Tulpa References/Discussion

Vulture

There have been a number of discussions here on LessWrong about "tulpas", but it's been scattered about with no central thread for the discussion. So I thought I would put this up here, along with a centralized list of reliable information sources, just so we all stay on the same page.

Tulpas are deliberately created "imaginary friends" which in many ways resemble separate, autonomous minds. Often, the creation of a tulpa is coupled with deliberately induced visual, auditory, and/or tactile hallucinations of the being.

Previous discussions here on LessWrong: 1 2 3

Questions that have been raised:

1. How do tulpas work?

2. Are tulpas safe, from a mental health perspective?

3. Are tulpas conscious? (may be a hard question)

4. More generally, is making a tulpa a good idea? What are they useful for?

Pertinent Links and Publications

(I will try to keep this updated if/when further sources are found)

In this article¹, the psychological anthropologist Tanya M. Luhrmann connects tulpas to the "voice of God" experienced by devout evangelicals - a phenomenon more thoroughly discussed in her book When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God. Luhrmann has also succeeded² in inducing tulpa-like visions of Leland Stanford, jr. in experimental subjects.
This paper³ investigates the phenomenon of authors who experience their characters as "real", which may be tulpas by yet another name.
There is an active subreddit of people who have or are developing tulpas, with an FAQ, links to creation guides, etc.
tulpa.info is a valuable resource, particularly the forum. There appears to be a whole "research" section for amateur experiments and surveys.
This particular experiment suggests that the idea of using tulpas to solve problems faster is a no-go.
Also, one person helpfully hooked themselves up to an EEG and then performed various mental activities related to their tulpa.
Another possibly related phenomenon is the way that actors immerse themselves in their characters. See especially the section on "Masks" in Keith Johnstone's book Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre (related quotations and video)⁴.
This blogger has some interesting ideas about the neurological basis of tulpas, based on Julian Jaynes's The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, a book whose scientific validity is not clear to me.
It is not hard to find new age mystical books about the use of "thoughtforms", or the art of "channeling" "spirits", often clearly talking about the same phenomenon. These books are likely to be low in useful information for our purposes, however. Therefore I'm not going to list the ones I've found here, as they would clutter up the list significantly.
(Updated 2/9/2015) The abstract of a paper by our very own Kaj Sotala hypothesizing about the mechanisms behind tulpa creation.⁵

(Bear in mind while perusing these resources that if you have serious qualms about creating a tulpa, it might not be a good idea to read creation guides too carefully; making a tulpa is easy to do and, at least for me, was hard to resist. Proceed at your own risk.)

Footnotes

1. "Conjuring Up Our Own Gods", a 14 October 2013 New York Times Op-Ed

2. "Hearing the Voice of God" by Jill Wolfson in the July/August 2013 Stanford Alumni Magazine

3. "The Illusion of Independent Agency: Do Adult Fiction Writers Experience Their Characters as Having Minds of Their Own?"; Taylor, Hodges & Kohànyi in Imagination, Cognition and Personality; 2002/2003; 22, 4

4. Thanks to pure_awesome

5. "Sentient companions predicted and modeled into existence: explaining the tulpa phenomenon" by Kaj Sotala

Previous discussions here on LessWrong: 1 2 3

Questions that have been raised:

1. How do tulpas work?

2. Are tulpas safe, from a mental health perspective?

3. Are tulpas conscious? (may be a hard question)

4. More generally, is making a tulpa a good idea? What are they useful for?

Pertinent Links and Publications

(I will try to keep this updated if/when further sources are found)

In this article¹, the psychological anthropologist Tanya M. Luhrmann connects tulpas to the "voice of God" experienced by devout evangelicals - a phenomenon more thoroughly discussed in her book When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God. Luhrmann has also succeeded² in inducing tulpa-like visions of Leland Stanford, jr. in experimental subjects.
This paper³ investigates the phenomenon of authors who experience their characters as "real", which may be tulpas by yet another name.
There is an active subreddit of people who have or are developing tulpas, with an FAQ, links to creation guides, etc.
tulpa.info is a valuable resource, particularly the forum. There appears to be a whole "research" section for amateur experiments and surveys.
This particular experiment suggests that the idea of using tulpas to solve problems faster is a no-go.
Also, one person helpfully hooked themselves up to an EEG and then performed various mental activities related to their tulpa.
Another possibly related phenomenon is the way that actors immerse themselves in their characters. See especially the section on "Masks" in Keith Johnstone's book Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre (related quotations and video)⁴.
This blogger has some interesting ideas about the neurological basis of tulpas, based on Julian Jaynes's The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, a book whose scientific validity is not clear to me.
It is not hard to find new age mystical books about the use of "thoughtforms", or the art of "channeling" "spirits", often clearly talking about the same phenomenon. These books are likely to be low in useful information for our purposes, however. Therefore I'm not going to list the ones I've found here, as they would clutter up the list significantly.
(Updated 2/9/2015) The abstract of a paper by our very own Kaj Sotala hypothesizing about the mechanisms behind tulpa creation.⁵

Footnotes

1. "Conjuring Up Our Own Gods", a 14 October 2013 New York Times Op-Ed

2. "Hearing the Voice of God" by Jill Wolfson in the July/August 2013 Stanford Alumni Magazine

4. Thanks to pure_awesome

5. "Sentient companions predicted and modeled into existence: explaining the tulpa phenomenon" by Kaj Sotala

Once I had an idea for a sci-fi setting, about a society where it is possible to create a second personality in your brain. Just like tulpa, except that it is done using technology. Your second personality does not know about you, it thinks it is the only inhabitant of your brain. While your second personality acts, you can observe, or you can turn yourself off (like in sleep) and specify events that would wake you up (that automatically includes anything unusual). So for example, you use your second personality to do your work for you, while you sleep. That feels like being paid for sleeping 8 extra hours per workday, which is why it becomes popular.

When the work is over, you can take the control of the body. As the root personality, you can make choices about how the second personality perceives this; essentially you can give them false memories. You can just have fun, and decide your second personality will falsely remember it as them having fun. Of you can do something that your second personality will not know about (either will remember nothing, or some false memory: for example of spending the whole afternoon procrastinating online). This can be used if you want your second personality to be different than you so much that it would not agree with how you spend your free time. You can create a completely fictional life story for your second personality, to motivate it to work extra hard.

When this becomes popular, obviously your second personality (who doesn't know it is the second personality) would possibly want their own second personality. But that would be a waste of resources! The typical hack is to edit the second personality's beliefs to oppose this technology; for example you can make them believe to be a member of a religion that opposes it.

And the sci-fi story itself would obviously be about someone who finds out they are a second personality... presumably of an owner who does not mind them knowing. Or an owner who committed a mental suicide by replacing themselves by the second personality 100% of the time. But there is a chance that the owner is merely sleeping and waiting until some long-term goal is accomplished. The hero needs to discover their real past and figure out the original personality's intentions...

I stumbled over this reference to the ability to create duplicates of oneself and the problem that leads to:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/9cp/the_noddy_problem/

5A1987dM12y

IIRC Aristoi has something similar.

0drethelin12y

There's a shadow run book where the main character is a test case for this idea. She ends up becoming a highly paid bodyguard since she can be on call for much longer shifts with minimal downtime.

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