Instant Tulpamancy?

[Guest amber5885]

Personally and I have fought this point enforce in the past, I don't belive in instant tulpas.

 

HOWEVER! Just because something has been known to be true in the past doesn't mean it can't be changed or done differently.

 

Tulpa creation to me, isn't like the laws of gravity it's neve been a definite. If it was then we would have narrowed it down to a one size fits all method of creation that would workfor everyone but instead we have a plethora of new members offering their own methods and changing the game.

 

We're united in the belife that these things are real and we are united in the understanding that they all have the same basic characteristics which is what makes them tulpas. (sentience, free thought process and free will) but things are ever changing and I think maybe it wouldn't hurt to entertain the idea that much like someone can learn to play an instrument in a ludacrise amount of time, them maybe certain people with certain brains can create the basics of a tulpa almost instantly.

 

Now I'm not suggesting that this creation would be fully complete or that they could jump to imposition right away but a form that can speak on its own....sure.

 

I mean hell, by old school standards it would be nearly impossible for me to have Toby imposed in such a short time but I do. It's not done but it's a start so.... I don't know.... There's a lot about this we don't know so maybe entertaining the idea that someone could be gifted for this isn't so far fetched.

 

Is it normal? Probobly not.

Are most instant tulpa mancers telling the truth? Probobly not.

Does it hurt to reaserch this? Deffinitly not.

[bunny-boi-lover]

Thanks to everyone for your responses! I'm glad this has created such a great debate. So allow me to add further to it with my beliefs of what imaginary friends, tulpae, and sentience are.

 

To me an imaginary friend is just that, imaginary. The creator acknowledges it as a made-up creation that has no free will, no sentience, etc. It may have a personality, quirks, and all but has no influence on any of the creator's other thoughts. A tulpa, however, acknowledges its own existence, and the creator recognizes it as a being capable of independent thought and action. When I leave my wonderland, I'm sure Edwin moves about and does his own thing because when I return there he is often in a different place doing a different activity from when I left him. Sometimes I even have to hunt him down from where I enter at the base of the forest. He recollects on what he's done in the wonderland in my absence and has even surprised me by altering it. For instance, the waterfall. I didn't know it existed until he led me to it. I didn't imagine or visualize creating it or of it existing; Edwin did. He also decided to give himself black-tipped ears. I hadn't even considered it, but I love it.

 

Now, on to sentience. That's a debatable topic even in us humans. My belief of sentience is self-awareness and ability to think and act consciously, as opposed to acting solely on instinct. I suppose with that definition that animals could be seen as having a certain level of sentience, as I believe they do. I don't believe that they necessarily have a "soul", but I'm agnostic anyway, and I'm not completely positive that humans have souls either.

 

Edwin is sentient according to my definition. He does and says things that surprise me on a regular basis. For those who thought of him as being a "cookie-cutter" tulpa, he is actually strikingly different from any tulpa or imaginary friend I've created before and from anyone I've ever met in real life, and in some ways he is very different from me personality-wise. Sure, he didn't start out that way. I agree that personality and other details of a tulpa come with time. I didn't mean that when I created Edwin he instantaneously had a personality etc. As I said, he had a brief period of disorientation for a couple of minutes before being able to really even speak, but he took the form I imagined instantaneously. My focus in asking my question was mainly on the forcing aspect of tulpamancy, but it has brought about some great points for everyone to ponder on.

 

I believe that Edwin at this point has become quite developed. My problem with terms such as "underdeveloped" and such with describing any tulpa is that I believe there is no point at which a tulpa is "complete". Just like us, they grow and change over time. Experiences and influences shape them. Edwin has gradually developed his personality over the last couple of days, and I'm sure he's nowhere near done showing me his true self. I only willed the most basic aspects of his psyche and my intentions for creating him toward him when forming him. I prefer to allow my tulpae to develop their own personalities from scratch. I've spent a large amount of time with him in wonderland, sometimes spending two or three hours straight just doing activities and talking with him there. I have that luxury as of now, and I'm going to take advantage of it.

