This is an area that I think is so bad that it should probably be banned from the community. In practice, getting into “tulpamancy” strongly correlates in my experience with going into unproductive and unstable states—it’s at the point where if someone tells me that they have been looking into this area, I consider it a major red flag.
If LW’s stance on tulpas was a hard ban, I would have proceeded with my own experimentation. I’m here because I need to become stronger. Bowing down to authority every time someone tells me not to do something isn’t going to accomplish that.
That said, I’m interested in warnings that consist of more than a vague “this is bad”. After all, that’s part of why I posted here.
I imagine one of the cases Davis is thinking of is the same one I’m familiar with. Someone we know started experimenting with tulpas and became visibly more unstable, then shortly thereafter had a schizophrenic break and tried to kill someone, and has now been in federal prison for several years. Someone who had been working with them on tulpas then spent at least a year in an “unproductive and unstable state”, addicted to drugs etc. I know very little about tulpas themselves but knowledge of that situation makes me agree with Davis that tulpamancy is a major red flag.
That’s definitely concerning. On the other hand, there’s lots of people who don’t have that sort of side effect (and several in this thread), so I think it’s kind of rare… but perhaps this sort of result gets swept under the rug? Though, I wouldn’t predict that in advance—I’d expect it to blow up everywhere.
I’m not really sure what to think. Part of me wants to brush this off as a fluke and say that I would never break down like that but this is a failure mode that I hadn’t even considered and that makes me nervous.
Do you know if there were any factors that would have contributed to that incident? Like them already being a little schizophrenic or something along those lines?
If you had not even considered the possibility of breaking your brain in the process of trying to develop a second person, you need to step back and think more before proceeding. This failure mode should be one of the first that pops into your head, without even trying to think of novel failure modes. Right alongside intense meditation, psychedelics, etc.
I think the referent of Guy’s “this failure mode” was “breaking your brain”, not “committing murder.” This comment seemed to me like an unnecessary strawman :(
I was referring to your earlier comment, re: a schizophrenic break, etc. “Breaking your brain” sounds like permanent damage, and it is not obvious why (or how) mental activity could have effects like lead poisoning, or what differentiates mental activities that are supposedly “potentially destabilizing” from those that are not.
I agree it might have been too specific/shorten the causal chain unnecessarily:
(Potentially) Destabilizing Activity → Worse Mental Health, etc. → More likely to do crime, drugs, etc.
Sure. Seems extremely unlikely IMO. But if you’re deliberately trying to change how your brain thinks at a fundamental level rather than training an overlay like we do when learning math or something and letting that trickle down or however it usually works, you might succeed at changing but fail at direction. This is an obvious failure mode to at least consider before beginning. e.g. http://meditatinginsafety.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Kuijpers_2007.pdf
I’m no doctor or anything, but my understanding is that only people with a genetic predisposition can develop actual schizophrenia. Schizophrenia usually first manifests in a person’s twenties, if it’s going to manifest, but it’s not a sure thing – there are certain precautions you can take to make it less likely that it will develop. For example, I have a friend whose mom is schizophrenic, and he’s really careful to avoid hard drugs and other intensely mind-altering practices. So if you have anyone in your family with a history of schizophrenia, I’d be extra careful with tulpamancy.
On the other hand, there are lots of mental illnesses that don’t seem to require a family history – again, this is way outside of my realm of knowledge, but anecdotally, it seems like just about anyone can develop severe depression, hypomania, or a destructive drug habit, given the right circumstances. So if nothing else, I’d advise you to proceed with a whole lot of caution.
As for the point about getting swept under the rug: I have no familiarity with the discussion that goes on in circles that are interested in tulpamancy, but if it’s primarily self-reports, well, people who are imprisoned, dead, or severely mentally compromised wouldn’t be able to report on their status. I think I might sound like I’m trying to scare you – I guess maybe I am? It just seems really important to me to tread carefully around tulpas.
Bowing down to authority every time someone tells me not to do something isn’t going to accomplish that.
Not if applied across the board like that, no. At the same time, a child who ignores his parents’ vague warnings about playing in the street is likely to become much weaker or nonexistent for it, not stronger. You have to be able to dismiss people as posers when they lack the wisdom to justify their advice and be able to act on opaque advice from people who see things you don’t. Both exist, and neither blind submission nor blind rebellion make for successful strategies.
An important and often missed aspect of this is that not all good models are easily transferable and therefore not all good advice will be something you can easily understand for yourself. Sometimes, especially when things are complicated (as the psychology of human minds can be), the only thing that can be effectively communicated within the limitations is an opaque “this is bad, stay away”—and in those cases you have no choice but to evaluate the credibility of the person making these claims and decide whether or not this specific “authority” making this specific claim is worth taking seriously even before you can understand the “why” behind it. Whether you want to want to heed or ignore the warnings here is up to you, but keep in mind that there is a right and wrong answer, and that the cost of being wrong in one direction isn’t the same as the other. A good heuristic which I like to go by and which you might want to consider is to refrain from discounting advice until you can pass the intellectual Turing test of the person who is offering it. That way, you can know that when you choose to experiment with things deemed risky, you’re at least doing it informed of the potential risks.
