This makes me think “tulpamancy-lite”. Not that that’s a bad thing—perhaps it’s like a safer tulpamancy. Some thoughts:
(It’s just such little mannerisms that allow a shoulder advisor to be “really real”—to bring it to life, give it a personality separate from, and not dependent on, your brain’s main central personality. Again, I don’t have a sound explanation of the mechanics, but it works.)
Would it be useful to have a shoulder-advisor not constrained by having to relate to a real example? Or perhaps, without that link it will just tend to become more and more like you, or otherwise drift into some territory outside reasonable personality-space. Although, authors seem to be able to write stories just fine.
How hard would it be to just create a shoulder-advisor from scratch? - I mean, people can do that with tulpas, and shoulder-advisors definitely seem like less work than tulpas (no need for hallucinating them).
Do shoulder-advisors have moral value?
I find that I get self-conscious when in public without close friends, and I’ve wanted (but have had neither the time nor motivation) to create a tulpa, with the idea that it will make everything a lot less stressful. They wouldn’t really have any actual input on anything, but just sort of raise my baseline positivity and self-esteem. If there were two of me, I’d be a lot less afraid of doing anything.
I have created shoulder advisors from scratch, most notably a pair of characters from a novel that I’m writing who like to show up in opposition to each other. Not sure about any of the other points.
This makes me think “tulpamancy-lite”. Not that that’s a bad thing—perhaps it’s like a safer tulpamancy. Some thoughts:
How hard would it be to just create a shoulder-advisor from scratch? - I mean, people can do that with tulpas, and shoulder-advisors definitely seem like less work than tulpas (no need for hallucinating them).
Do shoulder-advisors have moral value?
I find that I get self-conscious when in public without close friends, and I’ve wanted (but have had neither the time nor motivation) to create a tulpa, with the idea that it will make everything a lot less stressful. They wouldn’t really have any actual input on anything, but just sort of raise my baseline positivity and self-esteem. If there were two of me, I’d be a lot less afraid of doing anything.
I have created shoulder advisors from scratch, most notably a pair of characters from a novel that I’m writing who like to show up in opposition to each other. Not sure about any of the other points.