Are We Living in a Video Game?

In this 2023 conversation with Justine Willis Toms, venture-capitalist and video-game pioneer Rizwan Virk asks whether we are living in a material universe or a simulated one. Are we living in a massive, multiplayer, online, role-playing game where our deeds and quests are being kept track of in the “cloud?” Is an angel recording our lives? If so, who is running the game? Why, if it is a video game, why don’t we choose bliss? And what is the connection between computer science, video game physics, and the great spiritual traditions?

Rizwan Virk is the author of 


- Zen Entrepreneurship: Walking the Path of the Career Warrior (BayView Labs 2013)
- Startup Myths and Models: What You Won't Learn in Business School (Columbia Business School Publishing 2020)
- Treasure Hunt: Follow Your Inner Clues to Find True Success (Watkins Publishing 2017) 
- The Simulation Hypothesis: An MIT Computer Scientist Shows Why AI, Quantum Physics and Eastern Mystics Agree We Are in a Video Game. (Bayview books 2019)
- The Zen Entrepreneur & the Dream: An MIT Grad’s Quest for Success & Enlightenment in Silicon Valley (no info yet on publisher 2023)

Interview Date: 7/14/2023  Tags: Rizwan Virk, Riz Virk, video games, Hindu Vedas, Atari, ChatGPT, reincarnation, dialup computer modems, augmented reality, Nick Bostrom, The Matrix film, Elon Musk, multiple universes, parallel universes, John Wheeler, 20th century physics, consciousness, entanglement, nonlocality, Star Trek Holodecks and replicas, Claude Shannon, Galileo, Schrödinger’s cat, quantum physics, probability wave, optimization, conditional rendering, chaos theory, complexity theory, Stephen Wolfram, quenched disorder, Paramahansa Yogananda, Science, Philosophy, Technology, Spirituality