FWIW, I think the best argument against spending effort on tulpas isn’t the risk but just the complete lack of reward relative to doing the same things without spending time and effort on “wrapping paper” which can do nothing but impede. You’re hardware hours limited anyway, and so if your “tulpa” is going to become an expert in chess it will be with eye/hand/brain hours that you could have used becoming an expert in chess yourself. If your tulpa is going to have important wisdom to offer by virtue of holding different perspectives, those perspectives will be generated with brain time you could have used generating those perspectives for yourself. There’s no rule saying people can’t specialize in more than one thing or be more than uni-dimensional, it’s just a question of where you want to spend your limited hours.
I will point out that making a habit of distrusting authorities is what led me to rationality.
Perhaps I have applied that lesson too broadly though, especially on here where people are more reliable. When I read OP’s comment, I automatically assumed that they were having a knee-jerk reaction to something cloaked in mystical language. I was wrong about that.
I think that your heuristic is a good one. It resolves a problem that I’ve noticed lately, where I tend to make mistakes because I think I have a way to improve a situation but I’m missing some piece of information.
And I’ve decided against pursuing tulpamancy. The damaging side effects concern me, even if they’re infrequent, and your best argument pretty much sums up the rest of how I feel. I see now that I was excited about the possibilities of tulpas and failed to apply the same demands for rigor that I would normally apply to such an unusual concept.
I just wanted to say I’m really impressed with your level-headed discussion, your ability to notice your own mistakes, and your willingness to change your mind (not just about pursuing tulpamancy, but also about people’s intentions). I wish you all the best :)
Three that I can think of easily, probably more if I did some digging, it’s a really bad sign IMO. In general I’m against “esoteric” methods and this one seems extra bad.
I’ll add that I’ve similarly found believing that I have beliefs in my head that are not mine was extremely disorienting. I have epistemic defenses I’ve built up for keeping out bad beliefs. Once I started believing that I had thoughts inside my head but were ‘other’—then I had what seemed like the mental version of an allergic reaction, where a bunch of my brain was treating another part of it as a foreign invader and trying to destroy it. It seemed like my epistemic defenses were turned inward. This only happened once or twice but was quite disorienting and destabilizing.
However, compartmentalization definitely does seem like a thing in this area that is not generally considered dangerous. So that seems interesting.
I do find Internal Family Systems to be quite helpful though.
This is an area that I think is so bad that it should probably be banned from the community. In practice, getting into “tulpamancy” strongly correlates in my experience with going into unproductive and unstable states—it’s at the point where if someone tells me that they have been looking into this area, I consider it a major red flag.
It would be useful to have this concern flashed out more, so there’s a better way to warn people.
How many people do you know who spoke about getting into tulpamancy to then get into unproductive/unstable states?
If LW’s stance on tulpas was a hard ban, I would have proceeded with my own experimentation. I’m here because I need to become stronger. Bowing down to authority every time someone tells me not to do something isn’t going to accomplish that.
That said, I’m interested in warnings that consist of more than a vague “this is bad”. After all, that’s part of why I posted here.
I imagine one of the cases Davis is thinking of is the same one I’m familiar with. Someone we know started experimenting with tulpas and became visibly more unstable, then shortly thereafter had a schizophrenic break and tried to kill someone, and has now been in federal prison for several years. Someone who had been working with them on tulpas then spent at least a year in an “unproductive and unstable state”, addicted to drugs etc. I know very little about tulpas themselves but knowledge of that situation makes me agree with Davis that tulpamancy is a major red flag.
That’s definitely concerning. On the other hand, there’s lots of people who don’t have that sort of side effect (and several in this thread), so I think it’s kind of rare… but perhaps this sort of result gets swept under the rug? Though, I wouldn’t predict that in advance—I’d expect it to blow up everywhere.
I’m not really sure what to think. Part of me wants to brush this off as a fluke and say that I would never break down like that but this is a failure mode that I hadn’t even considered and that makes me nervous.
Do you know if there were any factors that would have contributed to that incident? Like them already being a little schizophrenic or something along those lines?
If you had not even considered the possibility of breaking your brain in the process of trying to develop a second person, you need to step back and think more before proceeding. This failure mode should be one of the first that pops into your head, without even trying to think of novel failure modes. Right alongside intense meditation, psychedelics, etc.
You think if people meditate too much* they could end up committing murder**?
EDIT:
*Or if people have never done it before, if they do it the first time, it might destabilize their health (mental/emotional/etc.).
**This may be “too specific”, see my comment below.
I think the referent of Guy’s “this failure mode” was “breaking your brain”, not “committing murder.” This comment seemed to me like an unnecessary strawman :(
I was referring to your earlier comment, re: a schizophrenic break, etc. “Breaking your brain” sounds like permanent damage, and it is not obvious why (or how) mental activity could have effects like lead poisoning, or what differentiates mental activities that are supposedly “potentially destabilizing” from those that are not.
I agree it might have been too specific/shorten the causal chain unnecessarily:
(Potentially) Destabilizing Activity → Worse Mental Health, etc. → More likely to do crime, drugs, etc.
