T-Wave Systems offers the first commercial tulpa computing system on the market.
Our technology.
Like many profound advances, T-Wave’s revolutionary computing system combines two simple existing ideas in a nonlinear way with revolutionary consequences.
First, the crowdsourcing of complex intellectual tasks, by dividing them into simpler subtasks which can then be sourced to a competitive online marketplace of human beings. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is the best-known implementation of this idea.
Second, the creation of autonomous imaginary friends through advanced techniques of hallucination and autosuggestibility. Tulpa thoughtform technology was originally developed to a high level in Tibet, but has recently become available to the Internet generation.
Combining these two formerly disparate spheres of activity has produced… MechanicalTulpa [TM], the world’s first imaginary crowdsourcing resource! It’s no longer necessary to pay separately for each of the many subtasks making up a challenging intellectual task; our tulpameisters will spawn tulpas who, by design, want to get all those little details done.
MetaTulpa and the complexity barrier.
But MechanicalTulpa is good for far more than economizing on cost. The key lies in T-Wave’s proprietary recursive tulpa technology, whereby our tulpas themselves create tulpas, and so forth, potentially ad infinitum. This allows us to tackle problems, like the traveling sales-tulpa problem, which had hitherto been regarded as intractable on any reasonable timescale.
The consequences for your bottom line may be nothing short of dramatic. However, recursive tulpa technology is still in its early days, and at this time, we are therefore making it available only to special customers. For more information, please clearly visualize a scroll on which is written “Attention T. Lobsang Rampa, Akashic Records Division, T-Wave Systems”, followed by a statement of the nature of your interest. (T-Wave accepts no liability for communications lost in the astral mail.)
Once I had an idea for a sci-fi setting, about a society where it is possible to create a second personality in your brain. Just like tulpa, except that it is done using technology. Your second personality does not know about you, it thinks it is the only inhabitant of your brain. While your second personality acts, you can observe, or you can turn yourself off (like in sleep) and specify events that would wake you up (that automatically includes anything unusual). So for example, you use your second personality to do your work for you, while you sleep. That feels like being paid for sleeping 8 extra hours per workday, which is why it becomes popular.
When the work is over, you can take the control of the body. As the root personality, you can make choices about how the second personality perceives this; essentially you can give them false memories. You can just have fun, and decide your second personality will falsely remember it as them having fun. Of you can do something that your second personality will not know about (either will remember nothing, or some false memory: for example of spending the whole afternoon procrastinating online). This can be used if you want your second personality to be different than you so much that it would not agree with how you spend your free time. You can create a completely fictional life story for your second personality, to motivate it to work extra hard.
When this becomes popular, obviously your second personality (who doesn’t know it is the second personality) would possibly want their own second personality. But that would be a waste of resources! The typical hack is to edit the second personality’s beliefs to oppose this technology; for example you can make them believe to be a member of a religion that opposes it.
And the sci-fi story itself would obviously be about someone who finds out they are a second personality… presumably of an owner who does not mind them knowing. Or an owner who committed a mental suicide by replacing themselves by the second personality 100% of the time. But there is a chance that the owner is merely sleeping and waiting until some long-term goal is accomplished. The hero needs to discover their real past and figure out the original personality’s intentions...
Once I had an idea for a sci-fi setting, about a society where it is possible to create a second personality in your brain. Just like tulpa, except that it is done using technology.
Yes, Aristoi has high-status people with tulpas. IIRC, the purpose was access to a wider range of talents and more points of view, with no saving on sleep time.
There’s a shadow run book where the main character is a test case for this idea. She ends up becoming a highly paid bodyguard since she can be on call for much longer shifts with minimal downtime.
It’s called Tails You Lose. I think there’s a rest time of 30 minutes or something between the other consciousness waking up? The need for body rest is handled by cyborg tech.
My ideas of sci-fi story may be similar to yours; though they require some fleshing out.
In your story idea, does the second personality ever take physical control of your body? Can it physically go to work or should it be limited to working online, say via brain implant, while your body is sleeping? If the latter, how does it perceive its 8 hours of work? What happens if you suddenly wake up in the middle of the night?
What does it think it do during 16 hours of your uptime?
