Recording Our Experiences: A Proposal

[waffles]

In a recent thread I remembered an idea I'd had for a while: as a community, we, currently, don't record our experiences in enough depth to give a good idea of what it's like on the inside. The conclusion I came to there was that we, as a community, ought to make a serious effort to explicitly, clearly and unambiguously document the experiences we have, so that they will be understandable out of context. By that I mean a complete description, which gives a good idea of what it's like to have a tulpa, to possess, and so on, which will be intelligible without access to this community.

 

The example in the thread was about imposition, specifically, someone (Amadeus) who had written about his experiences three years ago. It's interesting because he talks about sensory control, in a complete sense, rather than the usual imposition. It's not something that most people talk about, I guess that a lot of people really think about; and while I tried to think about how typical those experiences are, I don't really know. People write imposition guides, which are mostly focused around how to get it, rather than what it's like to have it - imposition is usually described as 'hallucinating your tulpa', and not more than a few sentences talking about what it's like. It's not obvious from that whether sensory control is easy or hard given 'normal' imposition, or possible, or controllable, or common, or anything like that.

 

Personally, I can disambiguate it. I know who to ask - who has imposition down; and those people themselves can also answer. But that's not even true for some people in the community, I think, or for someone outside of it, and will definitely not be true when those people who can answer are gone. Historically, that information - details about what it's like to have imposition, or anything else - will be lost if we don't write it down. Possibly, a lot has already been lost in the four years this community has existed. What is understood when we say "mindvoice" is not necessarily constant, nor by "vocal", nor by "switching", nor any other term or phrase that we use. Textual definitions are okay, but often ambiguous, I guess. And, eventually, there'll be no-one around who can disambiguate.

 

This is a common problem faced by historians. When an ancient culture uses a word, like "beauty", we can't assume that they mean it like we do. We need to infer what it is they do mean with the term, and that's a fairly imperfect process. More interestingly, if you've heard of the bicameralism hypothesis - the idea that the ancients heard gods as voices, literally, telling them what to do - we again can't say for sure whether, when the Iliad talks about gods 'as if' they were talking to humans, it means that literally or not. The validity of that hypothesis isn't important, it's just that naively you'd think it would be really obvious whether so dramatic a shift in the core human experience had happened.

 

In some sense we can maintain strict definitions of some terms. 'Imposition' at least won't change as long as you talk about it as a "hallucination" - this is a term that can't be misunderstood, because it's a medical term, at least for now. I get annoyed when people use 'switching' to refer to what I'd call 'possession', or something else; not because of some linguistic prescriptivism, but because it distorts everything that people have written before under the old usages. If people eventually wind up using our common terms to refer to completely different things, what has been written before (and what we write now) will no longer mean what the writer intended.

 

But enforcing terminology usage is a losing battle. And, like I said, even if we keep strict definitions, the implications of those definitions, and what it's like to experience them, is bound to be ambiguous. This is why I think we need to pay attention to making a record of our experiences that is unambiguous: we want it to be clear what's going on here, even after the community changes or disappears. I think that with thought explicitly aimed at preventing confusions or semantic drift, we can document, in an unambiguous way, what the tulpa community experiences, without relying on a few terms.

 

I think there are a few possible concerns.

• Does this bias people into expecting a narrower range of experiences? - Well, possibly it wouldn't be a great idea to read a lot of others' experiences in detail before making a tulpa. On the other hand, seeing a wide variety of accounts might do the opposite.
  
• Do we care about small details of internal experiences? - I guess I don't usually tend to be interested in someone's mental habits, or small narrative details, personally. But they help to ground a more useful description of experiences. Or, it's hard to tell what's important and what's not, anyway. I'm not sure.
  
• More generally, what level of detail is actually meaningful? - some aspects of experiences might be more or less random between people. Then again, we'd find that out eventually by cataloguing in detail, which I guess might be useful in itself.
  
• Is it uncomfortable/harmful for people to compare experiences in detail like this? - Personally I have a slight inhibition to writing what I did below, maybe because of this. I would guess, but I'm not sure, that others feel the same to some extent. Whether it's actively harmful to current community members, again, I can't really guess.
  

