I don’t think the hypothesis that there is an independent conscious person existing along with you in your mind (or whatever those people think they’re doing) is the best explanation for the experiences they’re describing. If they just want to use it as shorthand for a set of narratively consistent hallucination then I suppose I could be okay with saying a tulpa exists. But either way: I don’t think a tulpa is an abstract object. It’s a mental object like an imaginary friend or a hallucination. Like any entity, I think the test for existence is how it figures in scientific explanation but I think Platonists and non-Platonists are logically free to admit or deny tulpas existence.
Really? The ‘existence’ status of that kind of mental entity seems to be an orthogonal issue to what (I am guessing) you mean by Tegmarkian considerations.
Tegmarkia includes every possible arrangement of physical law, including forms of psycho-phsycial parallelism whereby what is thought automatically becomes real.
Ah, fair point. I went too far. Still, I’m dubious about conflating the logical and the physical definition of existence. But hey, go wild, it’s of no consequence.
Have you noticed that, although you and Jack have completely opposite (minimal and maxima) ontologies, you both have the same motivation, of avoiding “philosophising”. Well, I suppose “everything exists” and “nothing exists” both impose minimal cognitive burden—if you believe some non -trivial subset exists, you have to put effort into populating it.
I haven’t noticed that Jack has a motivation of “avoiding philosophizing”. And I don’t say that “nothing exists”, I just avoid the term as mostly vacuous, except in specific narrow cases, like math.
I can talk about a Highest Prime. Specifically, I can say it doesn’t exist.
Would a Platonist think that a tulpa exists?
I don’t think the hypothesis that there is an independent conscious person existing along with you in your mind (or whatever those people think they’re doing) is the best explanation for the experiences they’re describing. If they just want to use it as shorthand for a set of narratively consistent hallucination then I suppose I could be okay with saying a tulpa exists. But either way: I don’t think a tulpa is an abstract object. It’s a mental object like an imaginary friend or a hallucination. Like any entity, I think the test for existence is how it figures in scientific explanation but I think Platonists and non-Platonists are logically free to admit or deny tulpas existence.
A Tegmarkian would.
Really? The ‘existence’ status of that kind of mental entity seems to be an orthogonal issue to what (I am guessing) you mean by Tegmarkian considerations.
Tegmarkia includes every possible arrangement of physical law, including forms of psycho-phsycial parallelism whereby what is thought automatically becomes real.
Ah, fair point. I went too far. Still, I’m dubious about conflating the logical and the physical definition of existence. But hey, go wild, it’s of no consequence.
Have you noticed that, although you and Jack have completely opposite (minimal and maxima) ontologies, you both have the same motivation, of avoiding “philosophising”. Well, I suppose “everything exists” and “nothing exists” both impose minimal cognitive burden—if you believe some non -trivial subset exists, you have to put effort into populating it.
I haven’t noticed that Jack has a motivation of “avoiding philosophizing”. And I don’t say that “nothing exists”, I just avoid the term as mostly vacuous, except in specific narrow cases, like math.