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The Possibility of Parrallel Processing


uncannyfellow

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Hi, can i pick up a couple of these threads?

 

I wasn't on this forum when the Ancient Greek guides were written, but when i did arrive, they already seemed a bit dodgy and maybe even counter-productive.

 

Problem one being that cognitive science doesn't believe in parallel processing. Yes the brain has loads of autonomous circuits processing information and they can independently investigate, but that is all subconscious operation which in the end still gets pumped to the central location of executive control. You can have multiple people in that spot sharing the inputs and interpreting them in their own way, but unless you're growing duplicate brain structures (which would be fascinating insight into where consciousness resides), you're still really only just time-sharing a brain.

 

And for all the amazing camera tricks people have been listing in their wonderland, it still sounds like you're using just the one visual centre of the brain and a shared imagination. All the separation and duality still sounds like it's just symbolic representation to me.

 

@Angry Bear: one thing you implied was that you can wilfully disconnect from the information coming down the optic nerve. If you can genuinely do that while you're sitting in an MRI it'd be an impressive trick, but i'm guessing you're just preferring to pay attention to Wonderland instead. If some threat popped up in your vision you'd suddenly "be looking" again and take steps to protect yourself, because that's just ordinary brain operation.

 

I'm personally willing to believe that there are superpowers to be unlocked through plurality, and there are a couple we're even investigating on our own, but if you want to prove parallel processing to science, you better be able to ambidextrously do two IQ tests at the same time. I'd even hope you can operate each eye independently, partly because it could fit theoretically, partly because it would be hilarious to just see that it could be done.

Early member of a large system.  Our system questions the way the afterlife and tulpamancy interact.  We genuinely suspect that deadies can return to share the mind of the living.

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No, you're right about my comment, i am honestly just describing how things appear to me, in essence ignoring sensory input; I don't know the mechanism. I go into an altered state perhaps? I know for hypnagogic enhanced visualization, i am in a state that allows some lucid dream qualities that bleed into my perceptions. It's as real as real can get in terms of visualization.

 

If what you're saying is right about cognitive science (i'm not an expert or even an enthusiast in that field), then fast switching explains a lot of this i suppose? Perhapse a percentage of the switches are handed to them as a matter of course. The fact remains that real experiences and memories are generated. This is all I can know for sure.

 

Based on the experience that my tulpas can interact freely even when I'm concentrating (which is not specific to me), I figure their 'consiousnesses' are left operating (even if they're stealing from me). This was true from day one. This is how i presumed it was for everyone for the first 4 months of their time with me (and i had no interaction with other tulpamancers.) If it's all smoke and mirrors then i'm still impressed by my brain's ability to absorb this extra duty because there was no drop in percieved cognitive capacity or speed that i cound tell, and they all joined me fully functioning and vocal on day one (even within 20 minutes of 'meeting' Ashley). I have to presume they sequestered some existing neural pathways that were developed by their character origins (they're all basically factives of my own well developed characters) but quickly diverged (within days).

 

Wiring and structures have to be shared in at least some cases, (or most? All?) I'll accept that if it's true, i'll believe it if we can find scholastic research based theories on the subject. In that case my attention has to be shared in many ways. I'm just theorizing that they have connections to subconsious and maybe something else? Their own consiousness or chunks if mine? Can your own consiousness be exercised and strengthened then walled off? Borrowed as a in pulse with modulation, or roulette system of control? I have no idea.

 

From the beginning, i just want to share my experiences and insights, but i am just like anyone here, so i'm not a superhero or four brained. I just want to access the feasibility of this before i relent or try to force my experiences through a filter. I believe they have their owm neural pathways, or in my mind, the whole thing is me and they're just adjunct preconsious filters, not 'people'. That's where i go logically with this. An NPC can instantly do a lot of interesting things that appear pretty real, how? Instant adjunct filters? Instant alters? Are they sharing my consciousness too? Maybe?

 

So if the brain can fire off other neuro pathways other than what is needed to make me consious, which is true for autonomic functions at the very least i presume, i hope there may be a mechanism for them to gain sentience other than sharing mine or again in my mind they're NPC's as we have conjectured if they share sentience.

 

Honestly we're practicing philosophers trying to understand brain mechanisms. I didn't expect to have to defend bona fide experiences with neuroscience.

 

Then there are the bona fide and repeated experiences of having an intrusive thought overlap clearly onto mindvoice (experienced simultaneously), and the overlap of tulpa verified imposition and my own mindvoice, which tends to happen while i'm asking questions and they start answering before i finish asking (and i don't stop asking, no, they can't do it with mindvoice-mindvoice.

