Tulpa Ethics

[Lacquer]

I honestly don't see a big issue with people mistreating or dehumanizing tulpas here, and when they have and I see it I usually call them out on it. Tulpa ethics in general can be lumped into the exact same box as "general ethics": I don't see any rules that would only apply for tulpas but not humans, and vice versa, so it's easier to just go "if I wouldn't do this to a human, I shouldn't do it to a tulpa."

 

Yeah, this thread seemed more hypothetical and for thought-provoking discussion than for the purpose of addressing a real problem. The only instances where tulpa ethics seemed to have come into play would be a couple people getting oversensitive about possessive grammar and things like this.

[Flandre]

Something you guys didn't seem to mention is that everyone thinks of tulpas differently. Regardless of the exact nature of any individual tulpa, the host's beliefs on who and what they are are very important in deciding how to treat and think about them. Just as all tulpas are different from each other and we accept those differences, all hosts think of their tulpas differently too. Lumi doesn't even think of us like tulpas sometimes, since his core beliefs were our own creation before we found out about tulpas. There's been a lot of influence from this community, and growth in that time too, but it's not too different. So even if they aren't so different they change an apparent "rule" of ethics, they are different. And we're a pretty established system in this community, right? What does that say for new members and lurkers?

 

There are definitely some universal norms that won't hurt, of course. But people have gotten upset at something as simple as "enforcing limits on your tulpa's freedom to change themselves", just recently. Lumi had a good point for the upset at that - it's just a parent who makes their children go to bed at 8 every night, after brushing their teeth.. and perhaps saying a prayer. That's their right of course as parents, but to some more liberal parents, that could seem pretty ridiculous. Our younger sister just recently had a friend her age over (about 8) who was extremely shocked to find our sister was allowed to drink soda. She also has no special feelings about the exclamation "Oh my god!" Her friend however told her that she needed to pray to God for forgiveness after saying that.

 

Yeah, see how that might rub people the wrong way? But it's absolutely not your right to tell her parents they're raising their child wrong. They're well within their rights as parents to do what they're doing. Even if you don't like it, and even if it's not the norm, it's not your child. And as long as they aren't directly harming their child (hush with the religion bashing..), there's nothing wrong. And I feel like some people in this community don't quite get that. It's not your right to tell someone they can't enforce limits on their tulpa's form. In this case they weren't even enforcing a specific form with no room for change, either, just "limits" which I assume refers to a lack of extremes. The fact that they're not just choosing their tulpa's form in the first place should be good enough. But that's just soda no-soda. As Lumi said, he picked our forms and never even thought about us wanting to change them until years later. Maybe that's a nightly prayer to you guys. But it didn't hurt us, in fact we saw no reason to think differently from him. As for "Oh my god!"s... Well, I've recently seen people say that referring to your tulpa as "your tulpa" is offensive and degrading, and so are vehemently against use of that term. It's their prerogative; they can't enforce it on you, and you can't them.

 

You can, of course, discuss any of this.. This is a place of learning, and it's practically a disclaimer that by using this forum your beliefs are liable to be challenged, for the sake of learning. Just keep it civil and open minded. It is all just in your head, in the end. Real to you, yet infinitely malleable compared to reality. Don't take it too seriously. Not because it isn't important, but because anything is just a thought away from suddenly being less serious.

[Hierophant]

If saying "my tulpa" is wrong, then saying "my mother" or "my classmate" is wrong too.

[waffles]

And as long as they aren't directly harming their child, there's nothing wrong.

 

This is the catch that turns implementing your advice into a game of figuring out what's an acceptable amount of wrong for a parent to inflict on a child in the name of freedom. The reason that people get weird about people not conforming to their own practices is that they have reasons for doing it their way - otherwise they wouldn't be doing it! It's practically a necessity that they think anyone doing anything else differently is doing it wrong, and that extends to the idea of it being harmful.

[Akecalo]

While I feel that the topic of tulpa ethics is an interesting one, certainly worthy of discussion, I feel that it should be treated with a certain amount of respect as a topic.

 

I don't feel that this is done if the first post redefines a commonly used phrase, expressed in the english language to mean something other than its accepted meaning, then claims that as a result of this personal redefinition, anyone who uses the phrase is "bad".

 

This is not the path to rational discussion. Someone trying to make that argument appears illiterate at best, disingenuous and manipulative at worst.

 

On the point of tulpa ethics or at least ethics in the practice of tulpamancy, I do think that an ethical standard is desirable, at least at the level of the individual. The way we interact others, whether we acknowledge them as sentient or not, affects the way we ourselves develop. It is my subjective opinion that it is preferable to develop as someone who habitually treats those in their environment as individuals worthy of respect, than as someone who doesn't.

 

Although I was not born before the internet was invented, I was born before it became widely publicly available. I was certainly born a long time before this community was brought into being and both of my tulpas predate it by decades. I did not therefore use any of the guides posted here to make them. As a result I did not have the received wisdom concerning appropriate motivations for making a tulpa or the treatment of the tulpa once present.