Can you directly communicate to your second personality? I guess, you can (like you’re supposed to do with a tulpa), but you don’t have to: you are the master personality and you can directly control their experience (this would be somewhat like servitor, I believe), right?
Anyone feel completely free to use any parts of what I wrote here, because I am absolutely not interested in writing that story anymore.
does the second personality ever take physical control of your body? Can it physically go to work
Yet. It is fully in control of the body (except that it does not know about the original personality, and the original personality can pause them at any time). Maybe some of your colleagues at work are like this, you never know. Or even outside of the work… just like people enjoy spending their time watching TV, they can find it interesting to create the second personality even for their free time and just observe it from inside.
Speaking from outside of the story—this creates much more opportunities. Think about the impact on the whole society; anyone you meet anywhere could be a virtual personality.
What does it think it do during 16 hours of your uptime?
False memories. Your choice. You have an equivalent of full hypnotic power over them. To avoid too much work with programming them every day, a reasonable default choice would be to make them remember everything but think that they did it.
Can you directly communicate to your second personality?
I didn’t think about it. My first answer would be no, because that would ruin the illusion that they are the real thing. -- However, choose the option that gives you better story.
Think about the impact on the whole society; anyone you meet anywhere could be a virtual personality.
That doesn’t seem to imply much. It’s still some distinct personality. What should have an impact is the fact that now there are two personalities inhabiting a single body at different times: when you meet me at daytime, it’s really me, but when you meet me at night—that’s a different person. Unless I’ve borked my “sleep” schedule and that’s still me; then I might be not-me at some time during the day. That should… take some getting used to.
Also, doesn’t the body need sleep, only a (part of the) brain?
What does it think it do during 16 hours of your uptime?
False memories. Your choice. You have an equivalent of full hypnotic power over them. To avoid too much work with programming them every day, a reasonable default choice would be to make them remember everything but think that they did it.
I see. It doesn’t make sense to make those memories too false, though, or the reality will take increasingly more effort to cover up. Suppose, I decide to start going to gym and conceal it from my alter-ego. Suddenly they will notice that their body started to bulk up for no apparent reason.
Once I had an idea for a sci-fi setting, about a society where it is possible to create a second personality in your brain. Just like tulpa, except that it is done using technology.
I don’t think science is synonymous with technology.
I personally found Inception quite awful to watch because it gets so much about what the relevelant phenomema are about so wrong.
Having guns and shooting yourself through enemies in a dream? Really?
There nothing that stops you in the real world from putting a person on drugs and successfully suggesting to them that they find themselves in a particular dreamworld. You don’t need some magical technology to do so.
If you explain things away with magical technology you aren’t really writing sci-fi but you are writing fantasy.
A book that reference real concepts such as tulpas and hypnosis will be much more exiting than a book that just answers all the interesting questions with a black box technology.
Of course that requires actual research and talking to people who play around with those effects, but to me that feels much better because the resulting dilemmas are much more authentic.
If you explain things away with magical technology you aren’t really writing sci-fi but you are writing fantasy.
What is your problem with a story where it is possible to create a second personality in your brain using technology? (let’s discuss just this story idea here, but not Inception, for clarity). As far as my understanding of the issue goes, tulpas are likely using their host’s mental resources in a way, so to create a second personality that is capable of independent work during host’s downtime, some kind of hardware upgrade for a host’s mind should be necessary.
I imagine the necessary mind upgrade should be similar to upgrading single-core CPU to single-core CPU with hyper-threading.
What is your problem with a story where it is possible to create a second personality in your brain using technology?
I think you likely ignorant about a lot of practical aspects that come up when one creates a second personality inside a person if you never talked to someone who dealt with the issue on a practical level.
I particularly don’t believe in the need to have a full persona that’s unaware of the host. I heard an anecdote on a hypnosis seminar about a hypnotherapist who created a secondary persona in a college student to help the student learn. Every morning the second persona would first wake up and learn. Then it went to sleep and after a hour the real person would wake up. I don’t remember the detail exactly but I think without a awareness of they exact memory of the morning.
But there was no issue of the second persona, not fulfilling the role. She was the role. The same goes for Tulpas. A Tulpa doesn’t go around disapproving of the host actions but is on a fundamental level accepting of the host. If there’s a real clash I doubt that censoring memories would be enough to prevent psychological harm.
so to create a second personality that is capable of independent work during host’s downtime, some kind of hardware upgrade for a host’s mind should be necessary.