Sure. Seems extremely unlikely IMO. But if you’re deliberately trying to change how your brain thinks at a fundamental level rather than training an overlay like we do when learning math or something and letting that trickle down or however it usually works, you might succeed at changing but fail at direction. This is an obvious failure mode to at least consider before beginning. e.g. http://meditatinginsafety.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Kuijpers_2007.pdf
I’m no doctor or anything, but my understanding is that only people with a genetic predisposition can develop actual schizophrenia. Schizophrenia usually first manifests in a person’s twenties, if it’s going to manifest, but it’s not a sure thing – there are certain precautions you can take to make it less likely that it will develop. For example, I have a friend whose mom is schizophrenic, and he’s really careful to avoid hard drugs and other intensely mind-altering practices. So if you have anyone in your family with a history of schizophrenia, I’d be extra careful with tulpamancy.
On the other hand, there are lots of mental illnesses that don’t seem to require a family history – again, this is way outside of my realm of knowledge, but anecdotally, it seems like just about anyone can develop severe depression, hypomania, or a destructive drug habit, given the right circumstances. So if nothing else, I’d advise you to proceed with a whole lot of caution.
As for the point about getting swept under the rug: I have no familiarity with the discussion that goes on in circles that are interested in tulpamancy, but if it’s primarily self-reports, well, people who are imprisoned, dead, or severely mentally compromised wouldn’t be able to report on their status. I think I might sound like I’m trying to scare you – I guess maybe I am? It just seems really important to me to tread carefully around tulpas.
Not if applied across the board like that, no. At the same time, a child who ignores his parents’ vague warnings about playing in the street is likely to become much weaker or nonexistent for it, not stronger. You have to be able to dismiss people as posers when they lack the wisdom to justify their advice and be able to act on opaque advice from people who see things you don’t. Both exist, and neither blind submission nor blind rebellion make for successful strategies.
An important and often missed aspect of this is that not all good models are easily transferable and therefore not all good advice will be something you can easily understand for yourself. Sometimes, especially when things are complicated (as the psychology of human minds can be), the only thing that can be effectively communicated within the limitations is an opaque “this is bad, stay away”—and in those cases you have no choice but to evaluate the credibility of the person making these claims and decide whether or not this specific “authority” making this specific claim is worth taking seriously even before you can understand the “why” behind it. Whether you want to want to heed or ignore the warnings here is up to you, but keep in mind that there is a right and wrong answer, and that the cost of being wrong in one direction isn’t the same as the other. A good heuristic which I like to go by and which you might want to consider is to refrain from discounting advice until you can pass the intellectual Turing test of the person who is offering it. That way, you can know that when you choose to experiment with things deemed risky, you’re at least doing it informed of the potential risks.
FWIW, I think the best argument against spending effort on tulpas isn’t the risk but just the complete lack of reward relative to doing the same things without spending time and effort on “wrapping paper” which can do nothing but impede. You’re hardware hours limited anyway, and so if your “tulpa” is going to become an expert in chess it will be with eye/hand/brain hours that you could have used becoming an expert in chess yourself. If your tulpa is going to have important wisdom to offer by virtue of holding different perspectives, those perspectives will be generated with brain time you could have used generating those perspectives for yourself. There’s no rule saying people can’t specialize in more than one thing or be more than uni-dimensional, it’s just a question of where you want to spend your limited hours.
I will point out that making a habit of distrusting authorities is what led me to rationality.
Perhaps I have applied that lesson too broadly though, especially on here where people are more reliable. When I read OP’s comment, I automatically assumed that they were having a knee-jerk reaction to something cloaked in mystical language. I was wrong about that.
I think that your heuristic is a good one. It resolves a problem that I’ve noticed lately, where I tend to make mistakes because I think I have a way to improve a situation but I’m missing some piece of information.
And I’ve decided against pursuing tulpamancy. The damaging side effects concern me, even if they’re infrequent, and your best argument pretty much sums up the rest of how I feel. I see now that I was excited about the possibilities of tulpas and failed to apply the same demands for rigor that I would normally apply to such an unusual concept.
I just wanted to say I’m really impressed with your level-headed discussion, your ability to notice your own mistakes, and your willingness to change your mind (not just about pursuing tulpamancy, but also about people’s intentions). I wish you all the best :)
Three that I can think of easily, probably more if I did some digging, it’s a really bad sign IMO. In general I’m against “esoteric” methods and this one seems extra bad.
I’ll add that I’ve similarly found believing that I have beliefs in my head that are not mine was extremely disorienting. I have epistemic defenses I’ve built up for keeping out bad beliefs. Once I started believing that I had thoughts inside my head but were ‘other’—then I had what seemed like the mental version of an allergic reaction, where a bunch of my brain was treating another part of it as a foreign invader and trying to destroy it. It seemed like my epistemic defenses were turned inward. This only happened once or twice but was quite disorienting and destabilizing.
However, compartmentalization definitely does seem like a thing in this area that is not generally considered dangerous. So that seems interesting.
I do find Internal Family Systems to be quite helpful though.