 

I had to formulate standards to use when interacting with my tulpas for myself. This was done over time, in discussion with those tulpas. The standards that we came up with are not a million miles away from those seemingly accepted by the majority of this community.

 

It is a personal choice, but I place the same conditions on the interaction with my girls as I place on my interaction with anyone else. I ask; is this thing that I am about to do in the interests of this other person? If the answer is yes, well and good. If the answer is no, then I have to decide whether I am willing to live with having done something that was not in their interest.

 

On the question of sentience, I think that the unprovable question "are they sentient?" is perhaps not the most useful question we could ask when determining how a tulpa should be treated. Again, I use the same model that I use with anyone else. Do I know that this person is definitely sentient? No. I have reasonably direct evidence only of my own sentience. Does this person have the appearance of sentience? Yes. Can I prove that this appearance is false? No. So I give them the benefit of the doubt and interact with them as if the reason that they appear sentient is because they are sentient. Given that they appear to have at least the potential for sentience, do I want to be the guy who treats potentially sentient people well, or do I want to be the guy who treats potentially sentient people badly? I make my decisions accordingly.

 

There is something that I have seen mentioned in a number of places, and not really understood. It was mentioned in passing in this thread, in a slightly more relatable form. The statement ususally takes the form "a tulpa has no physical/corporeal form/body". This seems strange to me, when it is encountered on this forum. This forum seems to have the formal position that the psychological model of the existence of the tulpa is the correct one. Further than this, the consensus of the majority here seems to be that the tulpa should be accepted as an independent consious personality running on the same brain as the original host, in much the same way as that original host seems to be. It is assumed that the host has a physical form, in that the personality of the host is running on a brain that is supported by and is a part of a human body. If the model of a tulpa that is used here is the one above, how does the tulpa not have a physical form? Its physical form is the same as that of the host, as they both run on the same brain. It would appear that to claim otherwise is to subscribe to a thought process that claims that the tulpa is not running on the brain and therefore is not associated with the physical form. This could be the case if a) the tulpa is not a conciousness running on a brain that it can lay claim to because it is fictional. Perhaps you believe it is all roleplaying. b) the tulpa is not a conciousness running on a brain because it has somehow been created or acquired in such a way that it is not dependent on the brain for its existence and is somehow independent of the existing form of the host. This would seem to be more in keeping with the discussion on the metaphysics forum, rather than an assertion made by a proponent of the psychological model.

 

I am sure that there are other models that free the alleged tulpa from dependence on the same physical form as the host, but those are the two which leaped readily to mind.

 

It would seem that a proponent of the psychological model of the tulpa would have to accept that a tulpa has a physical form upon which their existence is dependent.

 

Which brings me to the wording used in this thread; "while not owning a physical form". This makes more sense. It does not make the claim that a tulpa is without physical form, it simply states that the tulpa does not claim ownership of the physical form upon which they are dependent. I have had a working assumption for some time that this was the intention behind the other word choices used, but I am not certain about that.

 

Even with this wording, the statement seems a bit strange within the context of the thread or the post. Effectively it says that while a tulpa should be considered a sentient being, and treated as such, they should have no claim over the hardware upon which they run, unlike the host, who is also a sentient being running on that hardware and unlike the tulpa made the conscious decision to share it with someone else. This phrase surely implies that we should consider them a second class citizen in their own body. This implication is present in a post that indicates that we should strongly discourage disrespectful behaviour towards tulpas.

 

I don't know, maybe I have misunderstood the intention. I don't particularly have any feelings about the validity or applicability of the model implied by that discussion, it was just something that I wondered about, given that it seems to be the model that is subscribed to by many here.

[Luminesce]

Soda is bad for you in just every conceivable way. If you can keep your children from drinking it you should. And I'm not even going to start on peoples' opinions on teaching religion to kids.

Undeniably those are both seen as very bad to some people, and not to others. But what they have in common is that, in society, we allow it. There's a sort of undefined (or maybe legally defined..) area where anything inside is acceptable, and anything outside isn't. Flan's point was that you guys (not literally everyone, but those arguing) were failing to see that area in relation to tulpamancy, instead comparing it to a small amount of leniency to your own beliefs, or to the norm here.

 

Not that we know how to define that area as well as society has yet, of course. But it exists. We need to learn that different people are going to believe different things that we disagree with and consider wrong, but ultimately aren't malevolent enough to warrant forcing our beliefs on them. I think this thread was a pretty good example.

[Guest Anonymous]

Honestly, this entire thread is weird to me.

Discussing tulpa rights = discussing human rights.

It's that simple. A tulpa has any rights a human has, and thus, such a dedicated discussion on tupper ethics is... a bit irritating to me.

