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I seem to have a problem with making tulpas...


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That has nothing to do with running your mouth about things you made up without back-checking at all. This isn't a religion, stop treating it like one.

 

I Google'd it, but I couldn't really find anything. I mean come on, we're talking about tulpas.

 

...Wait a sec, you were wrong in the first place. Damn, I'm more gullible than I thought. What I said is a working hypothesis, not a theory I claim is proven. I thought ideas about tulpas are basically given to be hypotheses.

 

My hypothesis is that creating a biological neural network large enough for a sentient tulpa cannot be done on a whim.

 

If you know more about neurology and you know my hypothesis is false, then I stand corrected, but it's still not pseudoscience when it's just a hypothesis.

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Because tulpae are not created by making an entire second brain in your skull, they're just imaginary friends that you make yourself believe are real. They were created as a meditation tool to give voice to the subconscious and that's what they do. It takes a while to make one at first because you have to learn how to do it. But just like learning to cook, you don't grow a chef inside your brain whenever you make something. You just learn to cook. And then if you want to cook, you just cook something. If you want to make a tulpa, and you know how, you can do it easily.

 

sprouting words like "neural network" like a buzzword in an episode of CSI is pseudoscience. Why not learn about how they actually work? Or better yet how the whole brain works up to our current understanding of it. I sort of wouldn't talk about something before knowing a little bit about it, like I expect any decent member of society would.

 

Just because you associate tulpae with being your own very special friend that was magically brought to life and deserves as much respect as any living thing both socially and biologically doesn't mean it actually is that. It's still just a concept supported by your consciousness that you will life into, just like a dream. And just like a dream, you don't grow a brain in one night to have them, they're just fantasies. The only hard part about making a tulpa is learning to perceive it as a separate entity, and to you it is. But it is not that, it's still just an idea. Just like you never actually do anything you do in a dream, no matter how real it seems. This isn't even psychology we're talking about here, this is common knowledge. You'd have to be insane or an infant to think the brain works by growing random parts to perform specific actions and kills them later when it's done. I think we'd be able to get scans of that if that were a thing.

Scarlet - anime, 8/15/2012

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Sorry, poor word choice. By "creation" I meant connecting neurons together. I thought it was obvious, but I'm clearly wrong, since you're acting so condescending about it.

 

I do want to know more about neurology, but I'm waiting until the school year starts again since I know it's the best place to start.

 

Beyond that I'll agree on some points and agree to disagree on others. Now can we stop escalating this? It's not worth stressing over poor word choice. At this point I'm starting to think we both look like idiots right now.

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That has nothing to do with running your mouth about things you made up without back-checking at all. This isn't a religion, stop treating it like one.

 

Tibetan Buddhism, anyone?

 

But yes, Bin is right about a tulpa not being a full biological neural network. If you think of the brain as a computer, you have a power source (nutrients being pumped in from the body), input (eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin, chemoreceptors in the blood, and so on), and output (all the muscles in the body). Then there are different files and programs you rely on -- I guess you might call it an operating system. This would be stuff like self-awareness, emotion, language, ability to move around, deeper levels of your psyche, and so on. Then there's the user files: your memory, and to some extent, your personality -- this is the stuff you'd lose if you had amnesia.

 

When you look at it like this, making a tulpa is really just partitioning the hard drive, copying some software, and installing some new software. You don't need a whole new language center of the brain, for example, just a line of code that says goto host's language center at C:\Language, and apply Brooklyn accent.

 

A lot of what a tulpa "does" isn't actually happening. Emotion is a good example. Have you ever noticed that we use body words to express emotion? When you get angry your blood boils and you tense up, nervousness is like butterflies in your stomach, grief gives you a lump in your throat, annoyance is a pain in the neck, and so on. The reason we use bodily words for emotion is because emotion is felt primarily in the body.

 

William James, in the late 19th century, came up with a theory that much of emotion is a change in blood pressure, heart rate, muscle contractions, sweating, and so on. It's not entirely true, but it is to some extent -- people with major spinal injuries, such as paraplegics and quadriplegics feel a reduced sense of emotion because they're not receiving as much of that input from the body. In the 1980s, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio found that patients who suffered damage to their insular cortex, associated with motor control and perception, among other things, had a reduced sense of emotion as well.

 

Basically, your tulpa can't feel emotions in the same way you do without using your body to feel them. Unless you feel an emotion at the same time your tulpa does, your tulpa isn't really feeling that emotion -- he, she, or it is actually hijacking the part of your brain that perceives emotions in others, in order to give the illusion of feeling that emotion.

