Simulation cosmology: Agah Bahari interviews Rizwan Virk and Jason Jorjani

Giulio Prisco
Turing Church
Published in
3 min readDec 21, 2020

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A few months ago I was interviewed by Agah Bahari for his show Neohuman.

NEOHUMAN #77 :: Giulio Prisco: Tales of the Turing Church

Among many other things we touched simulation cosmology (cosmology based on the simulation hypothesis), which plays an important role in my book [*], but we didn’t elaborate too much.

In the last two episodes of the Neohuman show Bahari interviews the authors of two recent books that delve deep into simulation cosmology: Rizwan Virk and Jason Jorjani.

Rizwan Virk

NEOHUMAN #86 :: Rizwan Virk: The Simulation Hypothesis

Rizwan Virk’s book titled “The Simulation Hypothesis: An MIT Computer Scientist Shows Why AI, Quantum Physics and Eastern Mystics All Agree We Are In a Video Game” (2019) makes simulation cosmology accessible to a wide audience.

Virk notes that the simulation hypothesis “bridges the gap between religion and science in ways that weren’t possible before,” and “may just be the answer that provides a single framework, a coherent model that brings together science and religion.”

See my comments to Virk’s work in my book [*] (Chapter 12, Chapter 22). See also my review of Ben Goertzel’s review of Virk’s book and simulation cosmology.

Jason Jorjani

NEOHUMAN #87 :: Jason Reza Jorjani: Prometheism, and Redefining the Limits of the Possible

I recently reviewed Jason Jorjani’s book “Prometheism” (2020). I think Jorjani’s cosmology is visionary transhumanism at its best, on steroids.

Jorjani develops a simulation cosmology that supports free will and “occult” phenomena — telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, psychokinesis, teleportation, reincarnation and all that.

Eventually we will break free of ordinary reality and “embark on a cosmic conquest to recode the matrix of what has been mistaken for ‘reality.’

Bahari graciously mentions my review of Jorjani’s book. The interview is focused on the parts of Jorjani’s book that I’m less interested in (politics and conspiracy theories), but touches more interesting topics.

For example, Jorjani elaborates on the idea that technology is ontologically prior to science. He also says that future science will abandon reductive materialism and explore “occult” paranormal phenomena. My favorite snippet from the interview:

“There’s a kind of consciousness that is not reducible to the biological organism and that can survive physical death, and we can track it as it does and we can, you know, potentially guide a ‘soul,’ for lack of a better word, from one body into another, potentially into an android body…”

I agree. I think that future technology will resurrect the dead and realize other promises of traditional religions.

Beyond naive simulation cosmology

These two books provide a good introduction to simulation cosmology, from naive mental pictures based on videogames to more sophisticated mental pictures. In his book, Jorjani argues that our reality unfolds “from out of a background of information that is being processed in a non-local and non-linear way at a level of reality that remains hidden from us.”

See also my book [*] (especially Chapter 12, Chapter 13, Chapter 22). My conclusion is that, while popular accounts of simulation cosmology are likely far too naive (or, following Ben Goertzel, “mostly bullshit”), they are useful intuitive mental models of fundamental reality.

[*] My book “Tales of the Turing Church: Hacking religion, enlightening science, awakening technology” is available for readers to buy on Amazon (Kindle | paperback).

Please buy my book, and/or donate to support other Turing Church projects.

Cover picture background from Pixabay, pictures from Agah Bahari.

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Writer, futurist, sometime philosopher. Author of “Tales of the Turing Church” and “Futurist spaceflight meditations.”