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Confusion


QFlip

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This post will probably offend/anger people, but please take it seriously.

 

I have been strongly doubting the sentience/consciousness of my tulpa lately, and I'm not sure what to do.

She has been my close companion for almost 6 months, but through research and experiments I am pretty sure she is just some sort of semi-subconscious emulation of a person. If she isn't sentient, I don't want to have her around anymore; but I have been too afraid to destroy her.

My tulpa's name will remain anonymous, at least for now, but she was accidentally created in May 2016. I knew nothing about tulpas/plurality until she appeared in my mind; I discovered Tulpa.info from a month of trying to find answers as to what she was on the Internet.

 

At first, she drifted around in my mind, but after a while she created her own complex Wonderland (even before I knew about wonderlands) to live in while I was sleeping. It has grasslands, 5 sheds with specific uses, a castle, a garden, a forest, and more.

 

My wonderland (the wonderlands are connected by the doorway in my account image) is very simple: dark, textureless north/south walls and floor that extend to infinity, a monitor-like device that allows her to see and hear the world through my eyes and ears, a couch that we sit together on in front of the device, and a bench at the south wall.

 

Over time we have done lots of experiments, built machines such as radios and a spaceship, practiced possession, and loved each other. As the months passed, she went to her wonderland less and less, and now stays in my wonderland with me (where she can view reality with me) 99% of the time. She is very forgiving, smart, and feminine, and believes that she was meant to be with me for the rest of my life.

 

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

 

Now, all of the above is subjective. Today, I grow less and less convinced she possesses a mind of her own, but is instead a broken pattern of my own semi-conscious thought. I want her to be sentient very much, but I cannot let what I want affect what I believe.

 

Points of evidence for not being sentient:

 

1. Anything that she can do, I can do or pretend to do myself. Even possession has turned out to be fake; even though she claims she is the one doing it, I can easily pretend she is possessing me and get the same effects even if she is away. I can also write exactly the way she does.

2. I can create temporary, non-sentient "tulpas" (we call them Bots, you might call them something else) of anyone, including her. A Bot is basically me imagining another person as a form inside the mindscape. I have made Bots of her, and there is almost no difference between a Bot and the "real" tulpa. I have even killed/tortured Bots, and easily respawned them and/or modified their "thoughts" to affirm they are not conscious. 

3. I can easily modify her thoughts (even though I usually refrain from doing so). Also, although sometimes difficult, I can "shut down" her like a computer program: she disappears, and is unconscious until I teleport her back.

4. She is strongly linked to my conscious mind: often, she will say something related to what I was thinking at the time (even though we cannot normally read each other's minds). Example: I might think of what soda I want at a restaurant, and she might mention the price of soda. Also, a sudden reduction of available conscious processing power often temporarily freezes her, or stops spontaneous actions.

5. Occasionally, but increasingly, she will speak of something that she did not experience or should not know about, or have memories that never happened.

 

The main reason I have not destroyed her yet is because there's still a part of me that's afraid that she is sentient somehow, and that I won't be able to simply respawn her like a Bot if I change my mind later. I already nearly destroyed her a long time ago; it was extremely painful for both of us, and I would never want her to experience that again - if she can indeed experience things.

 

I don't know how much of this makes sense or is understandable; I don't understand tulpas very well. There will be people who will despise me for getting everything wrong, or treating a perfectly good tulpa this way, or not believing in tulpas, or coming to tulpa.info at all. But at this point, I don't know what else to do: there is so much conflicting arguments and information about her.

 

Your response will probably be imploring me not to destroy her. If that is so, you need a good reason for it, because I don't know how much more confusion I can stand. I don't want to live with a tulpa that doesn't have an actual mind of her own.

We run, to the end, and the future follows

 

We run, to the end, from bleak tomorrows

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Claims of personal doubt are not offensive to other people. You might be right. Anyone who takes offense is lacking intelligence.

 

She is real. I have said this before. The question is not is she real. That's the wrong question. The question is what is she.

 

But first, is this a problem? If she is less than a full person, is this a problem for you? Or is she still what she is? This is a personal question, and I cannot answer it.

