Skepticism

[Guest Anonymous]

Does anyone remember back when I said tulpamancy has traits of a pseudo-science and a proto-religion and like a few people flipped out and called me arrogant and said I was making baseless claims?

 

This is what I was talking about then. They are not baseless claims and I didn't pull it out of my ass. It was based on observation of the obvious and those people that left the forum all butt hurt at the time (Amber995 or whatever his name was) were just weak. Eight months later I am still here and it is still true that tulpamancy has traits of a pseudo-science and a proto-religion. I stand by my words that I made then still.

 

A host switching with the tulpa and going skipping around in the wonderland while his tulpa possesses his body and drives his car is about the same level as astral projection and remote viewing scientifically. Sorry. I am not saying no one is doing it, but scientifically, it is pseudo-science. If it is all based on faith, it is proto-religious in nature.

[Raetin]

Does anyone remember back when I said tulpamancy has traits of a pseudo-science and a proto-religion and like a few people flipped out and called me arrogant and said I was making baseless claims?

 

This is what I was talking about then. They are not baseless claims and I didn't pull it out of my ass. It was based on observation of the obvious and those people that left the forum all butt hurt at the time (Amber995 or whatever his name was) were just weak. Eight months later I am still here and it is still true that tulpamancy has traits of a pseudo-science and a proto-religion. I stand by my words that I made then still.

 

A host switching with the tulpa and going skipping around in the wonderland while his tulpa possesses his body and drives his car is about the same level as astral projection and remote viewing scientifically. Sorry. I am not saying no one is doing it, but scientifically, it is pseudo-science. If it is all based on faith, it is proto-religious in nature.

 

You know that you can't prove a person is sentience with the technology we have now, right? Somebody already said it, but solipsism is the theory that only the self can be known to exist. I feel if you can't say that another person is truly conscious and have empirical evidence to back that up, then you shouldn't be saying a tulpa is an imitation of a consciousness. Science itself is still exploring this concept. Right now, you can only prove another person is real from anecdotal evidence. I'm pretty much saying we're all doing pseudo-science, including you.

 

Edit: Last time I checked, there were two major theories in the scientific community that they think consciousness could be, which haven't been proven true yet, by the way.

 

1. The consciousness is an emergent property of the brain. Someone explained it as water being wet. Why is water wet? Chemistry isn't going to tell you why it feels that way, it's just a property of water.

 

2. Consciousness has a value depending how complex a system is. Which means a computer could be conscious? Maybe. They've explained this theory could be far-fetched, but it's there.

 

Like I said, they're still working on this, but these were ideas that came from scientists.

[Guest Anonymous]

Raetin,

 

Nothing you just said changes the fact that things like switching is just trippy hippy weird pseudo-science. The argument that we can't prove human sentience or the other philosophical one that the entire universe may be an illusion or some such thing, is just an attempt to avoid the question at hand. The question of tulpa sentience has everyone waxing eloquent about philosophy and the nature of science, but avoiding the obvious. Why does it seem so obvious to me and not to anyone else? You can use the same kinds of arguments for things like UFOs and Bigfoot. There is no way to disprove them and they are plausible. Lots of people like UFOs and science can't disprove their existence. Many UFO fans have almost a religious adherence to believing in them and have seen them and would swear to their existence. But the UFO following is still a pseudo-science.

[Luminesce]

When we can't even prove or explain human sentience, it's hard to scientifically discuss tulpa sentience.

[Yakumo]

I think we are dealing with several misconceptions here which make our lives unnecessary hard.

First of all it is important to distinguish between the practical and the theoretical part of tulpamancy.

 

For the practical part, a fundamental understanding on how things work is helpful but not a necessity.

Think of a metalsmith. Metallurgy did not arise as a science until the early 20th century, yet smiths have been able to produce masterpieces of metalworks for millenia. They had no formal research methods but relied on traditions formed by a long line of empirical and mostly anecdotal evidence. And more importantly, they saw their works not only as a job to be done, craftsmanship is also a form of art. You may say it had aspects of a pseudo-science or mystified proto-religion but that does not diminish the value or their creations.

