how do i know if my tulpa is sentient or not?

[M00n_lyt3_999]

it's been about 2 days since i started making astrid and he seems pretty sentient as of now, but i don't know if it's just my imagination or not. i mean, he does meow as a substitute for "yeah" (for now), which i cannot imagine causing, but i could very much be wrong. he so far has been able to move on his own, but i still can't tell if it's me or not

[Shaula]

Well, it sounds like he's sentient. 😁 A lot of creating a tulpa is believing that they're real. The main thing to do is think: if it might have been him, than it probably was. 

[An Ashy Individual]

People usually just ask their tulpa to surprise them as a way to confirm that the tulpa is actually around. Another method is letting the tulpa force themself. I personally also found it really useful to make my headmate try to read something, just because she was so awful at it that there was no way I could've simulated it.

 

But yeah, some people just have a much shorter creation time. It didn't even take my headmate a week to get to vocality, for example.

[fennecfoxx]

"Sentient" is a term that gets thrown around a lot without people really knowing what it means.

 

Sentience is often confused with sapience (intelligence). You are sapient because you have a human brain. Your tulpa shares your brain. Therefore, your tulpa is by definition sapient.

 

Sentience in its strict sense is the ability to have conscious experience. Ask around here, and you'll get different opinions on tulpa sentience. Our system's answer is "it's complicated", but I don't think that's what you're asking about, so I'll leave it at that.

 

You seem to be asking about autonomy, which also got conflated with sentience in the early days of this community for some reason. If you ask us, tulpamancy is, at its core, creating a secondary identity and training your mind to attribute a portion of its activity to that identity. If he appears to be acting on his own and responding in ways you don't expect—congrats, he's autonomous!