kalium comments on Post ridiculous munchkin ideas! - Less Wrong

55 Post author: D_Malik 15 May 2013 10:27PM

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Comment author: kalium 13 May 2013 05:17:56PM 3 points [-]

Fair enough, if I had an imaginary friend I wouldn't want to report it to a shrink. I got hung up on technicalities and the point I should have been focusing on is whether entertaining one specific delusion is likely to result in other symptoms of schizophrenia that are more directly harmful.

Comment author: Kawoomba 13 May 2013 08:47:29PM 0 points [-]

See my take on that here.

Many people suffering from hearing voices etc. do realize those "aren't real", which doesn't in itself enable them to turn them off. If I were confident that you can untrain hallucinations (and strictly speaking thus get rid of a psychotic disorder NOS just by choosing to do so), switch them off with little effort, I would find tulpas to be harmless.

Not knowing much of anything about the tulpa community, a priori I would expect that a significant fraction of "imaginary friends" are more of a vivid imagination type of phenomenon, and not an actual visual and auditory hallucination, which may be more of an embellishment for group-identification purposes.