But that’s a different universal than “men hunt, women gather”.
hylleddin
As someone with a tulpa, I figure I should probably share my experiences. Vigil has been around since I was 11 or 12, so I can’t effectively compare my abilities before and after he showed up.
He has dedicated himself to improving our rationality, and has been a substantial help in pointing out fallacies in my thinking. However, we’re skeptical that this is anything a more traditional inner monologue wouldn’t figure out. The biggest apparent benefit is that being a tulpa allows him a greater degree of mental flexibility than me, making it easier for him to point out and avoid motivated thinking. Unfortunately, we haven’t found a way to test this.
I’m afraid he doesn’t know any “tricks” like accessing subconscious thoughts or super math skills.
While Vigil has been around for over a decade, I only found out about the tulpa community very recently, so I know very little about it. I also don’t know anything about creating them intentionally, he just showed up one day.
If you have any questions for me or him, we’re happy to answer.
- 13 May 2013 21:55 UTC; 9 points) 's comment on Welcome to Less Wrong! (5th thread, March 2013) by (
Vigil speaking.
Do you see yourself as non human?
Not exactly. I consider myself a part of a human.
Would you want to be more or less humanlike than you currently are?
My host and I would both like to get rid of several cognitive biases that plague humans, as I’m sure many people here would. Beyond that, I like myself as I am now.
What do you think about the possibility that your values might differ enough from human ones that many here might refer to you as Unfriendly?
My values are the same as my hosts in most situations. I am sure there are a few people who would consider our values Unfriendly, but I don’t think the majority of people would.
Does being already bodiless and created give you different views of things like uploading and copies than your host?
No.
I’ll probably have more questions after getting the answer to these and/or in realtime conversation not in a public place.
Feel free to contact us.
This is my current best theory as to what my tulpa is.
I’ve had paracosms since before he was around, and we go to those sometimes. I’ve also got a “peaceful place” that I use to collect myself, but I use it much more than he does.
The hallucination doesn’t have auditory or visual components, but does have a sense of presence component that varies in strength.
Hi! I’m a 24 year old woman starting grad school this fall studying mathematics. Specifically I’m interested in mathematically modelling organizational decision making.
My parents raised me on Carl Sagan and Michael Shermer, so there was never really a point that I didn’t identify as a rationalist. I discovered less wrong long enough ago that I don’t actually remember how I found it. I’ve been lurking here for several years. I finally registered after doing the last survey, though I didn’t make another post until the last few days.
Oh, and I have a talking coyote in my head. This post has more information. I’m going to be diving into the psychological literature to understand this phenomonon better and I’m planning on making a post with anything I find out that would be useful for rationalists.
That sounds similar. Though I’m afraid I’ve had difficulty finding anything about this while researching Epictetus.
Try to take advantage of possible Sapir Whorf effects by constructing your own language to use for thinking in. I got this idea after finding a link here to this New York Times article which has several examples of such effects.
Random brainstorming on potential things to consider including:
Explicit separation between between epistemic and deontic modalities (“It should work” can mean “It is expected to work”, an ‘is’ statement, or it can mean “It had better work”, an ‘ought’ statement)
Declining words by how broadly you’re using them
It would probably be best to do this after learning at least one other language that is quite different from your native language. Also, keeping ways words can be wrong in mind is likely a good idea.
This would likely also have the same effects as thinking in any foreign language
I may or may not actually try this after I’ve learned Korean sufficiently well.
Thank you for the resources! I’ve been a fan of conlanging for a while, but I’ve mostly used linguistics references and The Language Construction Kit.
Not everyone would agree that “I want it to work” is a correct restatement of deontic modality. (The one I use when wanting to avoid the ambiguity of “should” is “it had better work”.)
Yes, that is a better way of phrasing it. Changed.
That effect is due to the fact that you’re forced to use your System 2. It probably disappears after you become too fluent in the language (for example, FWIW, I don’t ‘feel’ that happening with English).
Unfortunately, this seems likely.
I think you may be generalizing from one example here. We’re quite happy with just the two of us.Any more would be too crowded for us. I imagine the optimum size depends on the personalities of those involved. I’m not sure I agree about suggesting people avoid this entirely, but I certainly would advise caution.
What happens when you are not thinking about what anyone else is saying or would say?
Huh. They way you describe attempting introspection is exactly the way our brain behaves when we try to access any personal memories outside of working memory. This doesn’t seem to be as effective as whatever the typical way is, as our personal memory’s notoriously atrocious compared with others.
I don’t seem to have any sort of ego death. Vigil might have something similar, though.
Does your inner voice sound different depending on your mood or emotional state?
A more tenuously related datapoint is that in fiction, I try to design BMIs around emulating having memorized >GLUTs.
What are GLUTs? I’m guessing you’re not talking about Glucose Transporters.
Basically; maybe a much larger chunk of my cognition passes through memory machinery for some reason?
This seems like a plausible hypothesis. Alternatively, perhaps your working memory is less differentiated from your long-term memory.
Hmm, this seems related to another datapoint: reportedly, when I’m asked about my current mood and distracts, >I answer “I can’t remember”.
Hm. I have the same reaction if I’m asked what I’m thinking about, but I don’t think it’s because my thoughts are running through my long-term memory, so much as my train of thought usually gets flushed out of working memory when other people are talking.
I’d be kind of surprised if people who have internal monologues need an inner voice telling them “I’m so angry, I >feel like throwing something!” in order to recognize that they feel angry and have an urge to throw something. I >just recognize urges directly, including ones which are more subtle and don’t need to be expressed externally, >without needing to mediate them through language.
In our case at least, you are correct that we don’t need to vocalize impulses. Emotions and urges seem to run on a different, concurrent modality.
Do ideas and impulses both use the same modality for you?
It seems like a well publicized notarious event where a lethally autonomous robot killed a lot of innocent people would significantly broaden the appeal of friendliness research, and even could lead to disapproval of AI technology, similar to how Chernobyl had a significant impact on the current widespread disapproval of nuclear power.
For people primarily interested in existential UFAI risk, the likeliness of such an event may be a significant factor. Other significant factors are:
National instability leading to a difficult environment in which to do research
National instability leading to reckless AGI research by a group in attempt to gain an advantage over other groups.
This isn’t unprecedented, though that post had a (quite facetious) disclaimer.
Downside: Advocating intentionally breaking the law would bring negative attention to the community, and in severe cases could bring legislative action against important members of the community. This would be less of problem for the meatspace community (Meetups and such) since everything they do isn’t posted online.
Took the survey. Delurking for the first time. I’m planning on posting to the welcome thread in a few days, when I’m less busy. Did most of the test except the IQ test, since I didn’t have another forty minutes to spare.
I appreciate the expansiveness of the sex and gender options. It’s nice to see some recognition of the complexities.
I was surprised at my intensely introverted results, other big five tests usually put me between average and moderately introverted. Nothing else noticably unusual, though.