We have reports of people sleep walking which you could label “independent work during host’s downtime”. Secondly to a point time spent in meditation usually reduces the need for sleep.
But there are probably still physical processes that you don’t want to skip so some limited time of real sleep is probably always important. But I don’t think Villiam suggested that people in his society effectively don’t sleep.
But MechanicalTulpa is good for far more than economizing on cost. The key lies in T-Wave’s proprietary recursive tulpa technology, whereby our tulpas themselves create tulpas, and so forth, potentially ad infinitum.
One day you talk with a bright young mathematician about a mathematical problem that’s been bothering you, and she suggests that it’s an easy consequence of a theorem in cohistonomical tomolopy. You haven’t heard of this theorem before, and find it rather surprising, so you ask for the proof.
“Well,” she says, “I’ve heard it from my tulpa.”
“Oh,” you say, “fair enough. Um—”
“Yes?”
“You’re sure that your tulpa checked it carefully, right?”
“Ah! Yeah, I made quite sure of that. In fact, I established very carefully that my tulpa uses exactly the same system of mathematical reasoning that I use myself, and only states theorems after she has checked the proof beyond any doubt, so as a rational agent I am compelled to accept anything as true that she’s convinced herself of.”
“Oh, I see! Well, fair enough. I’d still like to understand why this theorem is true, though. You wouldn’t happen to know your tulpa’s proof, would you?”
“Ah, as a matter of fact, I do! She’s heard it from her tulpa.”
″...”
“Something the matter?”
“Er, have you considered...”
“Oh! I’m glad you asked! In fact, I’ve been curious myself, and yes, it does happen to be the case that there’s an infinitely descending chain of tulpas all of which have established the truth of this theorem solely by having heard it from the previous tulpa in the chain.” (This parable takes place in a world without a big bang—tulpa history stretches infinitely far into the past.) “But never to worry—they’ve all checked very carefully that the previous tulpa in the chain used the same formal system as themselves. Of course, that was obvious by induction—my tulpa wouldn’t have accepted it from her tulpa without checking his reasoning first, and he would have accepted it from his tulpa without checking, etc.”
“Uh, doesn’t it bother you that nobody has ever, like, actually proven the theorem?”
“Whatever in the world are you talking about? I’ve proven it myself! In fact, I just told you that infinitely many tulpas have each proved it in slightly different ways—for example my own proof made use of the fact that my tulpa had proven the theorem, whereas her proof used her tulpa instead...”
Tulpa computing has arrived.
T-Wave Systems offers the first commercial tulpa computing system on the market.
Our technology.
Like many profound advances, T-Wave’s revolutionary computing system combines two simple existing ideas in a nonlinear way with revolutionary consequences.
First, the crowdsourcing of complex intellectual tasks, by dividing them into simpler subtasks which can then be sourced to a competitive online marketplace of human beings. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is the best-known implementation of this idea.
Second, the creation of autonomous imaginary friends through advanced techniques of hallucination and autosuggestibility. Tulpa thoughtform technology was originally developed to a high level in Tibet, but has recently become available to the Internet generation.
Combining these two formerly disparate spheres of activity has produced… MechanicalTulpa [TM], the world’s first imaginary crowdsourcing resource! It’s no longer necessary to pay separately for each of the many subtasks making up a challenging intellectual task; our tulpameisters will spawn tulpas who, by design, want to get all those little details done.
MetaTulpa and the complexity barrier.
But MechanicalTulpa is good for far more than economizing on cost. The key lies in T-Wave’s proprietary recursive tulpa technology, whereby our tulpas themselves create tulpas, and so forth, potentially ad infinitum. This allows us to tackle problems, like the traveling sales-tulpa problem, which had hitherto been regarded as intractable on any reasonable timescale.
The consequences for your bottom line may be nothing short of dramatic. However, recursive tulpa technology is still in its early days, and at this time, we are therefore making it available only to special customers. For more information, please clearly visualize a scroll on which is written “Attention T. Lobsang Rampa, Akashic Records Division, T-Wave Systems”, followed by a statement of the nature of your interest. (T-Wave accepts no liability for communications lost in the astral mail.)
T-Wave: Imagine the possibilities.
