What is the position of science with regard to tulpas? Surely, if the phenomena exists, science must have encountered it an d have a stance wrt. it, right?
There no such thing as a position of science. Science is a process.
As far as Tuplas go, Tulpas are mainly about qualia. Qualia are by their nature but directly measureable. As a result a lot of scientists do shun research of qualia. Orthodox reductionists do try to explain qualia away whenever they can instead of trying to investigate them.
Western scientific education doesn’t train it’s scientists do be in control of their minds and that means that most they can’t run experiments that require mental control and good awareness of their own minds.
They can invite some buddhist monk and investigate how that monk does his thing, but that doesn’t allow for easy controlled experiments.
In that area even the easy questions seem to have little scientific investigation. Take heat development during particular types of meditation.
Ten years ago a scientists would have looked strangly at you for suggesting for heat development without movement but now we do know that the body can in principle do this in brown fat tissue.
There some small experiments that illustrate that a specific Tibetian technique can consistently produce heat but there no general science based theory that predicts when you would expect someone who meditate develops heat. It’s even not clear whether it’s really produced in brown fat tissue because adults have little of it.
Present thinking in medicine is rather: “How can we develop a drug that stimulates brown fat tissue to be active to help people lose weight?”
Tulpa need around 6 months of hard focused mental practice of 1 hours per day. That not something that you usually study in scientific studies.
If you look at another recent controversy on Lesswrong we even disagree whether mainstream science knows what losing weight is about. There a lot more scientific effort going into that question but it still isn’t conclusively answered.
If you are looking at far out mental phenomena there no reason to expect that they are well investigated by scientists.
Finding a person who hallucinates is pretty easy. You go to your nearest asylum and go through the patients and you will usually find someone who has hallucinations.
As luck would have it the patients are also bound for years to a specific location and might have no possibilty to opt out of your study.
Finding people as test subjects who spent halve a year doing a hard mental practice is harder. Experiments that require that you have test subjects who spend a lot of time on a hard mental practice are much easier to do.
At a glance, science seems pretty well informed about hallucinations.
The page you linked to doesn’t provide evidence that indicates that science is well informed about the issue. It doesn’t illustrate that scientific theories are able to make reliable predictions about hallucinations.
One of the examples about which the wikipedia article talks is a unreplicated 13 person experiment with 5 days duration. It talks about is as “strong support” for an idea.
It says “There are few treatments for many types of hallucinations.” You can translate that into the acknowledgement that the phenomena isn’t well enough understood to effectively modify it in the way you want.
The third way to check whether someone understands something is to check with your own empirical experience. I unfortunately don’t have much experience with hallucinations that go beyond things like the optional illusion where every normal viewer hallucinates that wheels turn.
I do have some experiences I had after spending 5 days in an artificial coma. One of them is a state where what I see visually doesn’t change when I close my eyes. I know of descriptions of other people who experienced the same thing.
Can you find a mainstream science description of that visual hallucination?
There no such thing as a position of science. Science is a process.
As far as Tuplas go, Tulpas are mainly about qualia. Qualia are by their nature but directly measureable. As a result a lot of scientists do shun research of qualia. Orthodox reductionists do try to explain qualia away whenever they can instead of trying to investigate them.
Western scientific education doesn’t train it’s scientists do be in control of their minds and that means that most they can’t run experiments that require mental control and good awareness of their own minds.
They can invite some buddhist monk and investigate how that monk does his thing, but that doesn’t allow for easy controlled experiments.
In that area even the easy questions seem to have little scientific investigation. Take heat development during particular types of meditation.
Ten years ago a scientists would have looked strangly at you for suggesting for heat development without movement but now we do know that the body can in principle do this in brown fat tissue.
There some small experiments that illustrate that a specific Tibetian technique can consistently produce heat but there no general science based theory that predicts when you would expect someone who meditate develops heat. It’s even not clear whether it’s really produced in brown fat tissue because adults have little of it.
Present thinking in medicine is rather: “How can we develop a drug that stimulates brown fat tissue to be active to help people lose weight?”
Tulpa need around 6 months of hard focused mental practice of 1 hours per day. That not something that you usually study in scientific studies.
If you look at another recent controversy on Lesswrong we even disagree whether mainstream science knows what losing weight is about. There a lot more scientific effort going into that question but it still isn’t conclusively answered.
If you are looking at far out mental phenomena there no reason to expect that they are well investigated by scientists.
Aren’t hallucinations about qualia? At a glance, science seems pretty well informed about hallucinations. What’s the important difference?
What makes tulpas significantly more far out than hallucinations?
Finding a person who hallucinates is pretty easy. You go to your nearest asylum and go through the patients and you will usually find someone who has hallucinations.
As luck would have it the patients are also bound for years to a specific location and might have no possibilty to opt out of your study.
Finding people as test subjects who spent halve a year doing a hard mental practice is harder. Experiments that require that you have test subjects who spend a lot of time on a hard mental practice are much easier to do.
The page you linked to doesn’t provide evidence that indicates that science is well informed about the issue. It doesn’t illustrate that scientific theories are able to make reliable predictions about hallucinations. One of the examples about which the wikipedia article talks is a unreplicated 13 person experiment with 5 days duration. It talks about is as “strong support” for an idea.
It says “There are few treatments for many types of hallucinations.” You can translate that into the acknowledgement that the phenomena isn’t well enough understood to effectively modify it in the way you want.
The third way to check whether someone understands something is to check with your own empirical experience. I unfortunately don’t have much experience with hallucinations that go beyond things like the optional illusion where every normal viewer hallucinates that wheels turn.
I do have some experiences I had after spending 5 days in an artificial coma. One of them is a state where what I see visually doesn’t change when I close my eyes. I know of descriptions of other people who experienced the same thing. Can you find a mainstream science description of that visual hallucination?