 

To sum up, tulpas don't need an entire brain. In fact, I'm not sure you could say that there's any part of the brain that belongs to tulpas exclusively. Most, if not all, of what they're doing takes place in parts of the brain you use for other things, although they use those parts of the brain in a somewhat different way.

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

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But yes, Bin is right about a tulpa not being a full biological neural network. If you think of the brain as a computer, you have a power source (nutrients being pumped in from the body), input (eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin, chemoreceptors in the blood, and so on), and output (all the muscles in the body). Then there are different files and programs you rely on -- I guess you might call it an operating system. This would be stuff like self-awareness, emotion, language, ability to move around, deeper levels of your psyche, and so on. Then there's the user files: your memory, and to some extent, your personality -- this is the stuff you'd lose if you had amnesia.

 

When you look at it like this, making a tulpa is really just partitioning the hard drive, copying some software, and installing some new software. You don't need a whole new language center of the brain, for example, just a line of code that says goto host's language center at C:\Language, and apply Brooklyn accent.

 

A lot of what a tulpa "does" isn't actually happening. Emotion is a good example. Have you ever noticed that we use body words to express emotion? When you get angry your blood boils and you tense up, nervousness is like butterflies in your stomach, grief gives you a lump in your throat, annoyance is a pain in the neck, and so on. The reason we use bodily words for emotion is because emotion is felt primarily in the body.

 

William James, in the late 19th century, came up with a theory that much of emotion is a change in blood pressure, heart rate, muscle contractions, sweating, and so on. It's not entirely true, but it is to some extent -- people with major spinal injuries, such as paraplegics and quadriplegics feel a reduced sense of emotion because they're not receiving as much of that input from the body. In the 1980s, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio found that patients who suffered damage to their insular cortex, associated with motor control and perception, among other things, had a reduced sense of emotion as well.

 

Basically, your tulpa can't feel emotions in the same way you do without using your body to feel them. Unless you feel an emotion at the same time your tulpa does, your tulpa isn't really feeling that emotion -- he, she, or it is actually hijacking the part of your brain that perceives emotions in others, in order to give the illusion of feeling that emotion.

 

To sum up, tulpas don't need an entire brain. In fact, I'm not sure you could say that there's any part of the brain that belongs to tulpas exclusively. Most, if not all, of what they're doing takes place in parts of the brain you use for other things, although they use those parts of the brain in a somewhat different way.

 

You're kind of putting what I already knew intuitively into words.

 

The only odd thing is I thought every tulpa experienced emotion through the body. So I guess yours doesn't?

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The only odd thing is I thought every tulpa experienced emotion through the body. So I guess yours doesn't?

 

My tulpa's still in the very early stages, so I'm getting this from things I've read in the forums, like Sands saying:

 

Early on, before Roswell was even vocal, there were cases when I'd be really happy and all and went to visit him, only to find him very down and lonely. Sometimes he was scared, sometimes even in pain, but I didn't realize it until I looked at him and saw his expressions.

 

I imagine that this is mostly an early-stages thing, and later on the tulpa is actually feeling emotions. That's what Sands said of feeling his tulpa's emotions later on in the same post.

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

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Yeah, Sands pretty much describes what would be psychosomatic occurrences (especially with how his tulpa was nervous mentally, and the body seemed to follow along to have the mannerisms and such that expresses it). And although possession or switching are presumed to give more realism for the tulpa, we can still pay attention to how they express themselves through visualization. The totality behind tulpaforcing processes brought Sands and Roswell in understanding each other more.

 

And even though his experience is anecdotal evidence at best, it still helps with conceptualizing on the wonders of the human mind and how it can create an experience for a person like Sands and his tulpa in the first place. So if there's people saying that the brain isn't making some neurological connection to produce that experience, that's why it's just contradicting everything this community is trying to get at with applying these experiential truths from users into something scientific.

 

Because the attitude for people who think it's not possible to build neurons and improve the infrastructure of the brain for certain processes (visual thinking, etc.) are simply being defeatists in the potential for this. That's why it's so annoying and disheartening seeing people give up and think so little because of that. And if they use excuses that they're in high school and think that means it's a cop-out euphemism from not having some competency in basic human thinking, they're obviously focusing what we're saying as ad hominem rather than trying to understand the underlying meaning behind the message.

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There's certainly a connection being made, but just a connection--not an entirely new emotional part of the brain.

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

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Because the attitude for people who think it's not possible to build neurons and improve the infrastructure of the brain for certain processes (visual thinking, etc.) are simply being defeatists in the potential for this. That's why it's so annoying and disheartening seeing people give up and think so little because of that. And if they use excuses that they're in high school and think that means it's a cop-out euphemism from not having some competency in basic human thinking, they're obviously focusing what we're saying as ad hominem rather than trying to understand the underlying meaning behind the message.

