Strong downvoted for the emojis.
Evenflair
Karma: 631
You’re confusing heuristics designed to apply to human plurality with absolute rules. Neither of your edge cases are possible in human plurality (alters share computational substrate, and I can’t inject breakpoints into them). Heuristics always have weird edge cases; that doesn’t mean they aren’t useful, just that you have to be careful not to apply them to out of distribution data.
The self sustainability heuristic is useful because anything that’s self sustainable has enough agency that if you abuse it, it’ll go badly. Self sustainability is the point at which a fun experiment stops being harmless and you’ve got another person living in your head. Self sustainability is the point at which all bets are off and whatever you made is going to grow on its own terms.
And in addition, if it’s self sustaining, it’s probably also got a good chunk of wants, personality depth, etc.
I don’t think there are any sharp dividing lines here.
It is a bit murky on what kind of delineation those that do make a divison in characters and tulpas are after. Everyone that thinks about being superman vivid enough shares the character but has distinct tulpas about it? Or is that characters are less defined and tulpas are more fleshed out and complete in their characterization?
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. Alters usually feel other in some sense, whereas a sim feels internal and dependent on you. Like if you ceased to exist the sim would vanish but the tulpa would survive.
So if you think about superman enough that he starts commenting on your choice of dinner, or if he independently criticizes your choice of phrasing in an online forum. Definitely plural territory. (Or if they briefly front to tell you not to say something at all, that’s a big sign.)
But if you briefly imagine him having a convo with another superhero and then dismiss both from your mind and don’t think about them for days on end, you’re probably not.
Being fleshed out vs incomplete is another dimension, I usually think of this as strength or presence.
As for creating a tulpa… well… moral stuff aside you’re adding a process to your mind that you might not be able to get rid of. It won’t be your life anymore—it’ll be theirs too. You won’t necessarily be able to control how they grow either, since tulpas often develop beyond their initial starting traits.
My voting heuristic is “do I want to encourage this kind of comment”. In most cases this boils down to “upvote if I agree” but sometimes I’ll upvote something I disagree with if I felt that it was valuable.
I didn’t check my history but my conclusion is the opposite of the one I’d get if I was biased so I think I’m okay.
A post can be valuable even if I agreed with it. For example, I agreed with most of the sequences as soon as I read them, but they’ve been extremely valuable to me.
Edit: I weak upvoted the OP because it was interesting enough for me to spend a few minutes thinking about it and responding.
Weak downvoted. The links above aren’t paywalled, and our homepage states that there’s a subscription to join as a full member. A substantial portion of our members (about 20%) asked us to waive their subscription and we have a long standing policy of granting these requests with no questions asked. (While this isn’t mentioned on the site, it’s the first thing you see upon joining the Discord server, which doesn’t require you to pay us anything.)
Yes I have an internal monologue, but it’s mostly text+emotion based, with occasional images. Like a telepathic chatroom rather than a voice chat.
Can you “turn off” your verbal thought and does it cause any discomfort?
I probably could if I tried hard enough but I think it would probably be destabilizing to my mental state.
Is there a difference between thinking conceptually and visually?
Yeah I think so? Sometimes a message to myself will have an image and that’s a very different experience than a pure conceptual message, which is again different from my normal mash of text+concept.
What sort of things do you comment on to yourself? ~everything
My thoughts about what’s happening, other perspectives on what’s happening, meta commentary on the thoughts, warnings, arguments with simulated people, arguments with myself, meta stuff about that. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of its repetitive but a lot is also unique.
If I’m in flow, there’s either nothing at all or I’m not aware of it.
Pretty basic but much better written than OP.
Some people write blog posts that I’d consider to be journalism though. Ie. people who aren’t employed as journalists. I can’t think of or find any good examples right now, but I recall coming across it in the past.
Maybe Zvi’s posts here? Or Scott’s much more than you wanted to know posts?
Could we use this bias to scare the public? “Oh, no — AI has just solved the Kill-All-the-Humans game.”
Kill all humans is an actual game so, maybe!
Interview with Matt Freeman
Ah! I shall read those next, then. Thank you.
Strong upvoted, I straightforwardly liked this one. I’m not entirely sure I agree with the alien, but that mostly depends on the capabilities of the fictional biotech.
I agree with the other commenters about the worldbuilding holes, but I personally didn’t find them distracting enough to be an issue. The stone in particular didn’t even register as a hole—in the text it’s implied that this has happened countless times, so I figured the authorities don’t reset things outside the store and just spawn a fresh concrete block.
I really liked the ending. The reveal of endless stone followed by salvation and then a final twist of the knife with a fresh priceco was a great ride.
I liked the focus on non nanite robots. It reminded me a lot of the latter parts of the Crystal Society trilogy. It’s not something you see a lot of, usually these stories either have the AI manipulating people or ascending to godhood overnight (or both).
Narratively, the story felt a bit bleak throughout. Still, that’d very in character since the narrator is telling the story after having been trapped and given up.
This one is my favorite so far! It feels like an old school horror story. I loved the closeness of the narrative camera and the narrator’s voice. Him siding with the self-replicating building was a cool twist too, I thought he would end up fleeing like Agnes was suggesting.
The ending is because I normally write horror and take perverse delight in making small additions to wholesome things which totally subvert and ruin them. It’s a compulsion at this point, lol.
I have noticed this tendency. Sometimes it’s really well done though, I loved the ending for ||the ehancer story||. (spoilers for another one of Alex’s stories)
I enjoyed this, especially the slow reveal that the transformation is actually good. I do think it would have been more thematically powerful without the last line. The black goo being passive didn’t bother me—I didn’t interpret it as a nanite AI, but just a dumb lifeform that slipped in through a wormhole or something.
I’m looking forwards to tomorrow’s post.
I didn’t push the button because I knew that doing so would actually take down the front page. And I only believed that would happen because it happened last year.
Option B, salary increases compound over the span of your career.
It’s like writing a clickbait title—they add clutter and noise for no benefit, and I want to discourage them.