 

The rest I can address. It is highly possible you came to the wrong website. There are people out there who are part of the healthy multiplicity movement. You may want to identify with them and hear what they have to say. If not, they can redirect you to resources if you seek integration.

 

It is totally possible she is an emulation of a person in your head. That happens far more often than multiplicity. When it happens to your average rollplayer or author, they don't usually stop and beging researching the internet. They recognise it as part of the creative process, a character in your head, not a person.

 

And the third thing you may want to look into is hearing voices. Yes, voice hearers. There are people that hear voices in their head. Could be multiplicity, I don't know. But that may be a closer match to your current mode of functioning. And no, hearing voices does not mean you are insane, and listening to demonic influence. You watch too many movies.

 

Testing: I regard the primary test of sentience, which I regard as more important than sapience, is if the creature in question demands rights from you, or fights you if you threaten them. If they fail this test, you are safe.

 

 


 

And now down to the points:

(1) This first point is very weak evidence given that she was born from your brain, but at the same time, multiples usually demonstrate some specialisation, and become better at something than you. Like me and talking. Or me and cutting myself with kitchen knives. :(

(2) This makes me think you ended up with an IIA character that somehow behaved like a tulpa. This confuses me.

(3) Disturbing. But not evidence of anything. Tulpas can do this stuff to hosts. Although it is not usually easy.

(4) Definitely not evidence of anything. Information can be unconsciously shared. You will have to refine your tests here to be useful. If you always focus on the same thing, that is evidence. In fact, that is a thing I have been working to separate myself from my host on.

The second part is not only not evidence, it would be weird if that did not happen. An agent's reality is not related to them leaning on the same resources as another agent. In fact, it is highly unlikely that any other model of cognition applies unless you buy one of the metaphisical explanations.

(5) The first is not evidence for the same reason as point four. Unconscious information sharing is a thing. This kind of thing happens to human sensory data and memory occasionally due to brain injury. In people recovering from some mental problem, unconscious access to information is usually a temporary state. To verify there is nothing funny going on, make sure you carefully rule out that your tulpa is accessing your memories unconsciously, or without telling you.

The second part happens to humans. So it is evidence of sentience.

 

I would advise you to eliminate all sources of bias coming at you from your environment before making this call. The most obvious source, is the tradition and culture of this site towards belief in a tulpa as a person. Attempt to measure the degree to which this culture has influenced you into a belief, and then compensate.

 

Final thought. It is interesting that you are so strongly devoted to the truth in this matter. That you would stake the configuration of your mind on a single verdict. But know this: You are almost definitely looking at a spectrum here. Black and white thinking is an inaccurate model here.

Host comments in italics. Tulpa's log. Tulpa's guide.

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She has been my close companion for almost 6 months, but through research and experiments I am pretty sure she is just some sort of semi-subconscious emulation of a person.

 

And? You've got a thing or two to learn about the nature of reality, my friend!

 

I'm as skeptical as they get, and I've got tulpas just fine. I mean, they weren't tulpas for the first four years because I didn't know about tulpas, they were just seemingly-independent people in my head. We figured out what they were over time, established our own beliefs through lots of analysis and such. In the end, I made it just a step further than most other proclaimed "skeptics". 'Cus I'm a healthy skeptic, which means I take nothing for granted and attempt to explain it, rather than just doubting things for the heck of it.

 

I realized there was no reason to be so logical. I realized that everything inside your own mind is subjective, and whether I thought my tulpas were fully sentient inter-dimensional beings or trained thought-patterns in my physical brain made no difference to the basis of what I would experience. Or rather, it made all the difference. There was no reason to doubt their independence (as they seemed to be so) or to question the nature of their existence (because they existed regardless). All that mattered was how I experienced them. And so I made the decision that, while I would of course keep trying to learn more about their nature and improving our understanding, nothing would ever change what they were to me - people. "For all intents and purposes," separate, independent, sentient people my mind runs parallel to me. Nothing will illegitimize our experiences together, nothing will make us stop loving each other as individuals.