 

 

As for how to do this, I guess I'm not sure what's best. I think it's enough to be descriptive and candid about things. Like I said, I wouldn't really expect lots of detailed descriptions to match, so they wouldn't really useful to people looking for something that's true in the general case (i.e., new people). Ultimately my suggestion here is to relax the focus on helping other people to have these experiences, maybe - I don't mean that it shouldn't be done, but that writing with that aim doesn't help with the goal.

 

What I might suggest is that we, here, start writing descriptions in this vein. I'll try to give an example, about my experiences with possession, which I'll comment on in italics. It's pretty TL;DR.

 

[hidden]

When I started, there was nothing at all. I would relax my body, and ask my tulpa to try to move it, usually just a finger. And it wouldn't move. I would stare at it for a while, while she made various attempts to feel out how to move it. But, no matter what she did, what I did, it wouldn't move until I moved it myself. [i want to establish what it was like not having it.]

 

As we practiced a bit, it became that when she tried to move my finger, it would move, a few mm, on its own. She would typically visualise an imaginary representation of the arm - say, a collection of circles in the shape of an arm - and then imagine the representation moving; the body then moved accordingly, fractionally [this is just "symbolism", but I guess it's maybe helpful]. Practicing more, she could move it a bit further, and weakly move my arm. What I mean here by 'she moves' is that I relax my arm, initially, and it then seems to move of its own accord. I don't keep the muscles relaxed - in that sense it isn't like someone else moving your limbs from the outside - but I do not will the movement. I send no commands to the arm, but feel her commands being acted out. ["Move" is possibly unclear without explaining. This might still be insufficient.].

 

With more practice [timescale might be useful here, or might not. I'm not trying to catalogue the development so much as use it to explain the shift in experience] her movements became stronger physically (she was unable to lift my arm against gravity, at first), and easier mentally. The haphazard and uncertain process of movement via imaginary symbolism slowly gave way to a more intuitive, 'feel'y process, where she'd exert a will to move the body, just as I did. It became that she could consistently move any part of the body. She practiced, walking clumsily as though her limbs were sluggish to respond, and as though every part of the body needed to be moved by individual attention. I kept from making any deliberate movement myself, just observing and feeling, though not willing, these movements.

 

As she kept practicing, her movements became more fluid, her control more secure, and individual movements more unconscious. To me it felt less and less like she was exerting a will to move, and more that the body was moving according to her thoughts. In this regard it became more difficult to distinguish her movement from my own - the question asked is only, "Who thought to move that?". It didn't feel different, physically, to have her move a part of the body, only mentally. For me there was not an 'in' or 'out' with the body: I was always feeling, always having the possibility to control, merely exercising the restraint not to. [This is where I'm uncertain and a bit curious as to how other people experience possession. A phrase like "alien movement" will often be used, but I don't know how broadly it applies.]

 

Quite quickly she became fluent controlling the body, having no significant difference in proficiency from me. As she started to spend long stretches of time possessing, towards the length of a day, my own conscious inhibition from trying to move the body myself became more unconscious, and easier. It effected a shift in mental roles: now, more commonly, she would be the only one thinking and acting, for long periods. [i guess this is more useful as part of a broader description of what it's like to have a tulpa, than isolated here.]

 

Now, several years on, her controlling is natural. I think nothing of letting her control the body, and likewise, it feels natural for her, as though it were her body. With a routine of her spending perhaps half of our waking time in the body every day, it became more and more the case that she developed a distinct set of habits and temperament - or, more accurately, that our habits diverged. [i know there was a forum thread on this.] We have plenty of mannerisms that are similar, the majority I think, such as posture, the way in which we type (physically), fidgeting with pens, for example. And the differences likewise; her speech patterns manifest when she talks via possession, she oftens prefers different sitting positions. [These are just examples, maybe they're boring.]

 

Experiencing things is different, depending on who is possessing. It's not that my attention might be directed elsewhere entirely when she possesses - I don't stop experiencing the body's senses - but that things feel slightly different. There is a gloss, a mental sensation, condition or awareness that I am not in control when things are being done, although this feeling is not strong. This gloss becomes apparent when, for example, I "wake up with her possessing". That is, in the moments while waking up, with the body moving, it becomes apparent to me that I am not the one moving, and instead that she was possessing at that time. Besides which, we may experience the same physical thing differently, differences in taste, or temperature, for example.

 

[i think these last few paragraphs are the most important, the ones that I'm trying to use to get across the experience adequately.]