 

 

Greets,

AG

[Evil]

@Luminesce:

 

I personally feel like the entire tulpa ethics problem revolves around what the host wants to impose on the tulpa, for his own benefit, instead of the regulation a parent would impose on his child. Making an anime waifu or a pony for instance, just for the sake of having that around and not talking to an intelligent person and create a good environment. I feel like when we're trying to use examples such as 'oh, a parent would do the best for his child', we're merely fooling ourselves by avoiding our hypocrisy. I am aware your tulpas have anime forms, but what I said does not apply to you. In many cases, I have seen people trying to provide justifications for what 'they' wanted; after all, is there any reason for making a tulpa, in all cases? You could live without (before going through that experience, of course.), you are creating someone who may have never wanted to actually have anything to do with this world. The majority of the community is made of teenagers and young adults who are unaware of the true sense of responsibility it takes to 'raise' a child, and even then, a child has their own physical body, and you don't doubt your child exists on a daily basis, except if you doubt of the entire world's legitimacy.

 

Making an anime tulpa is juuuust fine. It's completely acceptable, and even beneficial, as standing out would probably help out the tulpa. Refusing all sorts of changes under the pretense that 'oh, tulpas don't know any better' resides in arrogance and a lack of experience in the same time. Arrogance because we think that we actually know better than our tulpas (and assume that all there is is what we see on the surface, and not deeply written in the way they behave, think and function). Making a pony tulpa is absolutely fine, I did not mean to say in the former paragraph that it was anything bad, not at all. My point was that people make tulpas for benefit, in the majority, if not totality of cases, but are afraid to admit it, and seem to want to hide behind a curtain of justifications. Which is also acceptable, as all people have their needs. But rejecting and refuting a tulpa's needs and, in some ways, integrity because we are too 'attached' and yet still try to create excuses for our strictness (an example is Tsunami's thread, with due respect, it was filled with excuses such as 'my creation' 'I have no free will myself' 'I know better' in some implications). That sense of property is not bestowed upon people, in any cases, aside from slavery and the outlook of ownership of human 'livestock', let's put it this way.

 

I just believe it is highly hypocritical of us, as a community, to try to adapt the parent argument as a means to justify limitations. Might as well be honest with ourselves. This post, Luminesce, was not entirely aimed at you (I'd say 5% was, though), I just saw the mention of the whole parental argument once again, just like in the other thread, so I figured I could make a comment on that, as I have been holding back a few thoughts.

It's pointless to even discuss morality and ethics, you want to know why? Because regardless, in the end, nobody changed opinions. Nobody went from bad to decent, or from decent to good, or from good to higher planes of self-empowerment. I have a lot of stuff happening with my more troublesome resident, and I took drastic measures at certain instances, surely, but in the end, acceptance is of the essence. If you, the reader, want an anime tulpa, go ahead. As I said, it is 100000% fine. If you want to contradict your tulpa's will when it reaches sentience to change forms, or traits, or anything, under the argument of 'knowing better', go ahead, do that too, no need to justify it in front of us.

 

PS: I personally disagree with the statement that tulpas are like children. They tend to be much more mature even at first signs of vocality, and development, if done right, happens much faster.

[Guest Anonymous]

PS: I personally disagree with the statement that tulpas are like children. They tend to be much more mature even at first signs of vocality, and development, if done right, happens much faster.

 

This. A thousand times.

I'll even re-quote it just to really rub the point in hard.

 

PS: I personally disagree with the statement that tulpas are like children. They tend to be much more mature even at first signs of vocality, and development, if done right, happens much faster.

 

 

Greets,

AG

[Luminesce]

Well, real quick, I'll respond to a few of those things. My tulpas aren't "anime" tulpas, I'm just not an artist. I understand that I'm not everyone else and don't speak for them all, but at least in my case, my tulpas are completely unreliant on their source material. Their forms were based on existing ones I like because I have very little imagination or artistic ability, and their pictures are all "anime" style because.. well, that's how the characters are drawn. If I could draw, and do so more realistically and qualitatively than these artists, I would. But I can't, so I settle. I've no issue converting them to realistic 3D humans myself, anyway.

 

Also, the parent similarities were only brought up, and only relevant because, we were discussing the creation process. Living your whole life with your tulpa certainly doesn't have to be a parent-child experience (though for some it is), but the creation process usually is. Restricting your children and your tulpas in their developmental phases is just part of nature. Now, the argument on only giving your tulpas as much freedom as you had/your child would, is indeed something you can wave off should you want. I was arguing that because it was the OP's argument in that thread. Tulpas really aren't the same as children, not the least of which is due to the fact that they're part of your brain and not their own. There are still some parallels to draw given their perceived free will to change, but I dunno.

 

My personal beliefs, at that point, go to the more psychological beliefs I have where a tulpa's "free will" is still under your control. But the reason I don't discuss those beliefs in detail is that I don't share a definition of "you" that everyone else does. Your tulpa's free will is controlled by "you", but "you" isn't necessarily the host's identity. I consider it something more overarching. But you can see why this isn't something I bother trying to discuss, from my own perspective. That's why I used the OP's.

 

You're right, at least, that the discussion doesn't matter if no one changes. And while I don't believe that no one changed from these, I might that the original person you guys saw a problem with perhaps didn't. I did my best to instill beliefs that were for the good of him and his tulpa though. That doesn't have to be done through arguing.. In fact, arguing is the least effective way to convince someone of something, in my experience.