was true initially. I'm finding that if you are not just talking about the NPC version, if you're not talking about 'everybody is an AI,' then I find many more women interested in the idea.
Here's a worry I have about the simulation idea. If you think all this is probably a video game, then it doesn't seem like a stretch to say, 'It might not be so bad if we destroy the environment by filling every single square foot of earth with a data center, as long as doing so lets
us
create quintillions of simulated worlds that could be as beautiful and meaningful as ours is.' How can the simulation idea comport with traditions that tell us to take care of creation as the only world we've got?
Well, I don't know that the simulation hypothesis is necessarily saying that any worlds that we create are as valuable as this world, because now you're thinking of layers of the simulation. But this gets back to the central issue that I've been talking about, which is the NPC versus RPG version. We're here for a reason: We've chosen to go through what many, many ancient traditions have called the veil of forgetfulness, to be here and to forget that we're players from outside this world. So it doesn't mean we shouldn't enjoy this particular world. And more importantly, it doesn't mean we should destroy this world. In an ongoing role-playing game, others will enter after us, and we have a responsibility to them.
Rizwan Virk will be talking about his book before a screening of '
in Brookline on July 28.
Brian Bergstein is the editor of the Globe Ideas section. He can be reached at