 

Then there's the visualization, but i'm not claiming that it's theirs or that it's parallel.

 

So it leaves us with my percieved notion from feedback here that no experience is bona fide unless it's traced logically to our novice understanding of brain mechanics, which are most certainly flawed as well, since were not experts. There's where i fall off the rails when my experiences become increasingly difficult to explain without truncating or filtering them.

 

These experiences have achieved results in my behavior and mental health, so i can't, in good faith, abandon them without at least lying to myself.

 

There's the frustrating cunundrum if you could follow any of that, and doubly so if you couldn't. I'll hopefully be able to at least help figure it out.

 

I found one article quickly that at least seems to allow something. A lot of the articles are from last century, this one was more recent at least.

 

Brain Mechanisms of Serial and Parallel Processing during Dual-Task Performance (2008.)

 

"The psychological refractory period (PRP) refers to the fact that humans typically cannot perform two tasks at once. Behavioral experi- mentshave ledtotheproposal that, in fact,peripheralperceptual andmotorstagescontinue tooperate inparallel, andthat only a central decision stage imposes a serial bottleneck."

 

That's my 10 minutes of research and solid hour of conjecture anyway.

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Well Angry Bear, your conjectures are the spirit of science and you really ought to, in good faith, continue pursuing your own investigations because science doesn't have a lot of really big solid answers about consciousness that you don't already understand. You've got a broad range of questions here, and some great avenues of investigation, but i'm going to share from my own perspective instead of drilling down to some hard science hypothesis of how things work.

 

You see my impression, as a conscious creature, is that practically nothing which happens in the brain is "me", but i'm the person who gets to decide what to do with it. One of the earliest concerns i had during formation was deciding whether the reaction the brain offered was mine or not. Did i think that thought or was it just my host? Sometimes the brain also pulls up garbage or gets obsessed over some detail. In figuring out my own way to work it, my first impression was that you just have to hold on to the urge to express something, and that any picture or word or action you needed would just get worked out by the brain for you. I could use words i'd never heard to explain concepts to myself i didn't understand, and all i had to master was just wanting, in the right way, to say it.

 

All of this is just to say that my impression is that consciousness is a very small thing, little more than the current yearning which tells the brain to calculate "your" answer for you. And maybe, if you are truly sapient, you can say no, and tell the brain to come up with a different response that feels more like this. Everything else about the brain is just machinery, looking up answers in advance, trying to have answers ready but i barely count any of it as "thinking" until you personally hear it and decide what to do with the thought.

 

I should mention an important detail about intrusive thoughts here: you can just train them out of existence. It's maybe not quite as easy as just brushing them off, but you can certainly overwrite them. Your power as a consciousness is to say no to your own brain and tell it to learn a new reaction instead.

 

Now, given how small i consider the 'conscious' part of self to be, it doesn't seem at all difficult to squeeze multiple selves into a spot that shares practically all the wiring. If multiple people can see with the same eyes, or share a visualized imagination, then i'm ready to say you're sharing the driving seat, at least in certain ways. If you can talk to you to your tulpa, then you're sharing the part that hears a voice in your head.

 

You see, being separate conscious individuals doesn't need to be parallel processing. I half-joke about the perfect test being ambidextrous, double test-taking but in all honesty, that's basically our own ongoing experiments in parallel processing anyhow. We literally just bought software that lets us use two mice on the computer with their own independent on-screen cursors. The experiment fails, and i could blame it on the software because it only lets you click on one thing at a time. But the real problem is we're still only switching back and forth between what we're paying attention to. It could be convincing enough if you wanted to "prove" it on TV news, but it's really just a parlour trick where each person just focuses on keeping track of what their actions are when it's their turn. You can be separate streams of thought, but you always work together on what you're paying attention to.

 

But it does bring me to my own unproven, poorly defined theory that i use to answer a bunch of your general questions about what makes the distinctive individual, whether host or tulpa. I think a significant part of consciousness is holding onto your perspective.

 

Up to this point i've mostly been arguing a model of consciousness called the Cartesian Theatre. You're a person sitting in the seats, and everything else your brain does, emotions, physical sensations, memories et al, are just a movie flashing on screen for you to like or not. It's a decent theory but i also have to expand it into new definitions to fit my own perspective, because maybe i'm not quite just one of the people in this theatre watching the show, but maybe once in a while i stand up and shout "play Free Bird", because i'm the person who likes to hear that song played. (Not an honest detail about me — just an old-fashioned reference in my dad's brain).