[Luminesce]

Basically, we aren't trying to say that in ten minutes we can create a tulpa no different from one years old. We're saying we can create the basis for a tulpa, a thought-form with basic ability to speak and act. I don't believe that you need to develop sentience in your tulpas more than once, or that a new"born" tulpa needs to learn to talk or walk. I think we treat them as if they do because it gives us an excuse to develop them, because not everyone is responsible enough to do so if they think they don't have to.

 

Creating a sentient tulpa the first time was a year-long effort (didn't have this forum to help), and the second time was a moral debate. But years later, I don't have any more blocks to prevent me from making them sentient right from the start. They just aren't developed, which I think bugs a lot of you because you consider sentience a sign of an experienced tulpa. I consider it a sign of an experienced tulpamancer. I don't have to struggle to make my tulpa sentient - I had to struggle to give it a purpose and name it, and then I have to take the time and effort to really develop its personality, behavior, and just give it experiences to work with.

 

I don't think this "instant sentience" works for everyone, but it is different from an "instant tulpa". They can think for themselves because we've already experienced that process thoroughly in the past, and can recreate it relatively easily. Their personality and such take some time, though - I think? - there are some authors who are so experienced writing a wide variety of characters that they can make up fairly in-depth ones on the spot. And while that could apply to tulpas, I think that's still unnecessary, plus it's relying on old characteristics giving no attention to creating new ones. And every tulpa deserves at least a little creativity put into their character. I'm pretty sure most Twilight Sparkle tulpas differ greatly in their personalities and speaking manners, anyway.

[Stevie]

They just aren't developed, which I think bugs a lot of you because you consider sentience a sign of an experienced tulpa. I consider it a sign of an experienced tulpamancer. I don't have to struggle to make my tulpa sentient - I had to struggle to give it a purpose and name it, and then I have to take the time and effort to really develop its personality, behavior, and just give it experiences to work with.

 

In Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (or one of the books in the series, hell, I haven't read them in years) there's this machine that's able grant sentience to any object that it's used on. The object changes in no way, other than the fact that it's aware of its own existence.

 

I think that maybe we assign this huge importance and value to sentience because it's considered a big deal, in general, but sentience by itself doesn't mean much. In the book, they stuck a cigarette lighter in the machine, and it looked and acted no different than a cigarette lighter without sentience.

 

It's the other stuff that goes into tulpas that make them tick, then, because raw sentience alone, while the sign of a skilled tulpamancer, isn't the end all be all.

 

That's kind of an interesting concept that I hadn't considered.

[Luminesce]

I just wanted my tulpa to have say in who she became, because my other tulpas had that too (as their development took place over a couple years, having not known about tulpas). I didn't consider it such a big deal until this thread came up and made it one. The tulpa isn't fully developed in a short time, it's simply given sentience, then forced like normal but with its own input along the way.

[Linkzelda]

I've just always assumed that thoughts and consciousness were the results of highly advanced physical processes, I've seen no evidence for them to be non-physical / outside of reality besides humans being unable to understand that process yet. But if epiphenomenalism helped you create the points above, then I guess I'm missing something.

 

....I was pretty much replying directly to LinkZelda, though.

 

You pretty much took the words out of my mouth when you were talking about your analysis with the theory with p-zombies and tulpas, Reisen. And as for the post I made in general, I was just playing devil’s advocate. I feel the epiphenomenon thing seems to be a term that could coincide with those that may presume a tulpa’s existence being partly, or even wholly contingent on physical processes of the brain, and yet the emergent qualities (e.g. consciousness being caused by said physical processes alone mentioned in the thread) and what have you wouldn’t affect this reality.

 

And through hopefully putting in some analogues, one would see that it would beg the question on how the host is any distinguishable from a tulpa that may, for example, be able to switch with them; if someone has to be taking dominion over real life sensations and qualia while the other fixates on imaginary senses, then that tulpa that’s switching would in theory have to have internal mental states and qualia, and being able to be aware of its existence in a way. So those sensations and such experienced in this reality would essentially be physical, because if not, it’s back to begging question, and the mention of p-zombies just furthers the question begging because one would probably have to presume dualism as a premise in the first place.

 

Because if somehow p-zombies as a supplement in theorizing what makes a tulpa, a tulpa were to be true, then it may pose some problems for those who strictly utilize extreme forms of materialism, e.g., eliminative materialism. In other words, if it were plausible in some way, it would imply dualism in the first place, along with supporting the probability that phenomenon (e.g. epiphenomenon generated by physical processes of the brain with the neurological analogies and what have you) cannot be broken down with just materialistic implications and causes.

