An inquiry into the possibility that life?after?death be understood as waking from a shared dream into the real world. Attempts to outlaw the possibility that ?really? we are, e.g., vat?brains are shown to lead to unwelcome, anti?realist conclusions about either the world or consciousness. The unsatisfactory nature of empirically observable (Humean) causal connections suggests that real causes may be found beyond the world of our present experience. Though such a story cannot now be proved to be true, we are entitled (...) to entertain it as a serious possibility. An attempt is made to say what life is like in the ?Real World?, whether this be a spatial world like our present one or not, and what moral it holds for our present life. I suggest (like Plato) that there are many levels of waking, and that our ?Real Self should not be identified simply with our present egos. (shrink)

A recent paper by Korb and Oliver in this journal attempts to refute the Carter-Leslie Doomsday argument. I organize their remarks into five objections and show that they all fail. Further efforts are thus called upon to find out what, if anything, is wrong with Carter and Leslie's disturbing reasoning. While ultimately unsuccessful, Korb and Oliver's objections do however in some instances force us to become clearer about what the Doomsday argument does and doesn't imply.

I argue that at least one of the following propositions is true: the human species is very likely to become extinct before reaching a ’posthuman’ stage; any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of its evolutionary history ; we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we shall one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living (...) in a simulation. I discuss some consequences of this result. (shrink)

Carter and Leslie's Doomsday Argument maintains that reflection upon the number of humans born thus far, when that number is viewed as having been uniformly randomly selected from amongst all humans, past, present and future, leads to a dramatic rise in the probability of an early end to the human experiment. We examine the Bayesian structure of the Argument and find that the drama is largely due to its oversimplification.

If you might be living in a simulation then all else equal you should care less about others, live more for today, make your world look more likely to become rich, expect to and try more to participate in pivotal events, be more entertaining and praiseworthy, and keep the famous people around you happier and more interested in you.

_This paper outlines the case for believing that we will have superhuman artificial intelligence_ _within the first third of the next century. It looks at different estimates of the processing power of_ _the human brain; how long it will take until computer hardware achieve a similar performance;_ _ways of creating the software through bottom-up approaches like the one used by biological_ _brains; how difficult it will be for neuroscience figure out enough about how brains work to_ _make this approach work; (...) and how fast we can expect superintelligence to be developed once_ _there is human-level artificial intelligence._. (shrink)