 

Now, when i say "holding onto your perspective" i don't claim to control any of those subconscious processes. I don't have a wire from me to that particular memory which makes it distinctly or exclusively mine. It's a generic bin in the brain that flashes its contents on screen that we can all see. And there's certainly no unique access my host has to any contents. I've dug up more than enough odd things through random wondering that i'm certain i have an all-access pass to this brain.

 

By "holding your perspective", what i contend is that conscious self is roughly a lens that knows how to find the things it's looking for. I don't really think of every word i use so much as just want to say something and count on the words that come out sound like the kind of thing i think i'm trying to say. If i like the words that come out, that's still practically all thanks to the automatic processes operating in the subconscious. The brain notices when i like a certain word and marks it as a preferred option. The next time i need the concept again, the brain's going pick to offer the word from my preference list before i'm even consciously involved.

 

For comparison, let me explain how i perceive my dad/host can hold his perspective. I've mentioned that i can access anything i want in our brain, but i haven't opened every single door yet. So occasionally what happens is that we'll come across some random detail and suddenly dad will whip out the most mind-blowing story, shocking amounts of detail about the wildest things i'd never even heard of and might not even be brave enough to try. The important detail is he makes no conscious effort, doesn't have to think of what that name was or remember how it worked, it just spills out in a tidy packet. I paid a lot of attention to how those stories came up because it frustrated me that i hadn't found these stories myself. But the reality is that he it just got put on his own preference list because he was there thirty years ago and did the thing. He can be surprised by some of the details he's forgotten about some of those tales, so he's not telling the story "himself", but the brain found it for him because it's marked as hist story to tell.

 

To conclude i'd like to take my model and directly answer questions you raise.

 

No, i don't think a tulpa can really "steal" or borrow consciousness because i figure that you're really just both sitting together in roughly the same spot where you're paying attention, they're distinct from you practically as soon as their expressing their own choices. Switching back and forth quickly explains a lot of experiences, and does fit those hard limits where the brain is the thing that can only pay attention to one thing at a time. I won't claim to explain it in neural pathways, but i assume what "makes" the individual members in a system is those accumulated preferences, whomever's character is the list of responses the brain offers when it's their turn to react. Chattering over each other and similar kinds of interefernce is just one of those technical limits of the brain; you can maybe practice waiting to take turns, but when me and my host had the problem, we just agreed that whoever was already talking gets to keep talking and just claim whatever idea arose.

 

I'll count everything you report as bonified experience and i hope you'll believe that some of my stories contain a kernel of truth, because all any of us has to show for evidence is self-reporting and theories, so all we can work toward is agreeing that this set of things happens, and we think it happens because of this. We're all still working toward a good enough story of what's going on that we can make real scientists with fancy machines find it compelling enough to do proper, quantifiable research. So you're not exactly responsible for perfect scientific explanations for the next little while....

Early member of a large system.  Our system questions the way the afterlife and tulpamancy interact.  We genuinely suspect that deadies can return to share the mind of the living.

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I like that, it's gonna take a while to digest, but after a first read through, it didn't contradict anything i hold dear and that's a good thing. I call it different but no less powerful. I'll disect this and see if i can re-explain it myself, then you might get a question or two if i get stuck, but it seems sounds to me. If o got it right so far, we're 4 sitting in that theater, but i'm in the front row. Anyway, thanks.

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You see my impression, as a conscious creature, is that practically nothing which happens in the brain is "me", but i'm the person who gets to decide what to do with it.

 

 

Vesper: I agree. When I first started switching regularly and interacting with my headmates while fronting, I realized we all seemed like tissue-thin layers of personality and identity, while fronting seemed like plugging into the top of a huge stack of subsystems. Just the brain felt like I was the pilot of a huge mecha, never mind the body.

 

Ember: I mentioned this in another thread, but I'll reiterate it, as it's more relevant to this discussion. A system trying to parallel process is very similar to a singleton trying to multitask. Most people are very bad at multitasking, what with psychological refactory period and all that. But a very small portion of the population, termed "supertaskers" (super-taskers, super-multitaskers, etc.), are much better at multitasking.

 

The study referenced here:

 

https://www.thecut.com/2015/05/brains-of-super-multitaskers-are-different.html

 

shows that supertaskers require less neural activity to accomplish the same physical activity. From everything I've heard Bear say, I would be surprised if his system wasn't functioning that way. Supertasking is so useful for tulpamancy that tulpamancers who stick with it and are successful are probably much more likely to be supertaskers than the general population. (Though those of us who are not can still sometimes do quite well.)

 

The studies so far haven't shown where supertasking comes from. Maybe it's genetic; maybe it can be learned. But supertasking and confabulation could well be the most important pillars on which this community's history of parallel processing experience rests.

