Since a tulpa doesn’t get its own hardware, it seems likely that hosting one would degrade my original performance. Everyone says this doesn’t happen, but I think it’d be very difficult to detect this, especially for someone who isn’t already trained in rationality.
I think you might be overlooking something here. I get the impression a lot of thought is consciously directed, and also that a lot of people probably don’t… diversify their workload enough to make full use of their resources. IIRC, we can measure a person’s caloric efficiency, and people consume more when doing difficult intellectual work. We evolved to conserve energy by not constantly being in that mode, but we no longer have to conserve energy like that, food is cheap. Having more than one locus of consciousness might just result in more useful work overall being done.
In myself, I do get the impression that sometimes nothing useful is really happening in the background. I can consciously start useful cogitation, but I have to focus on it, and I’m easily distracted. This is pretty crap. If there’s a way I can get those resources put to something useful (IE, by creating tulpas with a personal focus on solving interesting design problems), I’d want to do it. In the least, it would be really nice if I could navigate traffic or talk to a friend without forgetting completely ceasing all creative cogitation. It would be nice if there were a part of me that always cared and was always pushing it forward.
Even though I haven’t been thinking about this from a perspective of tulpamancy or IFS at all, I think I might be part of the way there already, I find I frequently get served ideas completely unrelated to what I’m doing in the moment. This process might be more efficient if I were more accepting of a stronger division between the outward-facing consciousness and the inner problemsolver. The more entangled we demand those processes be, the more they are going to trip each other up. The less parallel they can be.
An informed approach might involve identifying the aspects of thought that can bear concurrent processes, the parts that can’t, and designing the division around that.
I think you might be overlooking something here. I get the impression a lot of thought is consciously directed, and also that a lot of people probably don’t… diversify their workload enough to make full use of their resources. IIRC, we can measure a person’s caloric efficiency, and people consume more when doing difficult intellectual work. We evolved to conserve energy by not constantly being in that mode, but we no longer have to conserve energy like that, food is cheap. Having more than one locus of consciousness might just result in more useful work overall being done.
In myself, I do get the impression that sometimes nothing useful is really happening in the background. I can consciously start useful cogitation, but I have to focus on it, and I’m easily distracted. This is pretty crap. If there’s a way I can get those resources put to something useful (IE, by creating tulpas with a personal focus on solving interesting design problems), I’d want to do it. In the least, it would be really nice if I could navigate traffic or talk to a friend without forgetting completely ceasing all creative cogitation. It would be nice if there were a part of me that always cared and was always pushing it forward.
Even though I haven’t been thinking about this from a perspective of tulpamancy or IFS at all, I think I might be part of the way there already, I find I frequently get served ideas completely unrelated to what I’m doing in the moment. This process might be more efficient if I were more accepting of a stronger division between the outward-facing consciousness and the inner problemsolver. The more entangled we demand those processes be, the more they are going to trip each other up. The less parallel they can be.
An informed approach might involve identifying the aspects of thought that can bear concurrent processes, the parts that can’t, and designing the division around that.