 

At the same time, utilizing the p-zombie theory to see if qualia would be irreducible would raise questions on the host’s qualia, and the analogues with possession and switching were utilized to have one question things like:

 

- Who is experiencing the physical sensations with having an internal mental state(s) and qualia after the switch, or even possession is initiated—the host, tulpa, or the body and mind not requiring someone to consciously experience these things in the first place?

 

- And if it’s implied as physical sensations, how come some people would be skeptical for something like imposition (any sensory form with that term) where they can safely presume that a projection of a tulpa’s existence is merely not part of this spatiotemporal reality, i.e., hallucinatory type of thing.

 

- It would make them wonder why they need to worry about those impositions in the first place when they could probably try to go along the theories with possession and switching to gain some kind of significant assurance in their tulpa being sentient, along with other attributes like sapience as well that may coincide in acknowledging and rationalizing with their awareness of their existence.

 

- And if one’s tulpa that did the switch isn’t experiencing physical sensations, then so much for the theory with switching if the sensations would be psychosomatic and illusionary at best (the one taking dominion of sensations of this reality). So how one defines what switching is will ultimately in some way have to take a metaphysical stance(s) in theorizing it; it’s just some aren’t aware of what they’re saying would reconcile with metaphysics in general (e.g. those who may be anti-meta, and don’t realize they’re utilize metaphysics that’s much more than supernatural, mysticism, and such)

 

These analogues and queries are just stepping stones in wondering whether or not there may be some form of dualism that can be utilized as a supplement in one’s endeavor of validating what makes a tulpa, a tulpa. It’s mostly question begging, especially the part with whether or not we’re p-zombies ourselves just trying to convince ourselves that tulpas may be p-zombies while we have the real qualia and internal mental states. Things seem all fine and dandy with non-physical and physical implications that may not really affect this reality (e.g. an objective reality that can exist with or without our sensations and experiences) up until we talk about something like possession and switching, and even imposition in general.

 

But again, just idea play, and just me playing devil’s advocate with presumptions with physical processes of the brain being the source of causation with consciousness and sapience of a tulpa (and those qualities would be by-products from said processes that have no affect with physical events in this reality). Round and round, and nowhere to go but to speculate even more. Just remember, this is fixating on one standpoint, it'll get more problematic mixing with more, or maybe shifting to others.

[Kiahdaj]

@Reisen

The fact that you don't believe your own tulpas to be conscious, or have their own mind explains a lot. However, I would argue that that means that they are simply not tulpas. What distinguishes a tulpa from an imaginary friend is that it is its own mind, with its own consciousness and sentience, like you or me. A form in your mind that has the ability to respond to you, but is not actually its own being is exactly what an imaginary friend is. Imaginary friends are capable of responding without you telling them what to say, and they are capable of surprising you. All that good stuff. The consciousness and mind is all that distinguishes them. Although that does imply a lot of additional things.

 

 

Regarding the argument that your

general "your", here (not anyone specific)

experience indicates that instant tulpa creation is possible is certainly not conclusive by any means, if you ask me. I understand that having experienced what you have makes it seem clear to you, but I say again, that it is likely a misinterpretation. At the very least, I don't consider it true "evidence". You say that your tulpa is able to surprise you, make its own decisions, and act on its own. Well, I can create an imaginary friend right now, that can do all of those things. But it is not a tulpa.

In fact, tulpas and imaginary friends can be so hard to distinguish, that people who have been forcing for months still have doubt, because they believe that they may be fooling themselves, and that their experiences don't necessarily mean that their tulpa is sentient. And frankly, they are right. The brain is such an amazing, complicated thing that there is not, and can never be something that can definitively prove that your tulpa is "real". It is a matter of when you are willing to believe it.

I suppose it is fine if you want to believe that your tulpa is sentient from the very beginning. In fact, that's a common misinterpretation of an idea around here. The problem occurs when you try to make that out to be a fact.