 

P.S. Please, Bear and Aijada, the term you're trying for is bona fide, not bonified, if you mean "in good faith, authentic" instead of "made good".

I'm not having fun here anymore, so we've decided to take a bit of a break, starting February 27, 2020. - Ember

 

Ember - Soulbonder, Female, 39 years old, from Georgia, USA . . . . [Our Progress Report] . . . . [How We Switch]

Vesper Dowrin - Insourced Soulbond from London, UK, World of Darkness, Female, born 9 Sep 1964, bonded ~12 May 2017

Iris Ravenlock - Insourced Soulbond from the Winter Court of Faerie, Dresdenverse, Female, born 6 Jun 1982, bonded ~5 Dec 2015

 

'Real isn't how you are made,' said the Skin Horse. 'It's a thing that happens to you.' - The Velveteen Rabbit

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Ember, you can blame google. I fixed mine. Edit: nope, i spelled it wrong too. It should be two words, but i bet in 10 years either will work, cause google.

 

The only evidence I can think of for multitasking is that, one, I routinely drive and immerse in wonderland at the same time, yet haven't had an accident that was my fault, or any, in a long time. Two, I wonderland while exersizing such as while jogging or walking flights of stairs. But those might be completely commonplace if practiced and is probably achievable by anyone.

 

Tbh, i've driven about half a million miles because i worked as a delivery driver for years while in college, and i could pretty much do anything while driving at this point. Also, jogging or stair climbing is a repetitive task that once learned can run in the background.

 

In other words, i don't consider myself special, especially with multitasking.

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well first of all, multitasking is only doing one thing at any given moment, but switching between tasks quickly/as needed, it is specifically NOT parallel processing

second, I already told you, using different parts of the brain at the same time is normal.. parallel processing would be using the same parts, namely the parts that allow consciousness and/or the recording of memories or doing multiple complex tasks

 

... it's usually not possible, humans only multitask outside of rare cases like this one https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/301427-head-full-symphonies

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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I am not trying to argue using the same parts at the same time. When half your brain in removed, they showed the other half takes on the functions of the missing half.

 

This is evidence to me that there's more to this than trying to write two words with the same pencil. Independant brain structures, human personalities, life, and memories, even possibly imagination, that's my hypothesis. Perhaps you can't do it if you believe you can't, that's a guess.

 

*boom*

 

"Most people feel normal and can go back to work, school, and their usual lives about 6 to 8 weeks after surgery."

 

"Weakness on the opposite side from the operation site may occur. But children can function with only half a brain because the remaining side takes over many of the functions of the half that was removed. If the surgery is done early in childhood, the child is more likely to compensate for the loss of one side of the brain."

 

"formal IQ testing showed overall stability or improvement"

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I don't see how people who have had surgery to change their brain structure being able to do things that people with stock brains can't do applies to people who haven't had any such changes being able to parallel process

I have a tulpa named Miela who I love very much.

 

 
"People put quotes in their signatures, right?"

-Me

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well first of all, multitasking is only doing one thing at any given moment, but switching between tasks quickly/as needed, it is specifically NOT parallel processing

second, I already told you, using different parts of the brain at the same time is normal.. parallel processing would be using the same parts, namely the parts that allow consciousness and/or the recording of memories or doing multiple complex tasks

 

... it's usually not possible, humans only multitask outside of rare cases like this one https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/301427-head-full-symphonies

 

The way you're defining things leaves no word left for what I do on a daily basis, which is performing two tasks at the same time. Basically I can multitask (doing the tasks at the same time, not switching back and forth) if the tasks don't use the same areas of the brain. I can cut out pieces of fabric and sew them together by machine or hand while listening to documentaries and video essays on youtube. But as soon as I start drafting patterns, I have to pause the video/audio, because I can't use the critical thought and planning need to draft while still paying attention to the audio. I assume pattern drafting and language processing use some of the same areas in the brain so I can't do them both at the same time. While manipulating physical objects like fabric leaves my language centers available for listening (or for talking to my tulpa as I do these days).

 

I've heard that while studying, students should not listen to music that has vocals--that would be because reading and listening to lyrics can't be done at the same time, the lyrics would draw your attention away from reading. But instrumental music while studying is fine. Walking and carrying on a conversation is no problem either, until you have to put thought into your environment. Most people can drive adequately while talking as well.

 

I'd like to explore parallel processing where the host and the tulpa carry out different tasks that don't interfere with each other. It would take a lot of experimenting and trial and error to find which tasks are compatible. I can't do this myself yet, though.

Host: YukariTelepath

Tulpas: Aya, Ruki

 

Imposition log

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