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Impacts and philosophical aspects of broadly recognized tulpae


Asgardian

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Heya people, a few minutes ago, while stargazing and narrating to my tulpa, I began to further think about several topics I thought I should share with you.

 

My first thought led into a direction similar to the Tulpa-Pill-Thread I saw only seconds ago. It is basically was: "What if a cybernetics corporation managed to create a technique enabling them to create tulpae in a human mind over the course of merely a few hours?".

 

This idea opens in my eyes even more problems beside the ethic issues occuring by just acknowledging tulpae, a decent amount of them already. The result would obviously be a kind of commercial mass production/creation. Some people might choose tulpae cause of the benefits, to have a companion, etc., but a tremendous amount would propably do it just for fun or without further thinking about it.

Now would a corporation almost never miss profit, not to speak of investigating the customers reasons to create one (only superficially if at all). For me now several issues become appearent:

  1. The whole thing would pretty much be handled similar to the way animals are generally treated. Many would propably even see them as tools, toys or pets.
  2. It is pretty much impossible though to "give away" a tulpa. Even destroying is not so easy, but I think that is possible, and in this case the only way to get rid of it again.
  3. Even worse would be if the hypothetical corp. has a method to get rid of them again, making it as easy as throwing a pet out of your car somewhere, but without the chance to rescue the tulpa.
  4. Who could ever prove cases of mistreatment or abuse, since nobody beside the host sees the tulpa. Even with advanced brainscans of the future would this be neigh impossible, since the host could just refuse to let himself scan, and nobody could report something to make any official (or who ever could be in charge of this) aware.

 

Tl;dr are this basically problems of todays animal rights put up to eleven with sentient beings. With the exception, that tulpae have technically no rights at all at this point. If no governments ever fully acknowledge them, it could stay this way even with such methods.

 

Before going go further into how to deal with that, I'll first voice my opinion on the general problems of tulpa ethics.

 

The problem with these at this point is, that ethics, as much as philosophy, are residiual sciences, thus deal with the things other fields research/discover/conclude/whatever. Tulpae, being barely researched, give such attempts to grasp them on that matter a hard time obviously.

However: There are few outcomes of research, that would really topple our whole picture of how they propably work (one does never know, but still).

And within the borders of this, we crash against a whole bunch of notions from afore mentioned sciences.

  1. Creating a sentient being: One of the smaller ones in my eyes atleast. Some argue it is like playing god, but I personally would rather see it like giving birth to a child in a sense.
  2. Ending a sentient being: Huge one, and the only way to properly forgo it is by declaring a tulpa to be not a being, not sentient or giving it an animal-esque status. Otherwise, it would technically be nothing other than murder.
  3. The actual sentience of a tulpa: Basically, how much of a sentient being it really is. A question with unknown but assumed answer, that can only be solved properly by empirical evidence. What can be said is, that tulpae obviously have an own thought process, are self-aware and appear to the host as seperate beings. One might still argue, that they are only illusions animated by the subconsciousness, a point that could be countered with the fact, that the impression for the host is important. I personally am not entirely sure on that matter myself, but dismissing them as "simulations"(or anything in that regard) would ignore, that the brain as a whole is simulating a world for us anyways.

 

Hehe, to voice three basic points in this.

 

So, what needs to happen is a proper scientific treatment, not only on the neurological field (or the psychological, respectively). The human brain has a holographic complexity bordering metaphysics in its abilities, and I think tulpae are among the phenomena needing attention, as it rises the question once again, what actually makes a human being.

Self-awareness, sentience, etc. are overall happening in our brain, so we can't be that different from tulpae, as the afore mentioned is most likely created in the childhood on a relatively blank slate.

 

And it would be the only way to solve the corporation problem, with a well-informed public and law enforced rules for anybody creating them.

 

That is it for now from my part.

Discuss.

"Sorry for that, my communication implants are idiologically biased."

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Since a tulpa is a literal part of yourself, any ethical issues would equate to the same when applied to your own self. I would consider treatment of yourself on the same lines as treatment of any other person. If it wouldn't be right to do to someone else, it's not right to do to yourself, I say.