For the practical part, it's important to formulate a procedure that produces usable results. Whether the foundations of the underlying models are correct is irrelevant at this point. It is however important to see them as abstract concepts in order to avoid maneuvering oneself into a dead-end. Sticking to outdated beliefs instead of being open for new theories hinders further progress in the long run.

 

Of course our results are not as tangible as a smith's but you get the idea. We have set up procedures that work pretty well for most people (it's not really that hard as I already described) and we do have practical results. I think most of us have experienced stuff they would never have thought to be possible before knowing about tulpas. And I think we are still underestimating their importance.

 

StillI at least partly agree with David.

A significant fraction of the research carried out here qualifies as pseudoscience and some aspects of tulpamancy can be considered as a proto-religion. That doesn't mean any of it is 'bad' or 'wrong' but we should be aware of it.

 

The theoretical 'science' part of tulpamancy is of course somewhat problematic.

But we're not alone here.

Look at the project 'Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science'

 

Conclusion

 

After this intensive effort to reproduce a sample of published psychological findings, how many of the effects have we established are true? Zero. And how many of the effects have we established are false? Zero. Is this a limitation of the project design? No. It is the reality of doing science, even if it is not appreciated in daily practice. Humans desire certainty, and science infrequently provides it. As much as we might wish it to be otherwise, a single study almost never provides definitive resolution for or against an effect and its explanation. The original studies examined here offered tentative evidence; the replications we conducted offered additional, confirmatory evidence. In some cases, the replications increase confidence in the reliability of the original results; in other cases, the replications suggest that more investigation is needed to establish the validity of the original findings. Scientific progress is a cumulative process of uncertainty reduction that can only succeed if science itself remains the greatest skeptic of its explanatory claims.

That's it.

I work in natural science which is supposed to be a lot less murky than psychology and I second this.

In most cases you know even less after completing a project than you did before. You may learn that some stuff doesn't actually work as as you thought or that it has to be way more complicated. But the idea of 'proving' anything or to discover some undeniable 'truth' is laughable at best.

 

We must free ourselves from such unreachable goals and look at what's actually achievable.

Gathering evidence critically examining it and trying to set it in context with other observations is what we can do.

So as I see it, the 'crime' committed in the (pseudo)science done here is not the lack of quality but the lack of humbleness. We need to be aware that the research we are able to carry out is very limited and that the significance of the obtainable results is even more limited.

This however doesn't mean we should result to 'nothing can be proven anyway' and stop asking questions altogether. We still can try to do our best, no matter how small the evidence we manage to provide may be.

 

What does all this mean in practice?

In my opinion it is possible to do good tulpa research while adhering to some basic scientific standards, but it will be hard. Very hard.

I'd also say the front page needs an overhaul as it makes way to many general statements.

I don't think it's good to say 'a tulpa is' as it isn't. Some may reach a certain level after lots of practice, but there is a continuum from the very idea of a character you've just come up with to what we'd call as a fully developed 'autonomous' and 'sentient' tulpa.

 

Another big step would be to put the tulpa phenomenon into a broader historical, ethnological and religious context. This would make it a lot less exotic than it currently appears to outsiders.

I am highly convinced that what we view as tulpamancy is incredibly similar to the practices of shamans, traditional healers and many faithful individuals who claim to be in communication with other 'beings' and that humans have carried out such techniques since the dawn of mankind. I've already laid out how the brain's abilities to come up with said 'beings' that we can interact with is of fundamental importance for predicting the intentions of individuals we are dealing with and there are plenty of studies proposing models as of how this may work on a neurological level.

 

Can any of the said be proven?

Nah, but I hope we can at least develop tulpa-research from pseudo- to proto-science and see where we get from there. Small steps are the key.

[Guest Anonymous]

Honestly, sometimes I feel I'm the only person in the world who doesn't really have any doubts about his tupper.

 

Step One: Anyone Hooome~?

Rina's there. I can hear her, see her, feel her and so on.

Good, that's step one - I can tell she's there. We wouldn't be able to get anywhere without that, now would we?

 

Step Two: Reeaallyy~?

She must be real because she can influence me in all ways any other person could, the only limitations being on the physical side of things, but in turn she can affect me in ways any other person couldn't.

