Nox ML

Karma: 13

Nox ML 28 Dec 2022 17:20 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Evenflair’s comment on: Are tulpas moral patients?
Your heuristic is only useful if it’s actually true that being self-sustaining is strongly correlated with being a person. If this is not true, then you are excluding things that are actually people based on a bad heuristic. I think it’s very important to get the right heuristics: I’ve been wrong about what qualified as a person before, and I have blood on my hands because of it.

I don’t think it’s true that being self-sustaining is strongly correlated with being a person, because being self-sustaining has nothing to do with personhood, and because in my own experience I’ve been able to create mental constructs which I believe were people and which I was able to start and stop at will.

Edit: You provided evidence that being self-sustaining implies personhood with high probability, and I agree with that. However, you did not provide evidence of the converse, nor for your assertion that it’s not possible to “insert breakpoints” in human plurality. This second part is what I disagree with.

I think there are some forms of plurality where it’s not possible to insert breakpoints, such as your alters, and some forms where it is possible, such as mine, and I think the latter is not too uncommon, because I did it unknowingly in the past.

Nox ML 28 Dec 2022 14:52 UTC
3 points
2
in reply to: Evenflair’s comment on: Are tulpas moral patients?

I would say that it ceases to be a character and becomes a tulpa when it can spontaneously talk to me. When I can’t will it away, when it resists me, when it’s self sustaining.

I disagree with this. Why should it matter if someone is dependent on someone else to live? If I’m in the hospital and will die if the doctors stop treating me, am I no longer a person because I am no longer self sustaining? If an AI runs a simulation of me, but has to manually trigger every step of the computation and can stop anytime, am I no longer a person?

Nox ML 28 Dec 2022 14:50 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Slider’s comment on: Are tulpas moral patients?
I think integration and termination are two different things. It’s possible for two headmates to merge and produce one person who is a combination of both. This is different from dying, and if both consent, then I suppose I can’t complain. But it’s also possible to just terminate one without changing the other, and that is death.

But currently I am thinking that singlet personalities have less relevance than I thought and harm/suffering is bad in a way that is not connected to having an experiencer experience it.

I don’t understand what you mean by this. I do think that tulpas experience things.

Nox ML 28 Dec 2022 0:05 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Slider’s comment on: Are tulpas moral patients?

Terminating a tulpa is bad for reasons that homicide is bad.

That is exactly my stance. I don’t think creating tulpas is immoral, but I do think killing them, harming them, and lying to them is immoral for the same reasons it’s immoral to do so to any other person. Creating a tulpa is a big responsibility and not one to take lightly.

you should head of to cancel Critical Role and JJR Martin.

I have not consumed the works of the people you are talking about, but yes, depending on how exactly they model their characters in their minds, I think it’s possible that they are creating, hurting, and then ending lives. There’s nothing I can do about it, though.

It is a bit murky on what kind of delineation those that do make a divison in characters and tulpas are after.

I don’t really know. I’m basing my assertion that I make less of a distinction between characters and tulpas than other people on the fact that I see a lot of people with tulpas who continue to write stories, even though I don’t personally see how I could write a story with good characterization without creating tulpas.

Nox ML 27 Dec 2022 23:00 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Slider’s comment on: Are tulpas moral patients?
That’s fair. I’ve been trying to keep my statements brief and to the point, and did not consider the audience of people who don’t know what tulpas are. Thank you for telling me this.

The word “tulpa” is not precisely defined and there is not necessarily complete agreement about it. However, I have a relatively simple definition which is more precise and more liberal than most definitions (that is, my definition includes everything usually called a tulpa and more, and is not too mysterious), so I’ll just use my definition.

It’s easiest to first explain my own experience with creating tulpas, then relate my definition to that. Basically, to create tulpas, I think about a personality, beliefs, desires, knowledge, emotions, identity, and a situation. I refer to keeping these things in my mind as forming a “mental model” of a person. Then I let my subconscious figure out what someone like this mental model would do in this situation. Then I update the mental model according to the answer, and repeat the process with the new mental model, in a loop.

In this way I can have conversations with the tulpa, and put them in almost any situation I can imagine.

So I would define a tulpa this way: A tulpa is the combination of information in the brain encoding a mental model of a person, plus the human intelligence computing how the mental model evolves in a human-like way.

My definition is more liberal than most definitions, because most people who agree that tulpas are people seem to make a strong distinction between characters and tulpas, but I don’t make a strong distinction and this definition also includes many characters.