[/hidden]

 

Well, I'm not sure how useful that is. People already do write detailed accounts of creation, I guess. It's the latter part that I'm more interested in, what it feels like long after the 'achievement'. It's hard for me to tell how well that conveys what I want it to, though. I think that people who write in, for instance, progress reports, often focus on narrative that doesn't shed light on the experience itself - either details about what they did to force, or talking about the contents of their interactions with their tulpa rather than the nature of those interactions. But, I guess some people will have written this kind of detail, although I don't think it's easy to find.

 

Anyway, something like that is what I have in mind when I talk about "detailed accounts"; what I'm suggesting is that it would be useful for other people to write things like these for all aspects of the 'tulpa experience' - most usefully the more 'advanced' stuff like imposition or switching, I guess.

[Linkzelda]

I'm all for it, but I think the part where you mentioned others not detailing the nature of those interactions are probably those that are fixated in figuring out if there can be something of "nature" to it in the first place. In other words, I think the language they develop (and I mean more than just words; indirect) doesn't get enough feedback, which makes them feel it's going to be weird, and branded as "you're just trying to be a special snowflake."

 

But, I think the more the community starts getting into discussions over the nature of this and that (e.g. sentience, novelty, inner experience, qualia, etc.), I think they may have more of a fallback that they can correlate in detailing potential natures of those interactions and experiences with tulpas. If there's nothing to reconcile with, then yeah, a lot can be lost. But that's just me thinking discussions over more complex and deeper thought can be a tool for others in vocalizing those experiences more than just "Oh, I drank some OJ, and forced for like 3 hours. It was cool." If they can't acknowledge themselves in the sense of at least trying to see and theorize what's going on in their experience with their tulpa, in spite of the challenge of it having any bearing (e.g. empirically), then the strive for more transparency will fail because of that, or at least partially due to that.

 

Anyway, I got nothing else. But it's good to know people have been knowing that transparency, emotive context related to inner experience, and such during the journey is what we need.

[Carpenter]

Never mind how future generations might perceive what we write, there's enough variation between people's minds today, with or without tulpa, that this effort to maintain what we experience in writing could be pointless. Read this story of a man with aphantasia, the total lack of ability to form mental imagery, and how long it took him to realize he was different.

 

Let me be clear: I know nobody can see fantastical images through their actual eyes. But I was equally sure nobody could “see” them with some fanciful “mind’s eye,” either. That was just a colorful figure of speech, like “the bee’s knees” or “the cat’s pajamas.” ...

And is this “mental picture” in color? Of course it is—because the beach I visited was in color. But the very foundation of the question does not compute in my brain. It’s like asking me if the number seven has any stubble, or if the puppy is on a leash. What puppy?

 

Would Blake have learned about his difference earlier if everyone around him documented their mental experiences? Yes. But that doesn't mean that he'll ever understand what it really means to visualize something. Today, we can conceptually understand the idea of hearing the gods talking to you, because there's a have a reference: hearing our own thoughts in our head. But some day humanity might totally lack the ability to think vocally with words. What then?

[Luminesce]

We wouldn't even know people had different experiences if we didn't share our different experiences. Despite how different everyone is from everyone else, they tend to find similarities with others, and those similarities can be learned from. Just look at... books, in general, I guess. Sharing our experiences, or at least recording them so they are not lost, tends to be beneficial and at worst just isn't. It won't hurt anything, and writing about your own experiences often helps organize them in your mind, which is why journals/diaries are actually helpful.

[waffles]

I'm all for it, but I think the part where you mentioned others not detailing the nature of those interactions are probably those that are fixated in figuring out if there can be something of "nature" to it in the first place. In other words, I think the language they develop (and I mean more than just words; indirect) doesn't get enough feedback, which makes them feel it's going to be weird, and branded as "you're just trying to be a special snowflake."

 

I don't think it's really important to develop a terminology, though, at least not here. If anything it just confuses things more when everyone starts coining new words; now instead of a few community-specific terms there are a lot, and they suffer the same problems as the rest - their precise meanings may be unclear out of context, or may shift in usage, and so on. Talking about inner experiences in a clear way, I think the best approach is to use less weird terms, rather than more.