Once I had an idea for a sci-fi setting, about a society where it is possible to create a second personality in your brain. Just like tulpa, except that it is done using technology. Your second personality does not know about you, it thinks it is the only inhabitant of your brain. While your second personality acts, you can observe, or you can turn yourself off (like in sleep) and specify events that would wake you up (that automatically includes anything unusual). So for example, you use your second personality to do your work for you, while you sleep. That feels like being paid for sleeping 8 extra hours per workday, which is why it becomes popular.
When the work is over, you can take the control of the body. As the root personality, you can make choices about how the second personality perceives this; essentially you can give them false memories. You can just have fun, and decide your second personality will falsely remember it as them having fun. Of you can do something that your second personality will not know about (either will remember nothing, or some false memory: for example of spending the whole afternoon procrastinating online). This can be used if you want your second personality to be different than you so much that it would not agree with how you spend your free time. You can create a completely fictional life story for your second personality, to motivate it to work extra hard.
When this becomes popular, obviously your second personality (who doesn’t know it is the second personality) would possibly want their own second personality. But that would be a waste of resources! The typical hack is to edit the second personality’s beliefs to oppose this technology; for example you can make them believe to be a member of a religion that opposes it.
And the sci-fi story itself would obviously be about someone who finds out they are a second personality… presumably of an owner who does not mind them knowing. Or an owner who committed a mental suicide by replacing themselves by the second personality 100% of the time. But there is a chance that the owner is merely sleeping and waiting until some long-term goal is accomplished. The hero needs to discover their real past and figure out the original personality’s intentions...
IIRC Aristoi has something similar.
Yes, Aristoi has high-status people with tulpas. IIRC, the purpose was access to a wider range of talents and more points of view, with no saving on sleep time.
I stumbled over this reference to the ability to create duplicates of oneself and the problem that leads to:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/9cp/the_noddy_problem/
There’s a shadow run book where the main character is a test case for this idea. She ends up becoming a highly paid bodyguard since she can be on call for much longer shifts with minimal downtime.
It would be nice if you found its name. Doesn’t one’s body need rest?
It’s called Tails You Lose. I think there’s a rest time of 30 minutes or something between the other consciousness waking up? The need for body rest is handled by cyborg tech.
My ideas of sci-fi story may be similar to yours; though they require some fleshing out.
In your story idea, does the second personality ever take physical control of your body? Can it physically go to work or should it be limited to working online, say via brain implant, while your body is sleeping? If the latter, how does it perceive its 8 hours of work? What happens if you suddenly wake up in the middle of the night?
What does it think it do during 16 hours of your uptime?
Can you directly communicate to your second personality? I guess, you can (like you’re supposed to do with a tulpa), but you don’t have to: you are the master personality and you can directly control their experience (this would be somewhat like servitor, I believe), right?
Anyone feel completely free to use any parts of what I wrote here, because I am absolutely not interested in writing that story anymore.
Yet. It is fully in control of the body (except that it does not know about the original personality, and the original personality can pause them at any time). Maybe some of your colleagues at work are like this, you never know. Or even outside of the work… just like people enjoy spending their time watching TV, they can find it interesting to create the second personality even for their free time and just observe it from inside.
Speaking from outside of the story—this creates much more opportunities. Think about the impact on the whole society; anyone you meet anywhere could be a virtual personality.
False memories. Your choice. You have an equivalent of full hypnotic power over them. To avoid too much work with programming them every day, a reasonable default choice would be to make them remember everything but think that they did it.
I didn’t think about it. My first answer would be no, because that would ruin the illusion that they are the real thing. -- However, choose the option that gives you better story.
That doesn’t seem to imply much. It’s still some distinct personality. What should have an impact is the fact that now there are two personalities inhabiting a single body at different times: when you meet me at daytime, it’s really me, but when you meet me at night—that’s a different person. Unless I’ve borked my “sleep” schedule and that’s still me; then I might be not-me at some time during the day. That should… take some getting used to.
Also, doesn’t the body need sleep, only a (part of the) brain?
I see. It doesn’t make sense to make those memories too false, though, or the reality will take increasingly more effort to cover up. Suppose, I decide to start going to gym and conceal it from my alter-ego. Suddenly they will notice that their body started to bulk up for no apparent reason.