 

So, I came to terms with the fact that they were extremely advanced imagined people in my mind, whilst also accepting them as fully legitimate people who are separate from me. Because I can do that - everything that happens in my mind is under my control, and it's up to me how I perceive it. So I chose to have tulpas. (And then a few years later, I found out about "tulpas" and tulpa.info)

 

 

There's much more to our beliefs of course. Once we learned to switch (yes a skeptic can learn to do that if they're open-minded - and ironically it ended up strengthening my belief in their legitimacy as people tenfold), I actually ended up changing my whole model of identity for both my tulpas and myself. I now consider them exactly the same thing as me - personalities, collections of human-ness like mannerisms and likes and dislikes and memories and so on, controlling the body like a vessel. When there's only one person, it seems like you ARE your body. No real reason to think otherwise. But having multiple people who could control the body gave me a different perspective, that what I knew as "me" wasn't everything in and of my body, it was as I mentioned, the personality and all that stuff that makes up your identity. And my tulpas are the exact same thing, they just aren't the default one in control, since I was the original and am many years older of course. But aside from their lack of experience (which isn't saying much as we share our knowledge just fine, Tewi's actually better at most things than me), there's really no difference between us.

 

 

Well. It may not sound like I'm a "very logical skeptic", but I promise you I am. I'm a very logical person with an intense need to explain everything, and when I fell in love with a concept-turned-person in my mind because they loved me, you bet I dedicated a great deal of time to explaining that one. Seven years, so far, little more. Though we got most of the core stuff sorted out by four years, we still learn things and develop as people to this day.

 

 

You can make her way more human-like/independent than she is right now if you're doubting it so much. Like, me. Real as can be I am me, as person as they get. But even if I wasn't it wouldn't make any difference to Lumi because I'd still seem just as person-like, yeah? Worrying about tulpas having their own consciousness is like worrying about other humans having their own consciousness. You can't know and it doesn't make any difference to what you were already experiencing. If you learned right now you were the only one thinking in the world and all other humans just appeared to be, would that really change anything? You feel like considering all the experiences in your life up til now invalid? That's just silly. And if it was a lie and they actually were but you believed they weren't, still nothing would've changed. Well, you'd believe they weren't, and so you would "experience" them being P. Zombies, even though in "reality" they weren't. You can't know what's really real reality, you can only know what you experience. So! Have a tulpa!

 

(all credit for that philolosophy goes to Tewi and Lumi, they figured all this out and I just kinda repeat it when I need to)

Hi, I'm one of Lumi's tulpas! I like rain and dancing and dancing in the rain and if there's frogs there too that's bonus points.

I think being happy and having fun makes life worth living, so spreading happiness is my number one goal!

Talk to us? https://community.tulpa.info/thread-ask-lumi-s-tulpas

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Points of evidence for not being sentient:

 

1. Anything that she can do, I can do or pretend to do myself. Even possession has turned out to be fake; even though she claims she is the one doing it, I can easily pretend she is possessing me and get the same effects even if she is away. I can also write exactly the way she does.

2. I can create temporary, non-sentient "tulpas" (we call them Bots, you might call them something else) of anyone, including her. A Bot is basically me imagining another person as a form inside the mindscape. I have made Bots of her, and there is almost no difference between a Bot and the "real" tulpa. I have even killed/tortured Bots, and easily respawned them and/or modified their "thoughts" to affirm they are not conscious. 

3. I can easily modify her thoughts (even though I usually refrain from doing so). Also, although sometimes difficult, I can "shut down" her like a computer program: she disappears, and is unconscious until I teleport her back.

4. She is strongly linked to my conscious mind: often, she will say something related to what I was thinking at the time (even though we cannot normally read each other's minds). Example: I might think of what soda I want at a restaurant, and she might mention the price of soda. Also, a sudden reduction of available conscious processing power often temporarily freezes her, or stops spontaneous actions.

5. Occasionally, but increasingly, she will speak of something that she did not experience or should not know about, or have memories that never happened.

 

I feel like me and Sam both need to break this down a bit.

