I have been interested in the phenomenon called tulpa. (interestingly, Wikipedia sheds next to no light on this issue).
According to one site, it is an “autosuggested and stable visualization, capable of independent thought and action, while possessing its own unique consciousness”. Supposedly, following the guides found on the internet, one can create a stable, persistent “imaginary friend”, with the looks and character one wants that will be real in all aspects for its creator. Some say that tulpa can provide an alternate viewpoint or help fetch information from their host’s memory, but various hosts disagree on the possibility of this.
Looks like tulpa in modern, Western definition has no connection to its Buddhist namesake (like karma on the forums). Some enthusiasts claim otherwise, but, as seems to be characteristic of this topic, there’s no evidence.
All I could find are guides and diaries of anonymous people on the Internet. It seems like the whole phenomenon, if it really exists, was invented some 1.5 years ago by some Anonymous: there’s their own slang, and absolutely no sources that connect the methods to any actual scientific research.
I suspect that the tulpa phenomenon may either:
not work (all cases of success might be explained by belief in belief; people might be adeptly fooling themselves and their peers, thinking up their imaginary friends and persuading everyone that their actions are autonomous)
be dangerous to one’s mental health (shouldn’t success here by itself be diagnosed as some kind of personality disorder?)
which is by itself a reason not to try it myself, but I have a nagging doubt: which one of the two is true, if any?
I’ve recently talked online, including by voice chat, with people who claim to have tulpas, and quickly ran out of useful questions to ask. I asked for interesting questions to a member of LW meetup group and he said
“it would be interesting to check tulpa’s autonomy, but because only its host can report its actions, I don’t see a way to do it. Maybe if I understood psychology of personality better, I couuld think up something”
Really, what else can one do? The people that I talked to seemed surprisingly unconcerned with using methods written by Anonymouses, lack of scientific evidence, status of the phenomena with regard to psychiatry or what comes for “evidence”, “proof” or “source”.
Can anyone help me to find answers for the following questions:
What interesting questions can I ask people who claim to have tulpas?
Are methods grounded in science in any way?
What is the position of science with regard to tulpas? Surely, if the phenomena exists, science must have encountered it and have a stance wrt. it, right?
It could be a good occasion for me to learn scientific research; any help with it would be appreciated: where should I start figuring out what, if any, does science know about this?
Luhrmann wrote a book, When God Talks Back, about her experiences with evangelicals, which might be useful. She also succeeded in inducing tulpa-like visions of Leland Stanford, jr. in experimental subjects.
You may also be interested in the earlier LW discussion about tulpas. Like I mentioned in the thread, they seem like an intentionally developed version of a thing that many writers have naturally—my guess would be that they use the normal circuitry that we have for emulating and predicting the behavior of other people, only they’re modelling a non-existent person and the outputs of that modeling get fed back in to be used as new input.
Edit: Still, at a glance, the 3 questions I’m asking this time, were not exactly asked in the linked discussion. So I welcome everyone to share their thoughts here.
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?
I have been interested in the phenomenon called tulpa. (interestingly, Wikipedia sheds next to no light on this issue).
According to one site, it is an “autosuggested and stable visualization, capable of independent thought and action, while possessing its own unique consciousness”. Supposedly, following the guides found on the internet, one can create a stable, persistent “imaginary friend”, with the looks and character one wants that will be real in all aspects for its creator. Some say that tulpa can provide an alternate viewpoint or help fetch information from their host’s memory, but various hosts disagree on the possibility of this.
Looks like tulpa in modern, Western definition has no connection to its Buddhist namesake (like karma on the forums). Some enthusiasts claim otherwise, but, as seems to be characteristic of this topic, there’s no evidence.
All I could find are guides and diaries of anonymous people on the Internet. It seems like the whole phenomenon, if it really exists, was invented some 1.5 years ago by some Anonymous: there’s their own slang, and absolutely no sources that connect the methods to any actual scientific research.
I suspect that the tulpa phenomenon may either:
not work (all cases of success might be explained by belief in belief; people might be adeptly fooling themselves and their peers, thinking up their imaginary friends and persuading everyone that their actions are autonomous)
be dangerous to one’s mental health (shouldn’t success here by itself be diagnosed as some kind of personality disorder?)
which is by itself a reason not to try it myself, but I have a nagging doubt: which one of the two is true, if any?
I’ve recently talked online, including by voice chat, with people who claim to have tulpas, and quickly ran out of useful questions to ask. I asked for interesting questions to a member of LW meetup group and he said
Really, what else can one do? The people that I talked to seemed surprisingly unconcerned with using methods written by Anonymouses, lack of scientific evidence, status of the phenomena with regard to psychiatry or what comes for “evidence”, “proof” or “source”.
Can anyone help me to find answers for the following questions:
What interesting questions can I ask people who claim to have tulpas?
Are methods grounded in science in any way?
What is the position of science with regard to tulpas? Surely, if the phenomena exists, science must have encountered it and have a stance wrt. it, right?
It could be a good occasion for me to learn scientific research; any help with it would be appreciated: where should I start figuring out what, if any, does science know about this?
There should really be full discussion post about this, since it keeps getting brought up.
EDIT: So I made one. If there isn’t interest, well, at least it’s spurred me to consolidate a bibliography
In addition to what I wrote in the other thread:
Luhrmann wrote a book, When God Talks Back, about her experiences with evangelicals, which might be useful. She also succeeded in inducing tulpa-like visions of Leland Stanford, jr. in experimental subjects.
The tulpa community also seems to have a fondness for amateur psychological research, although I imagine there’ll be a lot of chaff and unfinished projects in there.
I don’t know what questions you’ve already asked, but how about
What has your tulpa done that’s surprised you? What does your tulpa do that you can’t do when you’re in your default state?
You may also be interested in the earlier LW discussion about tulpas. Like I mentioned in the thread, they seem like an intentionally developed version of a thing that many writers have naturally—my guess would be that they use the normal circuitry that we have for emulating and predicting the behavior of other people, only they’re modelling a non-existent person and the outputs of that modeling get fed back in to be used as new input.
Oops, I didn’t see that. Thanks.
Edit: Still, at a glance, the 3 questions I’m asking this time, were not exactly asked in the linked discussion. So I welcome everyone to share their thoughts here.
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?