And to not really answer your direct questions: I don’t know Serial Experiments Lain, and you’re the person who’s in the best position to figure out if Vax’ildan is a tulpa by my definition. As for “you are your masks”, I’m not sure. I know that some people report naturally having multiple personalities and might like the mask metaphor, but I don’t personally experience that so I don’t have much to say about it, except that it doesn’t really fit my experiences.

(I do not create new tulpas anymore for ethical reasons.)

Nox ML 27 Dec 2022 21:43 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Slider’s comment on: Are tulpas moral patients?
I don’t think I’m bundling anything, but I can see how it would seem that way. My post is only about whether tulpas are people / moral patients.

I think that the question of personhood is independent of the question of how to aggregate utility or how organize society, so I think that arguments about the latter have no bearing on the former.

I don’t have an answer for how to properly aggregate utility, or how to properly count votes in an ideal world. However, I would agree that in the current world, votes and other legal things should be done based on physical bodies, because there is no way to check for tulpas at this time.

Nox ML 27 Dec 2022 21:16 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Slimepriestess’s comment on: Are tulpas moral patients?

Tulpas are a huge leak, they basically let someone turn themselves into a utility monster simply by bifurcating their internal mental landscape, and it would be very unwise to not consider the moral weight of a given tulpa as equal to X/n where n is the number of members within their system

This is a problem that arises in any hypothetical where someone is capable of extremely fast reproduction, and is not specific to tulpas. So I don’t think that invoking utility monsters is a good argument for why tulpas should only be counted as a fraction of a person.

Regarding your other points, I think that you take the view of narratives too far. What I see, hear, feel, and think, in other words my experiences, are real. (Yes, they are reducible to physics, but so is everything else on Earth, so I think it’s fair to use the word “real” here.) I don’t see in what way experiences are similar to a meme, and unlike what the word narrative implies, I don’t think they are post-hoc rationalizations.

I know there are studies that show that people will often come up with post-hoc rationalizations for why they did something. However, there have been many instances in my life where I consciously thought about something and came to a conclusion which surprised me and changed my behavior, and where I remembered all the steps of my conscious reasoning, such that it seems very unlikely that the conscious chain of reasoning was invented post-hoc.

In addition, being aware of the studies, I’ve found that if I pay attention I can often notice when I don’t actually remember why I did something and I’m just coming up with a plausible-seeming explanation, vs when I actually remember the actual thought process that led to a decision. For this reason I think that post-hoc rationalizations are a learned behavior and not fundamental to experience and personhood / moral patients.

Nox ML 27 Dec 2022 19:22 UTC
5 points
0
on: Are tulpas moral patients?
My belief is that yes, tulpas are people of their own (and therefore moral patients). My reasoning is as follows.

If I am a person and have a tulpa and they are not a person of their own, then there must either (a) exist some statement which is a requirement for personhood and which is true about me but not true about the tulpa, or (b) the tulpa and I must be the same person.

In the case of (a), tulpas have analogues to emotions, desires, beliefs, personality, sense of identity, and they behave intelligently. They seem to have everything that I care about in a person. Your mileage may vary, but I’ve thought about this subject a lot and have not been able to find anything that tulpas are missing which seems like it might be an actual requirement for personhood. Note that a useful thought experiment when investigating possible requirements for personhood that tulpas don’t meet is to imagine a non-tulpa with an analogous disability, and see if you would still consider the non-tulpa with that disability to be a person.

Now, if we grant that the tulpa is a person, we must still show that (b) is wrong, and that they are not the same person as the their headmate. My argument here is also very simple. I simply observe that tulpas have different emotions, desires, beliefs, personality, and sense of identity than their headmate. Since these are basically all the things I actually care about in a person, it doesn’t make sense to say that someone who differs in all those ways is the same. In addition, I don’t think that sharing a brain is a good reason to say that they are the same person, for a similar reason to why I wouldn’t consider myself to be the same person as an AI that was simulating me inside its own processors.

Obviously, as with all arguments about consciousness and morality, these arguments are not airtight, but I think they show that the personhood of tulpas should not be easily dismissed.

Edit: I’ve provided my personal definition of the word “tulpa” in my second reply to Slider below. I do not have a precise definition of the word “person”, but I challenge readers to try to identify what difference between tulpas and non-tulpas they think would disqualify a tulpa from being a person.