Great - step two done, I double-checked if there's really someone's there and arrived at "uh-huh" as the answer.

 

Step Three: u not be mirror person, rait?!

And she can't be me because she knows and remembers things I don't know and remember, and vice versa.

Good! Step three also done - she's not me.

 

Step Four: u rly not miror persn? and u rly person?

She has emotions, opinions, personality traits and so on, many of which deviate from my own...

... awesome! Step four is yet another success: She has a personality, and thus isn't just some sort of soulless voice in my head.

And I even managed to double-check on step three. What a great day!

 

Step Five: And yer not just someone I'm puppeting around either, right...?

And, lastly, I can't control what she says, does, wants, feels, thinks - nothing.

Oh, what a fabulous day! I even managed to figure out that she's autonomous, sentient and beyond my control.

 

And the conclusion I draw from all that?

Esterina must be a person who is completely separate from the person that is me, 'cept that she occupies the same body!

 

Do you call that "tulpa"?

a) Yes? Awright, neat! Good to know what I should call her. "Wobbletock" doesn't sound nearly as great.

b) No? Ah, well, ahdun care. Then she's something else... gonna find a word sooner or later. Hey, maybe "wobbletock" isn't that bad after all!

 

---------------------------------------

 

Less-silly tl;dr:

Rina is a real person because of the fact that, through the way she exists and acts, she leaves me no way to reasonably argue that she isn't.

But, now, is that to say I could tell if anyone else's tulpa is real? ... nope. But I never said it does, either.

 

You could've written that from the start.

 

I know.

But I didn't want to. :)

 

 

Greets,

AG & Rina

[Guest Anonymous]

@Yakumo and AGGuy,

 

Great responses and things to think about and very helpful thank you.

 

AGGuy, I have no doubts about Melian's existence, only her status as a tulpa. As far as her being some kind of a semi-autonomous thoughtform, of that I have no doubt what-so-ever. Just wanted to clarify that.

[Hierophant]

The burden of proof is on you, saying that I must create a Tulpa is not grounds for arguing the existence of your Tulpa.

I'm not trying to convince you that my tulpas are real. Why the fuck should I? I don't go around convincing people that bananas are real; I tell them to eat a banana and try it for themselves. If they then respond with "the burden of proof is on you to prove bananas", it is not my problem. I will go off and eat bananas by myself and they can live their life never touching a banana.

 

Besides... the best proof of a tulpa is having a tulpa of your own. It seems to me that someone who was genuinely interested in finding out whether tulpas are real would happily try it out to see for himself. Being reluctant to do so and repeatedly demanding proof just sounds like you're trying to actively disprove tulpas.

[Evil]

Blak:

 

[To me, it seems that if you really feel the need to prove that your tulpa exists, regardless of whether it is to yourself or to other people, you are facing some internal issues that need to be addressed. A wise thing to do is to look at the things that make you doubtful of things. We were just thinking the other day about how tulpamancy involves a middle-ground between imagination and actual perception of reality. Were you imagining you'd know, wouldn't you? Imagination in comparison to how I and Dimitrov speak is very, very limited.]

 

There is no actual need to 'prove' you have a tulpa to people online. We're all just people on a forums who bother to discuss a psychological phenomenon, that's all it really is. It's important not to take things personally or to feel TOO involved. We should not seek to prove the disprovable, proving a tulpa is real is like proving religion is 'real', or rather legitimate.

[crazywaffle]

First off hi everyone I'm new here. I know this topic has gone on for so long but I've got gotta throw in my 2 cents. I've been a Christian since I was 11 and have dealt with atheists on multiple occasions and while some of them have been nice, most of them have been words I shouldn't say on here telling me how wrong I am without giving a convincing argument as to why I'm wrong other than science>faith. So my question always is why does it matter? As long as we're not hurting anyone why should it matter what we believe? I'm still on the fence about this whole Tulpa thing myself but that's why I've been doing EXTENSIVE research on the whole thing. I'm not sure if I'll try to make one myself but I don't think those that do are crazy. So yeah that's my two cents, unless they're hurting someone by it let people believe what they want to believe.