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It's interesting that demons in computer science are called that way. They have exactly the same functionality as the demons that occult enthusiasts proclaim to use.
Even if you don't believe in the occult, be aware that out culture has a lot of stories about how summoning demons might be a bad idea.
You are moving in territory where you don't have mainstream psychology knowledge that guides you and shows you where the dangers lie. You are left with a mental framework of occult defense against evil forces. It's the only knowledge that you can access to guide that way. Having to learn to protect yourself against evil spirits when you don't believe in spirits is a quite messed up.
I had an experience where my arm moved around if I didn't try to control it consciously after doing "spirit healing". I didn't believe in spirits and was fairly confident that it's just my brain doing weird stuff. On the other hand I had to face the fact that the brain doing weird stuff might not be harmless. Fortunately the thing went away after a few month with the help of a person who called it a specter without me saying anything specific about it.
You can always say: "Well, it's just my mind doing something strange." At the same time it's a hard confrontation.
Isn't this more like, our (human) culture has a ton of instances when "summoning" "demons" is encouraged, and Christianity didn't like it and so ...demonized...it?
Don't forget that some denominations practice the summoning of the "holy spirit," which seems to result in some interesting antics.
A lot of New Age folk put quite a lot of emphasis on respect and love instead of forcing entities to do something. Asking a God for a favor isn't the same thing as ordering an entity to do a particular task. Daemon's get ordered to fulfill tasks.
If you look at those tulpa creation guides they basically say, treat your tulpa nicely and it will help you to the extend that it wants. They advocate against manpulating the tulpa into doing what you want.
Really? From what I've read, The folks who claim that this "tulpa" stuff is possible to do also say that you can create "servitors", which are not conscious and are basically portions of your mind that can perform mental tasks without distracting you.
I dunno...I really don't understand why no one in this community has bothered to test this sort of thing. It's fairly easy to make a test of divided attention to see if someone has successfully created a partially separate entity which can operate autonomously.
There seem to be a number of such tests, but no data collected from them.
Mental Arithmetic test
Parallel Processing Test
I don't have a tulpa, and I tried the second test and was unable to keep track of both lines of dots; at best I could get one side perfectly and guess at the other side. If I create a tulpa at any point, I'll check if that result changes.
ETA: I tried the second test again, but counted the red ones as 1,2,3,... and the blue ones as A,B,C,... then I calculated what number the letter corresponded to. I got an almost perfect score; so a tulpa is not necessary to do well on this test. I'm not sure what sort of test could rule out this method; I have seen a auditory test which was two simultaneous dual-n-back tests.
Yup - since posting that comment I actually checked with the tulpa community and they referred me to those very links. No data formally collected, but anecdotally people with tulpas aren't reporting getting perfect scores.
I'm going with "use imagination, simulate personality" here, and am guessing any benefits relating to the tulpa are emotional and/or influencing what a person thinks about, rather than a separated neural network like what you'd get with a split brain or something.
The perceived inability to read the tulpa's mind and the seemingly spontaneously complex nature of the tulpa's voice is, I think, an artifact of our own inability to know what we think before we think it, similar to dream characters. As such, I don't think there is any major distinction between a tulpa and a dream character, an imaginary friend, a character an author puts into a book, a deity being prayed too, and so on. That's not to say tulpas are bs or uninteresting or anything - I'm sure they really can have personalities - it's just that they aren't distinct from various commonly experienced phenomenon that goes by other names. I don't think I'd accord them moral status, beyond the psychological health of the "host". (Although, I suspect to get a truly complex tulpa you have to believe it is a separate individual at some level - that's how neurotypical people believe they can hear god's voice and so on.)
I've got much respect to the community for empirically testing that hypotheses!
This is incredibly pedantic. (Also rather unjustified, due to my own lack of knowledge regarding occult enthusiasts.) However:
Although daemons in computer science are rather akin to daemons in classical mythology (sort of, kind of, close enough), they really don't particularly resemble our modern conception of demons. I mean, they can totally get a programmer into "Sorcerer's Apprentice"-style shenanigans, but I've never heard of a daemon tempting anyone.
I have previously recommend to friends that alcohol is a moderately good way to develop empathy for those less intelligent than oneself. (That is, it is a good way for those who really cannot comprehend the way other people get confused by certain ideas). I wager that there are a wide array of methods to gain knowledge of some of the stranger confusions the human mind is a capable of. Ignoring chemical means, sleep deprivation is probably the simplest.
Also, congratulations for going through these experiences and retaining (what I assume is) a coherent and rational belief-system. A lot of people would not.
RSS reader/other notification of new procrastination available.
Computer daemons don't tempt people. There's little danger is using them. At least as long they aren't AGI's. Tulpa's are something like AGI's that don't run on computer but on your own brain.
D_Malik read a proposal for creating tulpas with specifically tell the reader that they aren't supposed to created for "practical purposes". After reading it he thinks: "Hey, if tulpa can do those things, we can probably create them for a lot of practical purposes."
That looks like a textbook example of temptation to me. I don't want to advocate that you never give in to such temptations but just taking there Tulpa creation manual and changing a bit to make the Tulpa more "practical" doesn't sound like a good strategy to me.
The best framework for doing something like this might be hypnosis. It's practioners are more "reasonable" than magick people.
This and related experiences caused me to become more agnostic over a bunch of things.