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Tulpa theory


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Okay...I'm not the best of writers, so cut me some slack....

 

I'm gonna argue two things here:

1- You are a tulpa (your identity, not your physical body)

2- The only difference between you and a non-physical tulpa is sensory overload

 

For the first point, look at this thread:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/30/090330fa_fact_gawande

I got this link from the "Isolation" thread in the General Discussion Forums. It's basically an article on what happens to people during long-term solitary confinement. Without outside stimulus, the prisoners lose their minds. Here's one prisoner's experience:

 

After so many months in which his primary human contact had been an occasional phone call or brief conversations with an inmate down the tier, shouted through steel doors at the top of their lungs, he found himself unable to carry on a face-to-face conversation. He had trouble following both words and hand gestures and couldn’t generate them himself. When he realized this, he succumbed to a full-blown panic attack.]

 

I don't have much evidence, and I can't really interpret the fact that isolated people have brain trauma according to an EEG, but it looks to me like their identity begins to disappear once the interaction stops, much like how a tulpa fades if you ignore it. My theory: you are a tulpa that was constructed when the world gave you an identity and began treating you as such. This may be why you don't remember your early childhood. This could be why prisoners in isolation lose their ability to communicate.

 

Now, if this is true, we've got a bit of a problem: if we are tulpas, why don't we have perfect memory?

 

Look at this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savant_syndrome

 

Savants are people that appear every so often throughout history that have two characteristics: they have autism spectrum symptoms, and they have a "prodigious memory of a special type, a memory that he describes as "very deep, but exceedingly narrow" [good recall, unable to put it to good use]". Sound familiar?

 

I think that normal people are tulpas that are very focused on sensory input, and therefore unable to tap the subconscious like a non-physical tulpa can. Non-physical tulpas, on the other hand, don't have to deal with sensory input, and can tap the subconscious. Savants are somewhere in between: not quite in contact with the world, but able to access subconscious facilities.

 

This would also explain why non-physical tulpa probably can't possess the body (or so we think). In order to do so, you have to filter out all non-essential information. A tulpa able to do this would not have perfect memory recall.

 

Another thing: it's possible that having two tulpas in one body (one to deal with the outside world, one to access the subconscious) would allow for a feedback loop that would allow you to survive solitary confinement intact. It may even make you a stronger person in general, maybe break the cycle that is the weak-willed neckbeard.

 

Side-note: this fits in very well with the theory of bicameralism (wiki it)

 

Rambling: This might also be supported by what happens to feral children. They develop identities which are not interested in social communication, and, with these identities already in place, they find that they cannot learn to speak.

 

It's a weak theory, but I think it all sort of fits. Thoughts?

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Here's my go at modified variant of your theory:

A tulpa is just like your regular 'self' or 'personality', it's an emergent informational pattern with continuity in time, thus also with experience and own memory.

The 'self' that we are is what appears naturally when sensory input from the environment is being inputted. A tulpa is similar, but it mostly works with imagined input, but it's still training a neural network to be a "person", just like your self once learned this. The same network could very well house multiple competing patterns, but the more you have the noiser it would get, thus there are some hard limits to how many can be hosted in a single brain in parallel.

As for the memory abilities? Here is where it gets really tricky. I think that a tulpa's experiences are not very different from one's experiences in a lucid dream, there is control, but the entire experienced world is very malleable and changeable. It is possible to access one's memories and associations in lucid dreams directly, thus if you imagined accessing the memories through some item and gave it to your tulpa, it would be able to interact with your memories like you would be able to do in a lucid dream. Why can't we do this normally? We're too busy sensing the environment and we can't maintain stable and perfectly vivid daydreams without a lot of practice (practice which will happen during the tulpa creation process as well). If I'm right, you can also get your tulpa to share its memories with you. Having the tulpa control the external body or sensing may also be possible, but so far very few people have tried this, a few reporting success and one reporting failure.

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While I never really thought about it that way, yeah it could be described

like this. Meaning tulpae are not as illusory as it may seem. And now I have to wonder whether it would be possible to create another personality for your body.

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I would say yeah. That's probably how multiple personalities works, though a method of creation doesn't exist yet. I'd say it would be necessary to relinquish control of your body during creation somehow.

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Your supporting argument about childhood amnesia has a problem.

Children of young age have memories of early childhood and most of us in turn have at least some memories of being child of the age when we possessed memories of early childhood.

If the reason why we don't remember early childhood is because we as tulpae simply did not exist then how did we have memories of early childhood in latter stages of out life; stages in which we know we existed because we have memories of them?

