I don’t have a tulpa, and I tried the second test and was unable to keep track of both lines of dots; at best I could get one side perfectly and guess at the other side. If I create a tulpa at any point, I’ll check if that result changes.
ETA: I tried the second test again, but counted the red ones as 1,2,3,… and the blue ones as A,B,C,… then I calculated what number the letter corresponded to. I got an almost perfect score; so a tulpa is not necessary to do well on this test. I’m not sure what sort of test could rule out this method; I have seen a auditory test which was two simultaneous dual-n-back tests.
Yup—since posting that comment I actually checked with the tulpa community and they referred me to those very links. No data formally collected, but anecdotally people with tulpas aren’t reporting getting perfect scores.
I’m going with “use imagination, simulate personality” here, and am guessing any benefits relating to the tulpa are emotional and/or influencing what a person thinks about, rather than a separated neural network like what you’d get with a split brain or something.
The perceived inability to read the tulpa’s mind and the seemingly spontaneously complex nature of the tulpa’s voice is, I think, an artifact of our own inability to know what we think before we think it, similar to dream characters. As such, I don’t think there is any major distinction between a tulpa and a dream character, an imaginary friend, a character an author puts into a book, a deity being prayed too, and so on. That’s not to say tulpas are bs or uninteresting or anything—I’m sure they really can have personalities—it’s just that they aren’t distinct from various commonly experienced phenomenon that goes by other names. I don’t think I’d accord them moral status, beyond the psychological health of the “host”. (Although, I suspect to get a truly complex tulpa you have to believe it is a separate individual at some level—that’s how neurotypical people believe they can hear god’s voice and so on.)
I’ve got much respect to the community for empirically testing that hypotheses!
There seem to be a number of such tests, but no data collected from them.
Mental Arithmetic test
Parallel Processing Test
I don’t have a tulpa, and I tried the second test and was unable to keep track of both lines of dots; at best I could get one side perfectly and guess at the other side. If I create a tulpa at any point, I’ll check if that result changes.
ETA: I tried the second test again, but counted the red ones as 1,2,3,… and the blue ones as A,B,C,… then I calculated what number the letter corresponded to. I got an almost perfect score; so a tulpa is not necessary to do well on this test. I’m not sure what sort of test could rule out this method; I have seen a auditory test which was two simultaneous dual-n-back tests.
Yup—since posting that comment I actually checked with the tulpa community and they referred me to those very links. No data formally collected, but anecdotally people with tulpas aren’t reporting getting perfect scores.
I’m going with “use imagination, simulate personality” here, and am guessing any benefits relating to the tulpa are emotional and/or influencing what a person thinks about, rather than a separated neural network like what you’d get with a split brain or something.
The perceived inability to read the tulpa’s mind and the seemingly spontaneously complex nature of the tulpa’s voice is, I think, an artifact of our own inability to know what we think before we think it, similar to dream characters. As such, I don’t think there is any major distinction between a tulpa and a dream character, an imaginary friend, a character an author puts into a book, a deity being prayed too, and so on. That’s not to say tulpas are bs or uninteresting or anything—I’m sure they really can have personalities—it’s just that they aren’t distinct from various commonly experienced phenomenon that goes by other names. I don’t think I’d accord them moral status, beyond the psychological health of the “host”. (Although, I suspect to get a truly complex tulpa you have to believe it is a separate individual at some level—that’s how neurotypical people believe they can hear god’s voice and so on.)
I’ve got much respect to the community for empirically testing that hypotheses!