Oh, I just realized this post is new, and not one of the 8 year old posts I keep coming across and want to participate in.
I don’t think this technique works for me, at all. For several reasons. And reading through the comments section, I feel like other people can’t imagine my failure case (e.g. the people surveying others about whether they do / can do this—“Can you imagine your friend saying this?”)
I’m visually aphantasic, I cannot conjure a visual image at all except in some phases of sleep, or sometimes under extreme tiredness while ‘awake’ (I hypothesize those mental states are closer to sleep than normal waking awareness anyway). This means the ‘visual image’ part falls apart instantly. I can, however consciously control my auditory perceptions with extremely high fidelity.
This means I can easily make a voice in my head say anything in a specific person’s voice, but that can only happen with my conscious input. These voices are purely puppets, or more accurately, just ‘voice filters’ I can put on my ‘internal voice’.
I believe I’ve never ‘heard’ anything other than what actually happened or came directly from (or through) my internal train of thought, with rare exceptions of simple sounds hallucinated when about to fall asleep, so it’s rather hard for me to imagine an internal voice that is not THE internal voice.
That all was the first reason, another one is that I don’t think I can model people accurately enough to do this even consciously, let alone subconsciously. I don’t have a way to tell “what would my mom/dad/Alastor Moody say?”—for fictional characters I can only produce the most stereotypical sound bites associated with them if I don’t make them say anything specifically, for Moody it’s “Constant Vigilance”, for Princess Celestia it’s “I’m so proud of you”, but for Albus Dumbledore or Twilight Sparkle it’s just a thoughtful hum in their voice—I at most have a “How would they say this?” component in my head that lets me reword something I want (them) to say into their speech pattern and voice.
While writing this comment I did a few experiments with the mental ‘voices’ I have. If I force them to produce speech, I hear nonspecific speech. That is, I hear that there are words being spoken, breaks between words and sentences, and so on, but none of the actual words. Sort of like hearing some person you recognize in a crowd, but you can’t make out what they’re saying.
I also reflected on “mental constructs that are not me”—I don’t think I’m able to form these anymore at all. Even the few dreams I have and recall are empty of other characters (even if there are ‘people’). I used to have other characters in dreams in my childhood, but even then it was at best one antagonist + a crowd.
On more self reflection, and reading a bunch of posts in the subagents tag, and looking into tulpas again, I believe I just don’t have the mental architecture for this kind of thing.
I hypothesize that this skill requires thinking of yourself as a personality, but I don’t see myself that way. I see my ‘self’ as my central attention. I don’t believe I have software subagents, I believe I have hardware submodules with some configuration overlays at most. There’s no ‘default personality’. I switch how I interact with people based on context fluidly.
I don’t believe my architecture is flexible enough for this, as I can’t even write fictional characters that are not a version of my mind with masked knowledge and hidden or exaggerated traits (and otherwise with a manipulated context). I don’t argue with people in my head, I don’t do ‘what ifs’ of conversations, I don’t imagine what a person would say in some situation.