The general impression I got from reading a lot of the stuff that gets posted in the various tulpa communities leads me to believe it is, at its core, yet another group of people who gain status within that group by trying to impress each other with how different or special their situation is. Read almost any post where somebody is trying to describe their tulpa, and you'll see very obvious attempts to show how unique their tulpa is or how it falls into some unprecedented category or how they created it in some special way.
None of the sources posted offer any sort of good evidence that people who claim to have tulpas have any sort of advantages. It obviously has a low value of information for an aspiring rationalist. It's just people talking about imaginary friends. This discussion doesn't belong here.
The general impression I got from reading a lot of the stuff that gets posted in the various tulpa communities leads me to believe it is, at its core, yet another group of people who gain status within that group by trying to impress each other with how different or special their situation is.
Used to be, when I read stories about "astral projection" I thought people were just imagining stuff really hard and then making up exaggerated stories to impress each other. Then I found out it's basically the same thing as wake initated lucid dreaming,...
There have been a number of discussions here on LessWrong about "tulpas", but it's been scattered about with no central thread for the discussion. So I thought I would put this up here, along with a centralized list of reliable information sources, just so we all stay on the same page.
Tulpas are deliberately created "imaginary friends" which in many ways resemble separate, autonomous minds. Often, the creation of a tulpa is coupled with deliberately induced visual, auditory, and/or tactile hallucinations of the being.
Previous discussions here on LessWrong: 1 2 3
Questions that have been raised:
1. How do tulpas work?
2. Are tulpas safe, from a mental health perspective?
3. Are tulpas conscious? (may be a hard question)
4. More generally, is making a tulpa a good idea? What are they useful for?
Pertinent Links and Publications
(I will try to keep this updated if/when further sources are found)
(Bear in mind while perusing these resources that if you have serious qualms about creating a tulpa, it might not be a good idea to read creation guides too carefully; making a tulpa is easy to do and, at least for me, was hard to resist. Proceed at your own risk.)
Footnotes
1. "Conjuring Up Our Own Gods", a 14 October 2013 New York Times Op-Ed
2. "Hearing the Voice of God" by Jill Wolfson in the July/August 2013 Stanford Alumni Magazine
3. "The Illusion of Independent Agency: Do Adult Fiction Writers Experience Their Characters as Having Minds of Their Own?"; Taylor, Hodges & Kohànyi in Imagination, Cognition and Personality; 2002/2003; 22, 4
4. Thanks to pure_awesome
5. "Sentient companions predicted and modeled into existence: explaining the tulpa phenomenon" by Kaj Sotala