I don’t think science is synonymous with technology.
I personally found Inception quite awful to watch because it gets so much about what the relevelant phenomema are about so wrong.
Having guns and shooting yourself through enemies in a dream? Really?
There nothing that stops you in the real world from putting a person on drugs and successfully suggesting to them that they find themselves in a particular dreamworld. You don’t need some magical technology to do so.
If you explain things away with magical technology you aren’t really writing sci-fi but you are writing fantasy.
A book that reference real concepts such as tulpas and hypnosis will be much more exiting than a book that just answers all the interesting questions with a black box technology. Of course that requires actual research and talking to people who play around with those effects, but to me that feels much better because the resulting dilemmas are much more authentic.
What is your problem with a story where it is possible to create a second personality in your brain using technology? (let’s discuss just this story idea here, but not Inception, for clarity). As far as my understanding of the issue goes, tulpas are likely using their host’s mental resources in a way, so to create a second personality that is capable of independent work during host’s downtime, some kind of hardware upgrade for a host’s mind should be necessary.
I imagine the necessary mind upgrade should be similar to upgrading single-core CPU to single-core CPU with hyper-threading.
I think you likely ignorant about a lot of practical aspects that come up when one creates a second personality inside a person if you never talked to someone who dealt with the issue on a practical level.
I particularly don’t believe in the need to have a full persona that’s unaware of the host. I heard an anecdote on a hypnosis seminar about a hypnotherapist who created a secondary persona in a college student to help the student learn. Every morning the second persona would first wake up and learn. Then it went to sleep and after a hour the real person would wake up. I don’t remember the detail exactly but I think without a awareness of they exact memory of the morning.
But there was no issue of the second persona, not fulfilling the role. She was the role. The same goes for Tulpas. A Tulpa doesn’t go around disapproving of the host actions but is on a fundamental level accepting of the host. If there’s a real clash I doubt that censoring memories would be enough to prevent psychological harm.
We have reports of people sleep walking which you could label “independent work during host’s downtime”. Secondly to a point time spent in meditation usually reduces the need for sleep.
But there are probably still physical processes that you don’t want to skip so some limited time of real sleep is probably always important. But I don’t think Villiam suggested that people in his society effectively don’t sleep.
mistell; comment removed
One day you talk with a bright young mathematician about a mathematical problem that’s been bothering you, and she suggests that it’s an easy consequence of a theorem in cohistonomical tomolopy. You haven’t heard of this theorem before, and find it rather surprising, so you ask for the proof.
“Well,” she says, “I’ve heard it from my tulpa.”
“Oh,” you say, “fair enough. Um—”
“Yes?”
“You’re sure that your tulpa checked it carefully, right?”
“Ah! Yeah, I made quite sure of that. In fact, I established very carefully that my tulpa uses exactly the same system of mathematical reasoning that I use myself, and only states theorems after she has checked the proof beyond any doubt, so as a rational agent I am compelled to accept anything as true that she’s convinced herself of.”
“Oh, I see! Well, fair enough. I’d still like to understand why this theorem is true, though. You wouldn’t happen to know your tulpa’s proof, would you?”
“Ah, as a matter of fact, I do! She’s heard it from her tulpa.”
″...”
“Something the matter?”
“Er, have you considered...”
“Oh! I’m glad you asked! In fact, I’ve been curious myself, and yes, it does happen to be the case that there’s an infinitely descending chain of tulpas all of which have established the truth of this theorem solely by having heard it from the previous tulpa in the chain.” (This parable takes place in a world without a big bang—tulpa history stretches infinitely far into the past.) “But never to worry—they’ve all checked very carefully that the previous tulpa in the chain used the same formal system as themselves. Of course, that was obvious by induction—my tulpa wouldn’t have accepted it from her tulpa without checking his reasoning first, and he would have accepted it from his tulpa without checking, etc.”
“Uh, doesn’t it bother you that nobody has ever, like, actually proven the theorem?”
“Whatever in the world are you talking about? I’ve proven it myself! In fact, I just told you that infinitely many tulpas have each proved it in slightly different ways—for example my own proof made use of the fact that my tulpa had proven the theorem, whereas her proof used her tulpa instead...”
N.B.: The original dialogue by Benja_Fallenstein.