Today, empathetic intelligence entails sharing the sorrows of other sentient beings. In our posthuman future, will empathy consist entirely in sharin… - David Pearce

My own sense of how to behave in a simulation has more traditional roots in the theory of perception. I've long believed that each of us lives in an egocentric simulation of the world run by the mind/brain. Since the zombies of each (waking) simulation have sentient real world counterparts, one should treat them as though they were real. Nonetheless as an angst-ridden teenager, my dawning acceptance of an inferential realist theory of perception made me feel as if I'd been condemned to solitary confinement for life. The sense of loneliness was indescribable. Naïve realism is better for one's mental health.

Many city-dwellers have a romanticized conception of the living world. From another perspective, some "conservation biologists" favour e.g. "". By contrast, I think any truly compassionate person should be horrified at the terrible suffering of Nature "red in tooth and claw". Why not aim for a cruelty-free world instead?

It's easy to convince oneself that things can't really be that terrible, that the horror I allude to is being overblown, that what is going on elsewhere in space-time is somehow less real than the here-and-now, or that the good in the world somehow offsets the bad. Yet however vividly one thinks one can imagine what agony, torture or suicidal despair must be like, the reality is inconceivably worse. The force of "inconceivably" is itself largely inconceivable here. Blurry images of Orwell's "Room 101" can barely even hint at what I'm talking about. Even if one's ancestral namesakes [aka "younger self"] underwent great pain, then the state-dependence of memories means that much of pain's sheer dreadfulness is semantically, cognitively and emotionally inaccessible in the here-and-now. So this manifesto's rhapsodies on the incredible joys that do indeed lie ahead tend to belie its underlying seriousness of purpose. For the biological strategy is propounded here in deadly moral earnest.