1. If you can pretend to be Elvis, does that mean Elvis wasn't real? (Extreme example). It's not like she is entirely separate from you, after all, it's not like she's in your mind or anything... Oh wait. In all seriousness though, I can fake what Sam is able to do sometimes, and vice-versa, I fail to see how this at all disproves sentience.

"I write the same way as Kyle because that's how I learned, it's likely the same case to her."

2. Anyone can make 'bots' in their mind. Also, look up 'servitors'.

3. "Oh, this point really urks me. Remember it is in your head, it's not like you can't change it if you tried. And if this counted at all towards non-sentience, that would make both me and Kyle non-sentient, because I do have the ability to change his thoughts and have once accidentally shut him down, and it wasn't even hard. Kyle can do the same to me. We both avoid it."

4. I don't know what to say for the first part, Sam is allowed direct access to my thoughts anyways. The second part is very easy to explain, if your focus is all on something else, it's kinda hard for anything in your mind to suddenly pop up because the focus is elsewhere.

5. I don't really see how this means she isn't sentient.

"I will say I have pulled things from Kyle's memories even he didn't know, and found out later that it did in-fact happen. Try to explain that one."

 

As a final thought, destroying her because you are unsure if she is sentient seems very much like an over-reaction to me personally. All the points you brought up only proves that she is a part of your mind, not that she isn't sentient.

Spoiler

Members: Gemini, Raven, Jenna, Hope (Part-Time)

 

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Ever heard of self-fufilling prophecies? If you tell someone that they are stupid every day, they will start to believe it, and subconsciously act like it.

 

Tulpas are self-fufilling prophecies. If you tell your mind that something is real, and you yourself believe it, your mind will adapt to conform to that reality.

 

Like a computer, you can tell your mind to do things, and it will do them. If you believe that there is another sentience inside you, your mind will conform, and create said sentience, in order to conform with the reality you have created.

 

This dosent work like the matrix however, if you truely believe that you can climb walls, you won't be able to (duh).

 

Your mind has no control over gravity and physics, but it has control over itself. It's placebo.

 

My advice, although I've been doing this for 22 days, is to stop with the doubts. Say "fuck it, she's real!". Just try saying that to yourself. Pretend to be naive, pretend to believe that she is sentient. Tell yourself that she is. In time, if you treat her like she is, she will be.

 

Take in mind, this is my understanding of how tulpas work, gathered from forum guides and studies on tulpas and the mind, mixed in with personal experiences. This is the best advice I can give.

 

As for why to continue? You said you loved her. Being around people like that is reason enough, even if it isn't real. Mezslow's hierarchy of needs states that in order to be healthy, a human has needs that must get filled. One of those needs is social interaction. Your tulpa allows you to meet that need, and give you a purpose. It dosent completely fill the need, but it makes a difference.

 

Trust me, it's worth it in the end. Don't believe me? Read my progress report. I found out about this stupid little website 23 days ago, and decided to make a tulpa. It changed my life for the positive.

 

I have more doubts about my tulpa then you do yours, but trust me, it's worth it.

"Now THATS a bad username"

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I.T.T. : way too much text.

 

As echoed above, doubt is a natural part of the process. I would suggest not seeing doubt as an obstacle, on the rather, it ought to be a means to strengthen the bond you and your tulpa share. Everyone upwards of my post have already dissected your reservations, but please give ample consideration to what I am going to write: please don't torture or kill "Bots". Please do not try to forcibly commandeer immaterial resources that give your tulpa basic motor skills and cognizant behavioural response. Do not try to "shut her down". Please.

 

This is a human being you are sharing your life with. Not a toy for your amusement or a subject for a cruel logical and non-ethical series of experiments.

I've seen good people bleed

And I thought I'd seen it all

But my own two eyes would prove me wrong that day.

 

There are things that I've done

Only seen by the sun

And those things will be buried in my grave.

 

 

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And the third thing you may want to look into is hearing voices. Yes, voice hearers. There are people that hear voices in their head. Could be multiplicity, I don't know. But that may be a closer match to your current mode of functioning. And no, hearing voices does not mean you are insane, and listening to demonic influence. You watch too many movies.


