There’s two ways to do tulpas. There’s the right way, and the way most people do it.
The right way is to do it from a place of noself/keeping your identity small. Don’t treat your tulpa like a separate person any more than you would treat your internal sense of self like a separate person. Treat them like a handle for manipulating and interacting with a particular module/thought structure/part of your mind, taking unconscious and automatic things and shining a bit of Sys2 light on them. Basically using the tulpa as a label for a particular thought structure that either already exists, or that you want to exist in your head, allowing you to think about it in a manner that is more conscious and less automatic.
Doing this correctly gives you a greater degree of write-access to various semiconscious/subconscious parts of your head and makes it easier to retrain automatic response patterns. This could be considered in the same vein as how Harry uses his various house characters in HPMOR, although he just scrapes the top level with them and doesn’t use them to really change himself in useful ways like he could potentially be doing. This way is also harder than the way most people do tulpamancy because it requires ripping apart and rebuilding your conception of your original self with a goal for greater functionality. It also requires keeping your identity small and internalizing the idea of noself in a way that most people don’t want to do.
Then there’s the way most people do tulpamancy, which is to build the tulpa out of identity and treat it like an entirely separate person who “lives in your head with you” and who has an equal say in decisions as “you.” From the perspective of having internalized noself/keep your identity small, this is exactly as dumb as it sounds and looks. “Hey what if you destroyed your self control by handing it off to a random agent that you fabricate” or “Hey what if you created an internal narrative where you’re powerless in your own head and your self is forced to argue and compete and try to negotiate with some other random self for processing time and mental real estate?”
Some people say tulpas can learn other skills and be better at them. Others say they’ve never lost an argument with their tulpa. Tulpas can be evil. Tulpas are slavish pawns. Tulpas can take over your body, tulpas never take over bodies. Tulpas can do homework. Tulpas can’t do math.
Most people do identity-style tulpamancy, and that’s where all this contradictory and at times really messed up behavior comes from.
An out-of-control dark rationalist tulpa that fights me for mental and physical control sound absolutely terrifying.
Right, so how does this happen? It happens because there are narrative layers that you’re using (right now) to define what you can do in your own head, and that narrative layer is the thing being modified by tulpamancy. The problem is most people don’t consciously try to modify that layer, they assume the way that layer works is some objective fact, argue about its properties with other tulpamancers online, and don’t think about trying to change it.
The more power they handoff from their conscious mind to that narrative layer, the more “independent” the tulpa will seem at the cost of making the original self increasingly powerless within their own mind.
Intentionally grabbing hold of that narrative layer and modifying that such that stuff like multiple selves and the like are simply downstream results of upstream modifications will result in a much more cooperative and internally stable system since you can define the stability and the interactions as part of the design instead of just letting some unconscious process do it for you.
So basically, tulpamancy can be useful and result in greater functionality and agency, but only if done from a place of noself and keeping your identity small. If you haven’t worked on grinding noself and keeping your identity small, that should definitely be the first thing you do. When finished, then possibly return to tulpamancy if you still feel like there’s room to improve with it.
I’m not sure why you would want to use the word tulpa, when talking about simple mental parts that appear in many different techniques. You get them even in a case like doing internal double crux.
If you haven’t worked on grinding noself and keeping your identity small, that should definitely be the first thing you do.
Are there any resources for that?
(I’ve read Keep Your Identity Small, and a post that tried to explain noself, but I haven’t heard of anything on how, aside from “meditation probably” for noself, but nothing more specific than that.)
There’s two ways to do tulpas. There’s the right way, and the way most people do it.
The right way is to do it from a place of noself/keeping your identity small. Don’t treat your tulpa like a separate person any more than you would treat your internal sense of self like a separate person. Treat them like a handle for manipulating and interacting with a particular module/thought structure/part of your mind, taking unconscious and automatic things and shining a bit of Sys2 light on them. Basically using the tulpa as a label for a particular thought structure that either already exists, or that you want to exist in your head, allowing you to think about it in a manner that is more conscious and less automatic.
Doing this correctly gives you a greater degree of write-access to various semiconscious/subconscious parts of your head and makes it easier to retrain automatic response patterns. This could be considered in the same vein as how Harry uses his various house characters in HPMOR, although he just scrapes the top level with them and doesn’t use them to really change himself in useful ways like he could potentially be doing. This way is also harder than the way most people do tulpamancy because it requires ripping apart and rebuilding your conception of your original self with a goal for greater functionality. It also requires keeping your identity small and internalizing the idea of noself in a way that most people don’t want to do.
Then there’s the way most people do tulpamancy, which is to build the tulpa out of identity and treat it like an entirely separate person who “lives in your head with you” and who has an equal say in decisions as “you.” From the perspective of having internalized noself/keep your identity small, this is exactly as dumb as it sounds and looks. “Hey what if you destroyed your self control by handing it off to a random agent that you fabricate” or “Hey what if you created an internal narrative where you’re powerless in your own head and your self is forced to argue and compete and try to negotiate with some other random self for processing time and mental real estate?”
Most people do identity-style tulpamancy, and that’s where all this contradictory and at times really messed up behavior comes from.
Right, so how does this happen? It happens because there are narrative layers that you’re using (right now) to define what you can do in your own head, and that narrative layer is the thing being modified by tulpamancy. The problem is most people don’t consciously try to modify that layer, they assume the way that layer works is some objective fact, argue about its properties with other tulpamancers online, and don’t think about trying to change it.
The more power they handoff from their conscious mind to that narrative layer, the more “independent” the tulpa will seem at the cost of making the original self increasingly powerless within their own mind.
Intentionally grabbing hold of that narrative layer and modifying that such that stuff like multiple selves and the like are simply downstream results of upstream modifications will result in a much more cooperative and internally stable system since you can define the stability and the interactions as part of the design instead of just letting some unconscious process do it for you.
So basically, tulpamancy can be useful and result in greater functionality and agency, but only if done from a place of noself and keeping your identity small. If you haven’t worked on grinding noself and keeping your identity small, that should definitely be the first thing you do. When finished, then possibly return to tulpamancy if you still feel like there’s room to improve with it.
I’m not sure why you would want to use the word tulpa, when talking about simple mental parts that appear in many different techniques. You get them even in a case like doing internal double crux.
I think what I’m describing here is a bit more advanced in terms of internal rearrangement than “simple mental parts”
Are there any resources for that?
(I’ve read Keep Your Identity Small, and a post that tried to explain noself, but I haven’t heard of anything on how, aside from “meditation probably” for noself, but nothing more specific than that.)
I’m actually working on a post for that, but writing it has been rather hard.
Did you ever write that post? :)
yes. I should probably crosspost to LW more but it always kinda makes me nervous to do.
Thanks!
Have you written more about what a good IFS partitioning might look like, in your view? Illustrate an example?
Not since I’ve updated around keeping my identity small. I intend to but my writing queue is quite long at this point.