 

I don't mean to sound like my word is absolute, and that I couldn't possibly be wrong. I simply think that it is unreasonable to accept a new, far-out idea that is not based on anything scientific, which can also, very easily be explained by something that is.

[Luminesce]

Well, I didn't say that my tulpas aren't conscious, just that they don't possess their own. They utilize the same method of thinking I do, albeit.. silently? to me. I hold the belief that I do not have a consciousness separate from theirs, rather, my tulpas and I access that same consciousness, which is not tied to any persona. I came to this conclusion after realizing, when switched with my tulpas, "I" thought the same way they did. Reisen was certainly conscious, and in fact temporarily changed my entire mindset to fit her own (being significantly less bothered by stressors, more happy and accepting); but I was essentially no different from my tulpas. My consciousness did not come with me, to create a partitioned consciousness inside my head (which I also believe to be either impossible in any efficiency, or unnecessarily complicated). Instead, Reisen took my place as directly interacting with and controlling my mind and body, and I took hers as persona-detached-from-the-body/mind. (For the record, Reisen is all around very different than me when switched. But were I to switch with one of those sentient-without-development tulpas, I believe I would be no different for it. It's the different persona that makes the difference, and those "default" tulpas are essentially a blank slate, the blanks being filled in with my default behaviors. However anything they did while switched would probably contribute to their development.)

 

As for the "instant tulpas" that I explained were not instant tulpas, I would agree if not for one thing - their development is a sliding scale, and if my not-true-tulpa is sentient from the start, at what point do they become a true tulpa? Nothing inherently changes other than the depth of their persona (personality, behaviors, experiences). I still have yet to see a sound argument on why an experienced tulpamancer cannot create a sentient tulpa rather quickly. Sentience just isn't difficult for me - it only takes the intention for them to be aware of everything going on, and then they are. But they don't necessarily have what you call a very developed "consciousness" yet, because I define that as their ability to think uniquely from me, and to access my intuition (subconscious answers to conscious questions). And that is basically what I consider "the development process" at this point, when sentience isn't a problem. My tulpa has commented on how she'd like to be developed early in the process, but of course she did not do that from the standpoint of a fully developed conscience. A lot of how she thinks/acts is still reliant on my basic beliefs, the things my subconscious would say to think. (This IS different from puppetting her - I did not influence her to think these things, but she is essentially thinking as I would due to the lack of development on her part. Her thoughts are not entirely unique to her as a being yet, but it can still be useful as that's essentially my subconscious being translated for me during the development process. I recognize this, and consider it very useful. It will fade as she becomes more of her own person.)

 

 

Well, I don't really know how to continue this debate. My belief in the nature of consciousness differs from yours, yet I cannot understand yours (the popular belief). I've never experienced more than one "consciousness" in my mind. And I have experienced multiple personas, my tulpas and I, utilizing that same consciousness in different situations. You don't have to change your beliefs to fit what I'm saying if yours still make sense to you. But they don't to me. Which would be amazing, if my beliefs on the nature of consciousness actually changed my reality, and yours yours. I do my best to stick to strict logic in my beliefs based on a mixture of empirical observations and logical probability, but if my beliefs on consciousness are actually shaping my ability to observe it... That would be interesting.

[Kiahdaj]

Yes, tulpa development very much is a sliding scale. I believe I said that in even my first post in this thread. The problem with the "when do they become a true tulpa" question is that they are not sentient from the start. That is one of the things that you have to develop. If they were sentient, aware, and had their own minds from the very beginning, then they would start as tulpas. To say that your tulpas are that way from the beginning, eliminates a large bulk of the creation process, and I have no reason to believe that that's possible. It frankly doesn't make much sense to "will" sentience and being into something. Certainly not in a moment.

Furthermore, your whole argument seems to be based on the fact that you can. But how can you have any degree of certainty as to whether the tulpas you make are instantly sentient, when you decide they are? Even a robot can tell you that it can feel and perceive things. As I alluded to before, any imaginary friend can show sentience, despite not having it.

