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In fact my personal view of tulpas is that they could be (and are 100 % experienced as) a "second consciousness" arising in the same body/mind organism
(not yet answering your current question)We can create parts or components within ourselves to intentionally perceive things inaccurately in order to overcome flaws in our brain's design or increase our effectiveness, but we need to maintain some portion of ourselves that perceives reality as accurately as we are able to if we want to continue to do so efficiently and not have things go "off the rails", if you will.
"Willful Inconsistency is the grown-up, scary version of Intentional Compartmentalization. It involves convincing System 1 wholly and entirely of something that System 2 does not actually believe. There's no compartmentalization and no fragmentation. There's nowhere to shove the incorrect belief when you're done with it. It's taken over the intuition, and it's always on. Willful Inconsistency is about having gut-level intuitive beliefs that you explicitly disavow."
Today, we're going to talk about Dark rationalist techniques: productivity tools
which seem incoherent, mad, and downright irrational. These techniques include:
1. Willful Inconsistency
2. Intentional Compartmentalization
3. Modifying Terminal Goals
I expect many of you a...
If we look at the common description that a tulpa is both experientially real, and can be imposed as an omnisensory "hallucination" or let's say imagination, we can understand that the body/mind system is in some sense no different
12:33 AM
The body/mind is both experienced as "real in an objective world", AND is a "character" in our conscious experience of life
12:33 AM
or let's say "avatar" if you like
12:34 AM
or even just "aspect" or feature of the experience
Heres the thing, yes it's super awesome that you can do sensory imposition and trick yourself into making things real in your own head. But if you don't maintain awareness that it is NOT actually based on any input coming in from reality, you might expect others to be able to see it or for it to interact with other things in the world, which obviously it cannot do.
Not to come off with a negative connotation, but it feels like this is all a lot of words that in essence are just saying we are able to fool ourselves.
words that in essence are just saying we are able to fool ourselves
My emphasis is more on the part that imposed tulpas are a real part of our experience even if the impositions don't exist in objective reality as experienced by outsiders
12:41 AM
We don't "fool ourselves" into creating imposed tulpas (even if not physically real) any more than we "fool ourselves" into experiencing the body/mind as being real in an objective world
12:42 AM
Yeah idk I might not really be able to find the language for what I'm trying to point at haha
We're effectively just talking about how you categorize or label the experience and not saying anything about what the experience IS. This is effectively the same thing I was saying when the conversation about gender came up the other day.
With imposition, I'd consider it a delusion if you thought it was physically real and not a mental image
Would it be more agreeable if I suggested that let's say full-blown hallucination and the world as experienced as objectively real exist on two extremes of a fluent spectrum? or would that be insulting haha
I would say that qualia, conscious experience of the world and our own minds, is metaphysical (beyond matter) in a way, but it's not in the realm of "we don't know if this is a thing or not"
We know perception, thought, imagination are things, we experience them everyday
12:51 AM
I'd say dreams are perceptions created by the brain during sleep, not a part of the physical world. On par with imagination and visualization, but we don't usually intentionally create the dream
Physical world perceptions are constructed by the mind, but they are based on input from nerve impulses from the external world
I agree 100 %, but I think the fact that our experience of the physical world as perceived by our body/mind is interdependent with consciousness (meaning they depend on each other) is not given enough credit
So I mean this framework is in the end about psychology, but I think even human psychologists don't fully recognize that the body/mind is never separate from Life and is effectively "lived" by Life in each moment (including our heartbeat, our breath, our digestive system etc)(edited)
lol "human psychologists" what am I even trying to say here?
1:02 AM
Okay so
1:02 AM
One way to describe it
1:03 AM
Is let's say I ask you to waggle your finger right now
1:03 AM
(please do it, for the sake of the argument lol)
1:03 AM
Right, you waggled your finger (we'll pretend that you did), it was a voluntary action
1:04 AM
But you only waggled your finger because I asked you to do it because of this conversation we're having, so in the end you waggling your finger wasn't really any more voluntary than you breathing or beating your heart
You could have chosen to ignore me 15 minutes ago, but here we are still talking. You're only having this conversation because we're responding to each other
1:06 AM
Yes it's voluntary and you could head out any second now
1:07 AM
But it's also a result of the circumstance you found yourself in, and your body/mind's preference to have these types of conversations with a guy whose avatar is a pink elephant(edited)
1:07 AM
It's "voluntary" (at least experientially), but it's also completely determined by your design, conditioning and circumstance
1:07 AM
It's both
1:08 AM
But the second aspect is unrecognized, and that's why we suffer (psychologically)
Btw even when this recognition (that is sometimes referred to as "enlightenment" or liberation) sets in, the feeling of free will remains an undeniable component of the experience
1:10 AM
We experience ourselves as human beings living in an objectively real world, there's no way around it
1:11 AM
But we can recognize that we're never separate from Life, and that we could never have acted differently, no one else could have either, and Life doesn't need to be all pleasure no pain in order for us to be happy
Yeah but it's like the willpower thing. Our willpower is inherently limited, but it depletes more slowly if we falsely believe that it is unlimited.
So willpower is not unlimited, but it is still useful to behave as though it is.
Free will is not so inherently different.
1:13 AM
Free will is honestly just in general poorly defined.
Like what do you even mean you willed your finger into waggling? Isn't it all neurons and muscles?
1:14 AM
Input: stranger asks you to waggle your finger, processing: do I really wanna waggle my finger, output: decision to ignore the stranger
1:16 AM
where's the free will in that process?
1:16 AM
somewhere between "processing" and "output"? does it only last like a split second?
1:17 AM
if the output is to waggle your fingers, is the free will kind of like a pilot inside your brain that sends the neurons down the nerves and makes the muscles move?
1:17 AM
You kinda see what I'm driving at?
1:19 AM
Like, are you your brain? is the brain the one that has free will?
I had the freedom of will to make that decision without coersion by other agents, e.g., I could ignore the request, but my "decision" to do so is still inherently determined based on other factors, it certainly is not random, which is why free will is a poorly defined concept.
1:25 AM
Inputs/determining factors which can include things like prior social chastisement/condemnation or praise for prior actions, which is why I said, it still is useful to behave as if it exists
Otherwise it inherently modifies people's behaviors by giving them the easy excuse of pretending that their behaviors were predetermined and not really up to them, as a way of ignoring said social condemnation/chastisement, etc
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