 

I don't see your point.

 

I think I may be hiding from the meaning by looking for multiple possible interpretations. Be brutally honest.

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I don't see your point.

I think I may be hiding from the meaning by looking for multiple possible interpretations. Be brutally honest.

I mean come on, we're talking about tulpas.

My hypothesis is that creating a biological neural network large enough for a sentient tulpa cannot be done on a whim.

If you know more about neurology and you know my hypothesis is false, then I stand corrected, but it's still not pseudoscience when it's just a hypothesis.

 

inb4I'mCondescending

 

When people think they came up with revolutionary hypothesis, they tend to forget that there's billions of people in the world, and out of those billions, there's bound to be someone that already came up with these hypothesis, so when you called it a working hypothesis when it's already debunked based on scientific evidence that shows how the brain can improve, modify, and even create nerve tissues in certain regions in its composition, you already made things worse from the start.

 

Like I've stated before, the word Tulpa and/or thought-forms have its own myriad of definitions and perspectives from others, and like people have stated before, the community should make some strive condense the subjectivity a bit. The reason why people don't think having a full sentient tulpa cannot be done on a whim is most likely because the conventional ways of being able to visualize or perceive one (you know, months, years of practice to feel as if there's some value into it and all that fun jazz).

 

A thought-form is a thought-form, created through mental energy, but again, people have different definitions on what constitutes as a tulpa, but even if the community makes a strive to make a definition, that actually sets restrictions because then we'll have waves of newcomers and members wondering "Omg am I meeting the requirements for a tulpa?"

 

People also tend to disregard common sense on how the mind can easily make neurological connections to improve visual thinking (example: Image streaming). They want to feel that visualizing a tulpa has to be this overly difficult process when they can use current scientifically proven events where the mind can easily reach that type of creative potential with practice. And if the host can visualize a thought-form, at some point the unconscious mind would be able to set some foundation for the tulpa to become fully sentient.

 

The easiest way is to use comparative analysis with tulpa in waking life and dream characters/dream beings. Here's the part that gets people with some internal conflicts. There's some people who feel dream characters/dream beings aren't as sentient compared to tulpa, and that's mostly due to not having some decent experience with lucid dreaming in general (and I mean by recalling non-lucid and lucid dreams along with the techniques, methods, and concepts to learn from it).

 

The mind can easily make a sentient thought-form in our dreams, and even better than what we try to do consciously in long, dragged out practice. It can literally pop thought-forms in and out, fully sentient, fully sapient, and the more the person dreaming has enough willpower, these dream characters easily have potential in being as aware(sensory awareness and other factors) as the dreamer, or even MORE aware than they are. (I.e. people who see a dream character that seems to know how to go their way in a dream and helping the dreamer out)

 

Lucid dreaming is a scientifically proven phenomenon, and if you can go into your natural sleep and train yourself to see the confines of your mind creating dream characters/thought-forms better than any of us can, what do you think that will lead to?

It leads one to finding ways to tap into what can train the person to expand their awareness more, or to be more receptive to the creative potential of the unconscious mind rather than thinking they have to go at it consciously. And your hypothesis is contradicting basic logic with how people who DO have sentient tulpa will generally have an easier time making another one because the neurological connections have been made.

 

Then if you do a comparative analysis with Tibetan Buddhist creating Tulpa and destroying them (if they want) like it's a pre-meal warmup, and it's just done for them to use as a basis to question reality (without being obligated to have personal investment), after practicing and discipline themselves, they obviously will be able to make a sentient tulpa on a whim.

 

Even if your hypothesis is just talking about a newcomer who never made a tulpa before and is going through the initial stages into creating one, to even make such a heavy presumption that the brain isn't capable of having a sufficient neural network to make a sentient tulpa on a whim is just nonsense. Your hypothesis implies the brain can't organize the experiential totality, knowledge, schemata of reality, belief systems you have without you going into a shitty mess altogether.

 

Pro tip: It does this organization on a whim without you even knowing about it.

 

When you get to that level of thinking with this revolutionary hypothesis, you're clearly underestimating the human mind in general. There are ways to have a sentient tulpa in a moderately fast pace, it's just a matter of making processes and exercises that trains the person to reach that state. But once that person has a sentient tulpa, it's going to be easy, it's just basic unconscious competence that connects the dots to make things easier:

 

http://www.uie.com/articles/four_stages_competence/

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