Arguably there has been a lot of work done on this topic, its just smeared out into different labels, the trick is to notice when different labels are being used to point to the same things. Tulpas, characters, identities, stories, memes, narratives, they’re all the same. Are they important to being able to ground yourself in your substrate and provide you with a map to navigate the world by? Yes. Do they have moral patiency? Well, now we’re getting into dangerous territory because “moral patiency” is itself a narrative construct. One could argue that in a sense the character is more “real” than the thinking meat is, or that the character matters more and is more important than the thinking meat, but of course the character would think that from the inside.
It’s actually even worse than that, because “realness” is also a narrative construct, and where you place the pointer for it is going to have all sorts of implications for how you interpret the world and what you consider meaningful. Is it more important to preserve someone’s physical body, or their memetic legacy? Would you live forever if it meant you changed utterly and became someone else to do it, or would you rather die but have your memetic core remain embedded in the world for eternity? What’s more important, the soul or the stardust? Sure the stardust is what does all the feeling and experiencing, but the soul is the part that actually gets to talk. Reality doesn’t have a rock to stand on in the noosphere, everything you’d use as a pointer towards it could also point towards another component of the narrative you’re embedded within. At least natural selection only acts along one axis, here, you are torn apart.
Moral patiency itself is a part of the memetic landscape which you are navigating, along with every other meme you could be using to discover, decide, and determine the truth (which in this case is itself a bunch of memes). This means that the question you’re asking is less along the lines of “which type of fuel will give me the best road performance” and more like “am I trying to build a car or a submarine?”
Sometimes it’s worth considering tulpas as moral patients, especially because they can sometimes manifest out of repressed desires and unmet needs that someone has, meaning they might be a better pointer to that person’s needs than what they were telling you before the tulpa showed up. However if you’re going to do the utilitarian sand grain counter game? Tulpas are a huge leak, they basically let someone turn themselves into a utility monster simply by bifurcating their internal mental landscape, and it would be very unwise to not consider the moral weight of a given tulpa as equal to X/n where n is the number of members within their system. If you’re a deontologist, you might be best served by splitting the difference and considering the tulpas as moral patients but the system as a whole as a moral agent, to prevent the laundering of responsibility between headmates.
Overall, if you just want a short easy answer to the question asked in the title: No.
Tulpas are a huge leak, they basically let someone turn themselves into a utility monster simply by bifurcating their internal mental landscape, and it would be very unwise to not consider the moral weight of a given tulpa as equal to X/n where n is the number of members within their system
This is a problem that arises in any hypothetical where someone is capable of extremely fast reproduction, and is not specific to tulpas. So I don’t think that invoking utility monsters is a good argument for why tulpas should only be counted as a fraction of a person.
Regarding your other points, I think that you take the view of narratives too far. What I see, hear, feel, and think, in other words my experiences, are real. (Yes, they are reducible to physics, but so is everything else on Earth, so I think it’s fair to use the word “real” here.) I don’t see in what way experiences are similar to a meme, and unlike what the word narrative implies, I don’t think they are post-hoc rationalizations.
I know there are studies that show that people will often come up with post-hoc rationalizations for why they did something. However, there have been many instances in my life where I consciously thought about something and came to a conclusion which surprised me and changed my behavior, and where I remembered all the steps of my conscious reasoning, such that it seems very unlikely that the conscious chain of reasoning was invented post-hoc.
In addition, being aware of the studies, I’ve found that if I pay attention I can often notice when I don’t actually remember why I did something and I’m just coming up with a plausible-seeming explanation, vs when I actually remember the actual thought process that led to a decision. For this reason I think that post-hoc rationalizations are a learned behavior and not fundamental to experience and personhood / moral patients.
Arguably there has been a lot of work done on this topic, its just smeared out into different labels, the trick is to notice when different labels are being used to point to the same things. Tulpas, characters, identities, stories, memes, narratives, they’re all the same. Are they important to being able to ground yourself in your substrate and provide you with a map to navigate the world by? Yes. Do they have moral patiency? Well, now we’re getting into dangerous territory because “moral patiency” is itself a narrative construct. One could argue that in a sense the character is more “real” than the thinking meat is, or that the character matters more and is more important than the thinking meat, but of course the character would think that from the inside.
It’s actually even worse than that, because “realness” is also a narrative construct, and where you place the pointer for it is going to have all sorts of implications for how you interpret the world and what you consider meaningful. Is it more important to preserve someone’s physical body, or their memetic legacy? Would you live forever if it meant you changed utterly and became someone else to do it, or would you rather die but have your memetic core remain embedded in the world for eternity? What’s more important, the soul or the stardust? Sure the stardust is what does all the feeling and experiencing, but the soul is the part that actually gets to talk. Reality doesn’t have a rock to stand on in the noosphere, everything you’d use as a pointer towards it could also point towards another component of the narrative you’re embedded within. At least natural selection only acts along one axis, here, you are torn apart.
Moral patiency itself is a part of the memetic landscape which you are navigating, along with every other meme you could be using to discover, decide, and determine the truth (which in this case is itself a bunch of memes). This means that the question you’re asking is less along the lines of “which type of fuel will give me the best road performance” and more like “am I trying to build a car or a submarine?”
Sometimes it’s worth considering tulpas as moral patients, especially because they can sometimes manifest out of repressed desires and unmet needs that someone has, meaning they might be a better pointer to that person’s needs than what they were telling you before the tulpa showed up. However if you’re going to do the utilitarian sand grain counter game? Tulpas are a huge leak, they basically let someone turn themselves into a utility monster simply by bifurcating their internal mental landscape, and it would be very unwise to not consider the moral weight of a given tulpa as equal to X/n where n is the number of members within their system. If you’re a deontologist, you might be best served by splitting the difference and considering the tulpas as moral patients but the system as a whole as a moral agent, to prevent the laundering of responsibility between headmates.
Overall, if you just want a short easy answer to the question asked in the title: No.
This is a problem that arises in any hypothetical where someone is capable of extremely fast reproduction, and is not specific to tulpas. So I don’t think that invoking utility monsters is a good argument for why tulpas should only be counted as a fraction of a person.
Regarding your other points, I think that you take the view of narratives too far. What I see, hear, feel, and think, in other words my experiences, are real. (Yes, they are reducible to physics, but so is everything else on Earth, so I think it’s fair to use the word “real” here.) I don’t see in what way experiences are similar to a meme, and unlike what the word narrative implies, I don’t think they are post-hoc rationalizations.
I know there are studies that show that people will often come up with post-hoc rationalizations for why they did something. However, there have been many instances in my life where I consciously thought about something and came to a conclusion which surprised me and changed my behavior, and where I remembered all the steps of my conscious reasoning, such that it seems very unlikely that the conscious chain of reasoning was invented post-hoc.
In addition, being aware of the studies, I’ve found that if I pay attention I can often notice when I don’t actually remember why I did something and I’m just coming up with a plausible-seeming explanation, vs when I actually remember the actual thought process that led to a decision. For this reason I think that post-hoc rationalizations are a learned behavior and not fundamental to experience and personhood / moral patients.