[Luminesce]

I feel like we're at a stalemate, because neither of us can prove our side. But I think you're giving too much credit to sentience. There is no magical event that makes your tulpa sentient at any point in its development, besides you finally accepting that it is. We've seen no evidence contrary to this - in fact it's impossible, given tulpamancing is all in the mind, where belief is law. Someone's tulpa can become sentient and years later they decide they were never sentient and in fact never existed. But you can't just pretend they never were because in the end it was decided otherwise; they were while they believed. But you'd have no right to tell them that, because they have the same authority to say their tulpa was never sentient as they did to say it was. So now it's not.

 

But I guess, we're not debating any specific person, but the definition of the concept for others to aim for. And like I said way far back, there's a reason we don't assume sentience from the beginning in all cases. I didn't visit those threads much, but I know that they were discussed. And I imagine the consensus was something like, "Assuming sentience may in some cases speed up the development process, but it isn't worth the risk of believing your tulpa is sentient when it's not, as that will eventually lead to an existential crisis." Which of course translates to, "Do so if you think you should, don't if you think you shouldn't", like most advice on tulpamancy. Not everyone will stick to the rules we make, or use the definitions we create, but we have to make them as widely-applicable as possible anyway.

 

I'm trying to figure out why you can't understand how a tulpa in my mind can easily gain sentience, and how exactly it works for you. But all I can think of is that you just believe in a different road to sentience than me. I understand why your way is used and why it works. But sentience is no more than giving your imagined person permission to experience and process everything versus what you specifically direct at it. The imagined person then becomes effectively, sentient. Or at least, they become a p-zombie. But all that separates a p-zombie from a tulpa, to me, is a basis for their existence. Personality, reason for existing, behavior, and an arbitrary amount of neural connections to different events we call experience.

 

I don't know if this will help clarify things or not, but it might, so I'll document the creation of my sentient-from-the-start tulpa here... The thought of creating another tulpa, and tiny wisps of what they would be like, have been floating around my mind for some months. The idea of who that tulpa might be, maybe 3. Their form and purpose I've only just decided a week ago. Their personality and some behaviors, about 5 days. After deliberation with my existing tulpas 4 days ago, I created the actual tulpa - brought together form, behavior, personality, purpose, and the permission to sense things for themselves - 3 days ago. That is the first point where I've allowed them to exist. They were what I would call disoriented at first, knowing that they existed but without knowing exactly how to do so. After about an hour of actively forcing, which is quite a long time for me, we had established that they were a developing tulpa and would be sentient as we went through the rest of their development process. Still not 100% sure of their identity, due to the shared thought processes with me (not puppetting, but not quite creating "original"/separate thoughts like my other tulpas), we spent two days going over who and how we wanted them to be. She was actually able to advise me on what I wanted at times, as her thinking was still essentially similar to mine. The last day I've been distracted by my inability to choose a name, but I think she's developed enough to consider her thoughts her own now. Not terribly well developed in a way unique from my own, but hers nonetheless. We'll continue forcing her general existence until we reach a satisfactory point, and then we'll start doing the fun things like interacting with my other tulpas and playing tulpa-games.

(And just like that, everything I could ever put in a progress report, in a single paragraph. I told you guys I didn't have enough to write about..)

 

So looking back at that stream-of-consciousness, I think that might clarify what I actually meant by my tulpa being "sentient". She had the ability to think, but as there was next to no basis with which to do so, that ability was stunted and probably disillusions the mental image you had of an "instant tulpa". I tried to say that wasn't the case before. I'd also like to emphasize that I had not focused at all on her creation the weeks or month prior, I was strictly setting guidelines for the creation process once it began. For whatever reason, I was pretty adamant about not creating her before everything was "set up", since I planned to give her sentience from the start. That would just have made a very confused, sentient thought form with no identity and a lot of questions about why/how they exist. Which I believe is why we believe sentience is much harder to gain than it really is - it protects us from considering intrusive thoughts tulpas that we're now responsible for, or dream characters that persist to the border of waking. If we tell ourselves they weren't sentient, then they weren't, and we don't feel guilty.

 

But that's getting into ethics again. The ethics here seem to set themselves as we assume them as a community, so I'll refrain from offending anybody's immersion by going into them.

Actually, maybe it's offensive because I state things as if they're undeniably true. I'm sorry I do that. If I didn't wholeheartedly believe something, I would never post it here on the forum in the first place. So when I do post, I tend to sound pretty sure of myself. I'm always open to debate and possible corrections though.