 

 

Carpenter, your suggestion, "some day humanity might totally lack the ability to think vocally with words", was something that I had thought of using as an example myself. It's not so much that those post-humans wouldn't 'understand' what we're writing - that's the problem of qualia, you really can't make people understand what it's like to feel something they haven't felt. It's that they would think that when we talked about "mindvoice", they'd think it was metaphorical, and that we meant something else, whatever the medium of their inner thoughts were.

 

Blake doesn't need to "understand what it really means". He knows roughly what it entails, and he's no longer confused about the "mind's eye" being a figure of speech. It's that second part that's more important to combat than the first, I think.

[Temar]

I'd say this is a good idea. I've always had the impression that different people mean slightly different things when talking about imposition and possession. Everyone talking about what they experience might help narrow down what those terms actually mean to the group as a whole, so I'm all for this.

 

I especially like the point that just being candid can help a lot of newbies out... a lot of problems with starting imposition or possession come from the fact that the person trying to do it doesn't know what, exactly, to expect. So the more personal stories we can give them to show them how it might feel (not how it's supposed to, just how it might, and stressing that is important, I think), the better.

 

My question is what, exactly, you're proposing. Are you talking about actual threads dedicated to experiences in imposition/posession/switching/etc., or allowing more experiential and post-development content in the PRs, or just adapting a more share-y mindset around the board in general?

[waffles]

Are you talking about actual threads dedicated to experiences in imposition/posession/switching/etc., or allowing more experiential and post-development content in the PRs, or just adapting a more share-y mindset around the board in general?

 

Probably the first, or that people write those experiences here, or it doesn't really matter as long as people write it. Ideally other people could tell me whether what I've written as an example seems reasonable, and write things of their own that they think do the job too.

[Vos]

If we're going to do this, having multiple threads might be the better option. People probably won't want to slog through a general thread and descriptions of so many different aspects when they're just looking for something on imposition, for example. This thread is just a proposal, so you could shove some links to new threads into the OP once they're made, and we could eventually sticky this if the idea picks up.

 

I'll just respond to what you said in the previous thread because your tl;dr was here:

 

I wrote a (tldr) example of what I mean, but if you had something different in mind which would be better, I guess that'd be good.

 

Yes, this seems pretty similar to what Amadeus did in his article and could potentially be useful for any newbies who might be wondering if what's happening to them is normal or not (which means that we'll have less threads of those). It's rare to see progress reports where people touch on the little details. By that, I don't mean crazy descriptions of what the tulpa or wonderland looks like, but what it's actually like to have a tulpa, especially when the people involved are at the point where they're comfortable with where they are and don't worry too much about making progress. The best example that comes to mind right now is Daniel's log.

[TheGreenQueen]

Never mind how future generations might perceive what we write, there's enough variation between people's minds today, with or without tulpa, that this effort to maintain what we experience in writing could be pointless. Read this story of a man with aphantasia, the total lack of ability to form mental imagery, and how long it took him to realize he was different.

 

 

Would Blake have learned about his difference earlier if everyone around him documented their mental experiences? Yes. But that doesn't mean that he'll ever understand what it really means to visualize something. Today, we can conceptually understand the idea of hearing the gods talking to you, because there's a have a reference: hearing our own thoughts in our head. But some day humanity might totally lack the ability to think vocally with words. What then?

 

Hold up a sec, then why do we write ANYTHING down? That reasoning is way off point . . . 'there might be some future where humans can't understand text.' We even put text in hopeful-for-alien-contact satellites like Sputnik. The odds that aliens could even decipher what it says are very, *very* slim. But still we do it.

 

I have aphantasia by the way, and I still don't understand what you're getting at. Hopefully I can provide perspective for non-visual people wanting to create tulpas.

[Carpenter]

TheGreenQueen, reading is part of how we experience the external world, specifically text. This thread is concerned with internal experiences. The fundamental nature of the outside world will never change, nor will humans devolve the highly advantageous ability to read while it still matters. The only scenario I can think of where we as a species lose the ability to read is where information is directly uploaded to the brain, but even then we'll still have access to the information. Or we all switch to audiobooks, lol.

If there's very little discernible difference between someone with an internal experience, such as an internal voice or mental imagery, and someone without it, then there's very little selective pressure and nothing's stopping it from evolving (or devolving) to a new form.

 

There are other ways we can tell alien life about ourselves, like the Arecibo message.

Sputnik? You're thinking of the Pioneer 10/11 and Voyager missions. Sputnik burned up in the atmosphere in 1958 after only three months.