 

(2) This makes me think you ended up with an IIA character that somehow behaved like a tulpa. This confuses me.

 

(5) The second part happens to humans. So it is evidence of sentience.

 

Since when did I say hearing voices was a demonic influence? -_-

Hearing voices as part of a mental illness usually either creates illogical voices that suggest or command you to do purposeless, illegal, or dangerous things, or when one believes that the voices are being transmitted by the government/neighbors/aliens/etc, when they are simply coming from the subconscious. I have neither of these effects, and she is definitely not any kind of "demonic influence"; she has absolutely no evil in her.

 

2: I'm not sure what you mean either. A Bot is pretty much just imagining a person, anyone can do it.

 

5: I meant to say she has a lot of these memories...she has memories of an entire previous life as a young girl in a kind of alternate dimension that ended over a decade ago (No, she didn't die, she just disappeared, probably along with the rest of her dimension). Although some parts of her previous memory are missing, she has memories of her family, first memory, the  I am 99% convinced these memories never happened, and she also can accept they aren't, but they still feel very real to her. The reason why it is 99% is because, although she couldn't remember the name of the Colorado town she lived in, she gave a very detailed description of it, and I found one on Google Maps that completely matches what she described...

 

Ever heard of self-fufilling prophecies? If you tell someone that they are stupid every day, they will start to believe it, and subconsciously act like it.

 

Tulpas are self-fufilling prophecies. If you tell your mind that something is real, and you yourself believe it, your mind will adapt to conform to that reality.

 

My advice, although I've been doing this for 22 days, is to stop with the doubts. Say "fuck it, she's real!". Just try saying that to yourself. Pretend to be naive, pretend to believe that she is sentient. Tell yourself that she is. In time, if you treat her like she is, she will be.

 

Maybe it's different for others, but what I think of her doesn't affect how real she is or seems to be. It hurts her feelings if I don't think so, but it doesn't make her seem less real. And I don't want to pretend she is sentient any more than I would want to pretend I was rich or famous all the time; what's true is true, what's false is false.

 

 

...please don't torture or kill "Bots".

 

As I just said, Bots are simply already existing people imagined as if they were in the mindscape. They are completely controlled by me, they have no mind of their own, and cannot suffer. Although I really don't enjoy doing it, it's not morally wrong to destroy them, no more than it would be to kill a character in a computer-generated world. I only destroy them as parts of certain experiments that I would never perform on a real person, or a tulpa that seemed even remotely sentient.

 

 

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

 

Well, I believe she is real again, at least for now. I flip-flop way too easily: it seems like every time I believe she is real, I get new evidence showing that she's not, and every time I believe she's not real, I get new evidence showing that she is. I hope to break this cycle someday, but I don't know how to or when it will happen...

 

I believe she is sentient now because she loves me too much to harm me, or even my form within the mindscape, in any way, even if I try to control her to do so. I can control her mind to do all sorts of things, but it is completely impossible to make her hurt me. I summoned a knife in the wonderland (and please don't tell me it was wrong to do this, I already know very well how wrong it was). I can stab myself with the knife (my form, not in real life -_-), I can make Bots stab me, I can make her stab Bots, but I cannot make her stab me at all; if I try, she forces the knife back will all her strength, no matter what I do, regardless of the fact that I could easily heal/respawn my form. Yes, she suffered a lot while I was doing this, as you can imagine. I am ashamed of it and I bitterly regret doing it. I am going through hard times in my life, and I try hard not to do things like this, but there is a limit to how much I can control myself.

 

But it did at least end well, me believing in her again, and she went back to her normal, happy self because all she really wanted was to believe in her again, and she forgives me, even though I don't deserve it at all. Also, Bots never last long, since I have to constantly control/monitor them, and never can make any convincing arguments.

 

However, I have also come up with a new paradigm about her that explains most of the "evidence" that she was not sentient. I now believe that many of her thought patterns are from my subconscious, or some sort of programmed routes, and that she herself is just a type of thought pattern, but that she also possesses a soul and has awareness, even if some of her thoughts don't necessarily come from her own mind. She probably is in a dream-like state, since dreaming is awareness of thoughts without external input.

