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Servitors and Centipede's Dilemma


Gotonis

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My proposal is simple: servitors are more common than we think.

 

This isn't much more than speculation, and I'm not sure how one would go about testing this, but I have come to the conclusion that many actions that 'we' perform are actually controlled by servitors. These servitors are trained by repeated action, to the point where we don't have to think about doing things.

 

A large example would be walking. Most people (to my knowledge) don't think about walking when they do, they just walk. If anything, thinking about it might render the walker off-balance. I say that this is because the walking is done by a servitor. It is a primal servitor, or at least something similar to a servitor. It is most likely unable to communicate any information, but has no need to.

 

This applies to anything to which Centipede's Dilemma is relevant.

For those unfamiliar, Centipede's Dilemma is the situation in which you have trouble doing something because you are thinking about that thing. The name refers to a hypothetical centipede who, when asked how he controls all of his legs at once, realizes that he does not know, and is rendered unable to walk.

 

It does happen. You can test it yourself. While you're typing, try actively running the typing. You may find yourself slowing down, losing accuracy, altogether forgetting where letters are, or something else of the same nature. I say that this is because a servitor is converting the words you wish to type into a series of keypresses, then executing that series of button pushing. You're trying to do something that you already have being done by a machine, and your hand gets caught in the gears.

 

Maybe these aren't servitors, but something similar. However, I think these are at the very least similar to servitors.

 

Any thoughts?

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I personally wouldn't attribute that to servitors, but to implicit memory. It's like how you learn how to ride a bike by doing it, but if you tried to write out specific steps you would most likely be at a loss.

"Science isn't about why, science is about why not?" -Cave Johnson

Tulpae: Luna, Elise, Naomi

My progress report

 

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By this proposal, my heart beating is being controlled by a servitor. Let me test it. I'm thinking about my heart beating. Oh damn, I just died. On a much less sarcastic note, these things happen because the body grows accustomed to doing a certain repetitive action without relying on conscious thought, which is why once you put conscious thought into doing something, you get thrown off balance. Also, a servitor isn't constructed in such a way. It takes conscious effort to create a servitor. For example, I play the guitar. I've done it long enough to not have to think about playing, because my body has grown used to the motions. I couldn't make a servitor to play the guitar for me, because I would still need the muscle memory. The human body doesn't just 'do things', it needs to first have conscious input, then after a set period of time, you stop actively thinking about doing said action and your body takes over. If we all just unconsciously walked, we would never have to make a conscious input to move our legs, we would just always be walking.

 

EDIT: I haven't slept for a while, so sorry if my thoughts are jumbled. I think that's the whole picture though.

Let's focus on the matter at hand, shall we?

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The question is what do you exactly mean when saying "servitor". For me, servitor is an autonomous personality with a specified task. Functional parts of mind such as walking-performing-mechanism, are not personalities, they are just trained mechanical actions. Everyone have trained walking mechanism, someone learned dancing, someone learned penspinning - all these mechanical muscular activities are performed without actually thinking about any muscular move. It's normal, this is how our brain interacts with our body.

wtf russian tries spek engrish

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I think, as usual, we have it backwards.

 

While your example with centepedes dilemma is sound, I think that by trying to call this function a servitors function is missing the point entirely. A servitor is, to the best of my knowledge, a conscious projection or "hologram". Any actual functionality that it has is completely up to you. Meanwhile the conscious ignorance of how you walk, how your heart beats, or how you even breath is a function of something we know even less about: the subconscious. Your subconscious is constantly in control of things that are better done without your conscious attention, like with the examples you have given. A servitor (and more to the point, a tulpa) isn't a prerequisite to the functionality of your mind but is a direct result of your conscious will to access those functions.

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Things like walking, or playing a sport, are done from motor memory. This means that you do it instinctively,

subconsciously

. Why you would call this a servitor is beyond me.

Let's define 'servitor', since we seem to be lacking one.

 

Our in-house expert here provided one:

a servitor is a thoughtform that is only able to react to parroting/puppeting

To elaborate, a servitor is something, the details of which are well within your memory, that is not free-thinking; that is, you know what it is, and remember it well enough that it seems to exist constantly, but it cannot act on its own freely. The important thing here is that it is something; you don't have a servitor without someone knowing something about it. Beyond that, its functionality - as bigman said - is irrelevant to its existence, and the servitor, in essence, is a template.

What this means is that your walking servitor is not a servitor, because you do not see it as anything beyond functional. It has no characteristics, and nothing to distinguish it from anything else.

When you walk, memory serves to guide you. From your memory - of how to walk - your memory serves to guide you, to the extent that it - nearly - does things for you. When you start to pay attention to it, that link - as it were - is broken, and you, consciously, cannot receive the methods from your memory in the same way. Calling this the work of a servitor really goes to say that every part of your mind that functions but is beyond your consciousness is a servitor, which is perhaps along the lines of what you are saying. But it's wrong, because no-one defines a servitor by what it does as such, only what characteristics are intrinsic to it. You can't say that there is a servitor that walks you, because the servitor would have to exist as a recognised entity to function, which it is not.

 


 

Besides that, dusting off a somewhat older definition was interesting:

a servitor is a part of the magician's psyche, or a part of the Deep Mind that the magician evokes to perform a task

The older definition used by chaos magic is, of course, that a servitor is a being invoked to perform a specific task; be that being explainable by psychology or otherwise. While walking isn't often used as an example of such a task, it is interesting to see the similarity; to translate:

a servitor is a part of the subject's mind [presumed unconscious], or a part of the collective consciousness, that the subject uses to perform a task [walking]

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I'm just wondering, what made you associate the word "servitor" with a "non-free-thinking template, doll, hologram"; funny thing is, I used this word for autonomous personality that I created before FAQ_man's guides got their popularity. I received this term from chaos magic as well, and spreaded it to russian tulpa community; but servitor I meant was never a "doll that's unable to think by itself", the only major difference is that you can force servitor to change itself at any time - unlike tulpa and real personality you have "root access" to it. And it has a task as well. So my definition was (it was posted at april 27th here http://khagata.tumblr.com/post/21702090229/terminology ) "controllable personality that has its own determined task."

wtf russian tries spek engrish

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Guest BrownSubmarine

It's something different. We actually might have servitor that is controlling body and being in front is most direct way of communicating with it. While you are getting disassociated from the body you can control it less and less directly by for example forcing yourself a joystick that will let you walk around or just simple desires to move limb without directly focusing on it.

 

I like this hypothesis, it shows servitor as function serving specific purpose and not mindless form that will carry things around for you.

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