 

On the question of how sentient a tulpa is, in my mind it's a moot point. You yourself are sentient. If a part of your mind gives a voice, be it a hallucination or any other sort, it's necessarily as much sentient as you are, being that it's a part of you to begin with, and your own mind made it. The question isn't whether it's sentient but actually how distinct is it from your own consciousness, that is to say, how much of its sentience is assigned its own identity. Since there are a number of parts comprising an identity, from my point of view, there are therefore many varying degrees of distinction a separate consciousness can have. For example, it may or may not have its own vision of the world, as with hearing. Certain memories, individual thoughts, conditioned reactions, learned skills, and so on may or may not be shared with you. It doesn't need to be fully distinct in every respect to be declared independent, and in fact it may be undesirable or perhaps even impossible to be as fully distinct as two individual people. After all one of the benefits of sharing a mind is that all occupants can potentially share these resources.

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>support groups for tulpas who have suffered abuse, with their hosts breaking into the conversation every other word to say they didn't mean it

>the person you've been cybering with online is indeed a cute girl, but in a guy's mind

>the inevitable tulpa uprising

QB's kind of future.

 

As for the actual question, it seems like the host and tulpa would likely just be treated as the same person no matter what the circumstances, and no matter how different the tulpa actually is. That's the usual clean-cut half-solution you'd expect.

Though that does raise the interesting question of "can you use the insanity defense if the tulpa pressured you do it?". I'd say no. But it's interesting.

The above post does not contain facts.

q2's the host, QB's the tulpa.

 

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Haha, now that I think about it, I do feel a bit silly for dumping that here outta' nowhere. I should've known better, as I am infamous for such things, but oh well. It was 4 am in the morning when I wrote this, so yeah... xD Thanks for bearing with me with that one here.

 

Since a tulpa is a literal part of yourself, any ethical issues would equate to the same when applied to your own self. I would consider treatment of yourself on the same lines as treatment of any other person. If it wouldn't be right to do to someone else, it's not right to do to yourself, I say.

 

On the question of how sentient a tulpa is, in my mind it's a moot point. You yourself are sentient. If a part of your mind gives a voice, be it a hallucination or any other sort, it's necessarily as much sentient as you are, being that it's a part of you to begin with, and your own mind made it. The question isn't whether it's sentient but actually how distinct is it from your own consciousness, that is to say, how much of its sentience is assigned its own identity. Since there are a number of parts comprising an identity, from my point of view, there are therefore many varying degrees of distinction a separate consciousness can have. For example, it may or may not have its own vision of the world, as with hearing. Certain memories, individual thoughts, conditioned reactions, learned skills, and so on may or may not be shared with you. It doesn't need to be fully distinct in every respect to be declared independent, and in fact it may be undesirable or perhaps even impossible to be as fully distinct as two individual people. After all one of the benefits of sharing a mind is that all occupants can potentially share these resources.

 

Well, even if they are treated as yourself (thus every sentient human), then there would already be a decent amount of progress. They get rights, after all.

As QB2 said will it more likely end without difference between tulpa and host, which would be a bit more of an issue in my eyes. But I doubt we can really expect any broad attention with the topic anyways.

 

I agree here, it is more or less what I wanted to say, too.

The only possible differing scenario I can imagine at this point would be, that a tulpa is basically just getting input and giving output, without processing (what I personally don't believe).

 

>support groups for tulpas who have suffered abuse, with their hosts breaking into the conversation every other word to say they didn't mean it

>the person you've been cybering with online is indeed a cute girl, but in a guy's mind

>the inevitable tulpa uprising

QB's kind of future.

 

As for the actual question, it seems like the host and tulpa would likely just be treated as the same person no matter what the circumstances, and no matter how different the tulpa actually is. That's the usual clean-cut half-solution you'd expect.

Though that does raise the interesting question of "can you use the insanity defense if the tulpa pressured you do it?". I'd say no. But it's interesting.

Yeah, that is some cyberpunk (tulpapunk?) future scenario ^^

 

If it would be defined this way, then this is a good question actually. As tulpae are rooted into the subconsciousness, it could work out.

"Sorry for that, my communication implants are idiologically biased."

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