Also deviation of tulpae tells us that tulpae draw a lot from our subconsciousness, but from which subconsciousness would have we as the original tulpae be able to draw from?

Regarding the prisoners and their identity remember that these people where not just cut off from human contact but where also well prisoners meaning they had very little or nothing to do which undoubtedly also effected their mind.

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Additional food for thought:

 

The relationship between eastern religion and tulpae (from which they first came). In many eastern religions, you discard the notion of a "self". A lot of practice in meditation (or equivalently, tulpaforcing) is paying less attention to the senses (like the first post's theory about sensory overload) to attain greater focus. So is an "enlightened" individual just someone who has discarded their natural tulpa/self?

 

Alternatively, what would happen if you did try to get rid of the natural tulpa?

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Your supporting argument about childhood amnesia has a problem.

Children of young age have memories of early childhood and most of us in turn have at least some memories of being child of the age when we possessed memories of early childhood.

If the reason why we don't remember early childhood is because we as tulpae simply did not exist then how did we have memories of early childhood in latter stages of out life; stages in which we know we existed because we have memories of them?

Also deviation of tulpae tells us that tulpae draw a lot from our subconsciousness, but from which subconsciousness would have we as the original tulpae be able to draw from?

Regarding the prisoners and their identity remember that these people where not just cut off from human contact but where also well prisoners meaning they had very little or nothing to do which undoubtedly also effected their mind.

Good points. I looked through the wiki article on childhood amnesia, and this in particular caught my eye:

 

"The development of a cognitive self is also thought to have a strong effect on encoding and storing early memories.[1] As toddlers grow, a developing sense of the self begins to emerge as they realize that they are a person with unique and defining characteristics and have individual thoughts and feelings separate from others. As they gain a sense of the self, they can begin to organize autobiographical experiences and retain memories of past events. This is also known as the development of a theory of mind which refers to a child’s acceptance that they have beliefs, knowledge, and thoughts that no one else has access to.[1]

The developmental explanation asserts that young children have a good concept of semantic information, but lack the retrieval processes necessary to link past and present episodic events to create an autobiographical self.[16] Young children do not seem to have a sense of a continuous self over time until they develop awareness for themselves as an individual human being."

 

Perhaps the children's identity, being a very new being, has good connection to the subconscious (which collected memories in absence of an identity) at first, but loses that connection as time passes and those memories as well.

 

This makes me wonder: will a non-physical tulpa lose its perfect memory recall as it grows into a full-fledged being? Or is that a consequence of sensory overload?

 

Idk about the prisoner thing.... I wonder what would happen to the sense of self if one was left alone, but free to do as they pleased?

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So according to all this, birth is not a creation of another human, but just of a biomechanical doll. And human being is created by further social interactions. And also it makes tulpa more like a child. I like this idea, it makes sense.

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Just thought of another problem.

Children start acting like a person (speaking, showing emotion, showing preferences, moving...etc.) in the years covered by childhood amnesia.

So how is that possible if a person isn't really there during those years?

The only answer I can think off is that there has to be some sort of really complex "program" that can emulate a personality quite well before it is there and once you have something like that creating a tulpa to "fill" the body is starting to sound kinda redundant.

 

Perhaps the children's identity, being a very new being, has good connection to the subconscious (which collected memories in absence of an identity) at first, but loses that connection as time passes and those memories as well.

 

Then why do adults lack that good connection to the subconscious?

It is not the consequence of sensory overload because children receive just as many information from their senses as adults.

 

Idk about the prisoner thing.... I wonder what would happen to the sense of self if one was left alone, but free to do as they pleased?

 

Cases of castaways should have an answer to this but I'm too lazy to search for it.

 

So according to all this, birth is not a creation of another human, but just of a biomechanical doll. And human being is created by further social interactions. And also it makes tulpa more like a child. I like this idea, it makes sense.

 

Hmm....I wonder what that makes people that have sex with tulpae xD

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Just thought of another problem.

Children start acting like a person (speaking, showing emotion, showing preferences, moving...etc.) in the years covered by childhood amnesia.

So how is that possible if a person isn't really there during those years?

The only answer I can think off is that there has to be some sort of really complex "program" that can emulate a personality quite well before it is there and once you have something like that creating a tulpa to "fill" the body is starting to sound kinda redundant.

 

Toddlers don't act like real persons. It takes a year or more until they can walk and eat, and more until some actual skills are learned.

A tulpa develops much faster than our own self because a lot of the procedural skills and memories are already available. This does not mean that a tulpa doesn't have to learn skills by itself, just that it can reuse some of our own memories.

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