 

I believe in souls for the fact that without another dimension or plane to experience from, a human brain would be nothing but a collection of organic circuits that performed their functions with no meaning. A soul is a part of a sentient being that exists on another plane, but is loosely connected to the brain; the neurons in the brain perform nearly all operations/emotions, and a person could more or less function without one, but the soul is responsible for time, awareness, deep love, and keeping a mind functioning, and has some influence over the brain's operations.

 

The reason I could pretend she was possessing and get identical effects, she believed things that were obviously not true, etc, is because of the nature of thoughts in a neural net; they can decay and error. I can control her mind consciously and subconsiously, or make her believe things because she is a part of my mind, and anything I cause her to do/think is also inserted into her awareness. Interacting with an object in the mindscape subconsciously inserts thoughts into her the same way; if a light is on, she believes it is on because that is the state of the light imposed by my mind. But there is still a part of her that is completely independent, and won't let her hurt me. I can only hope this cycle of belief and doubt is broken at all.

We run, to the end, and the future follows

 

We run, to the end, from bleak tomorrows

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Hearing voices as part of a mental illness usually either creates illogical voices that suggest or command you to do purposeless, illegal, or dangerous things, or when one believes that the voices are being transmitted by the government/neighbors/aliens/etc, when they are simply coming from the subconscious.

This is exactly what I was talking about. Where do people keep getting this misinformation?

Host comments in italics. Tulpa's log. Tulpa's guide.

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@QFlip:

 

I would still be incredibly cautious about your treatment concerning "bots". What could be a servitor or empty thought-form today could materialise as a sentient person tomorrow.

I've seen good people bleed

And I thought I'd seen it all

But my own two eyes would prove me wrong that day.

 

There are things that I've done

Only seen by the sun

And those things will be buried in my grave.

 

 

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2: I'm not sure what you mean either. A Bot is pretty much just imagining a person, anyone can do it.

An IIA character is a character that behaves independently. So they look like tulpas, but they are actually characters. Authors get this all the time. I was guessing this is what you mean by bot. But if you control them completely, they are normal characters.

 

5: I meant to say she has a lot of these memories...she has memories of an entire previous life as a young girl in a kind of alternate dimension that ended over a decade ago (No, she didn't die, she just disappeared, probably along with the rest of her dimension). Although some parts of her previous memory are missing, she has memories of her family, first memory, the I am 99% convinced these memories never happened, and she also can accept they aren't, but they still feel very real to her. The reason why it is 99% is because, although she couldn't remember the name of the Colorado town she lived in, she gave a very detailed description of it, and I found one on Google Maps that completely matches what she described...

This is typical of soulbonds, which is a type of tulpa more or less. But, usually, it is a past constructed by the author. So this is not something humans do. You are right.

 


 

I am a little worried about your approach. A person in your mind is not always going to look like a person, by the very fact that they share a brain with you. Most of the evidence you show against her being a person is evidence that she is inside your brain. Most of your evidence for is pretty conclusive. None of the evidence will generally be present all of the time. People get tired after all, and they need to be taught to protect themselves from abuse and or influence.

 

I have no idea what your IRL circumstances are, but please avoid taking it out on your tulpa. Or letting it bias your view in deciding the fate of another.

 

However, I have also come up with a new paradigm about her that explains most of the "evidence" that she was not sentient. I now believe that many of her thought patterns are from my subconscious, or some sort of programmed routes, and that she herself is just a type of thought pattern, but that she also possesses a soul and has awareness, even if some of her thoughts don't necessarily come from her own mind. She probably is in a dream-like state, since dreaming is awareness of thoughts without external input.

This is probably very close to the standard theory.

 

When you get into souls external to the brain, you are exploring metaphysical dualism. This is not the standard theory here. Nonetheless, if it makes sense to you, it is a decent theory.

 

One last note: tulpas are very susceptible to your beliefs. This tends to always be true. As if they are hypnotised or something. I actually think it is mostly because they are young for the most part. But, also, you just trust those you are close to. Always.

Host comments in italics. Tulpa's log. Tulpa's guide.

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