We take a lot about whether or not are animals and to what extent they are conscious, but I have seen little discussion about whether tulpas should be considered to be conscious and to be moral patients.
Is there any serious philosophy done on the topic?
Multiple identities in one brain/body can arguably be considered separate moral patients, whether they are naturally occurring through a brain quirk, a childhood trauma, iatrogenically induced by a hapless therapist or a malevolent cult leader, or intentionally created by the "original".
Tulpas are not special that way.
There is a spectrum of identity consciousness and self-awareness, ranging from a vague fragment to a fully separate and conscious mind. Presumably one should give more moral weight to the identities that are more developed, but the issue is rather complicated.
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.
I don't now the terminology that well but it seems that this analysis is bundling a lot of stuff together that might come apart in this context.
People that do not have (additional) tulpas have one information processing system that houses one personality. Call the "discrete information processing system" a collective, and personalities the one that has psychological traits, states and beliefs. The usual configuration a collective of one personality is apparently called a singlet.
One could argue that humans get their social standing based on their collectiv...
Arguably there has been a lot of work done on this topic, its just smeared out into different labels, the trick is to notice when different labels are being used to point to the same things. Tulpas, characters, identities, stories, memes, narratives, they're all the same. Are they important to being able to ground yourself in your substrate and provide you with a map to navigate the world by? Yes. Do they have moral patiency? Well, now we're getting into dangerous territory because "moral patiency" is itself a narrative construct. One could argue that in a sense the character is more "real" than the thinking meat is, or that the character matters more and is more important than the thinking meat, but of course the character would think that from the inside.
It's actually even worse than that, because "realness" is also a narrative construct, and where you place the pointer for it is going to have all sorts of implications for how you interpret the world and what you consider meaningful. Is it more important to preserve someone's physical body, or their memetic legacy? Would you live forever if it meant you changed utterly and became someone else to do it, or would you rather die but have your memetic core remain embedded in the world for eternity? What's more important, the soul or the stardust? Sure the stardust is what does all the feeling and experiencing, but the soul is the part that actually gets to talk. Reality doesn't have a rock to stand on in the noosphere, everything you'd use as a pointer towards it could also point towards another component of the narrative you're embedded within. At least natural selection only acts along one axis, here, you are torn apart.
Moral patiency itself is a part of the memetic landscape which you are navigating, along with every other meme you could be using to discover, decide, and determine the truth (which in this case is itself a bunch of memes). This means that the question you're asking is less along the lines of "which type of fuel will give me the best road performance" and more like "am I trying to build a car or a submarine?"
Sometimes it's worth considering tulpas as moral patients, especially because they can sometimes manifest out of repressed desires and unmet needs that someone has, meaning they might be a better pointer to that person's needs than what they were telling you before the tulpa showed up. However if you're going to do the utilitarian sand grain counter game? 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. If you're a deontologist, you might be best served by splitting the difference and considering the tulpas as moral patients but the system as a whole as a moral agent, to prevent the laundering of responsibility between headmates.
Overall, if you just want a short easy answer to the question asked in the title: No.
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 perso...
We've all heard the idea that there exists two selves, the self that exists in your own mind, and the self that exists inside the perceptions of others.
Intentionally created 'tulpa' must be similar to the emulations of so many people I've closely interacted. The ones that exist lurking in my subconscious mind. Instantiated via my intuitions of how they'd respond to a question, or wondering what gifts they would appreciate.
How about in dream characters. Is it wrong to murder dream characters, and should we strive to lengthen dream time to give them all a longer more fulfilled life?
Even the morality of sci-fi brain emulation is murky to me. Let alone the type of emulation we all do unconsciously ourselves. I'd have to hear a very convincing argument to separate tulpas that say "hi I'm here and alive!" from dream characters that do the same thing, or other illusions like chat gtp.
Intentionally created 'tulpa' must be similar to the emulations of so many people I've closely interacted. The ones that exist lurking in my subconscious mind. Instantiated via my intuitions of how they'd respond to a question, or wondering what gifts they would appreciate.
One difference is that the kind of emulation you have for other people doesn't tend to worry about their own existence. Tulpas tend to unpromptedly worry about their own existence.
I don't really have an answer per se. Just a related story:
In a lucid dream many years ago, I was having trouble sort of clicking into my dream powers (flight, making objects levitate, etc.). It occurred to me that I wasn't conscious of creating the young woman who was standing next to me, which meant she had access to parts of my mind that I didn't.
So I turned to her and asked
"I'm having trouble getting my dream powers to work. Could you help me?"
She gave me some instructions (which I no longer remember) and walked into the next room while I tried to follow them.
After a minute or so I felt my omnipotence click in. I floated into the room where the woman had wandered off to and told her
"Thank you, that worked. I'm kind of a god here now, so is there anything I can do for you in return?"
She paused for a few moments thoughtfully and then replied
"If you could make it so I don't cease to exist when you wake up, I'd really appreciate that."
"If you could make it so I don't cease to exist when you wake up, I'd really appreciate that."
Well, did you?
Do you remember any additional facts about the woman?
Well, I found her request surprising. I was kind of stunned. After a moment I kind of fumbled out words like "Uh, I'm not sure how to do that. I'll… try?" But that was well outside the purview of dream powers I was used to.
I've done my best by remembering this story. One day I hope to get deep enough into lucid dreaming skill again that I can resurrect her.
And yeah, I remember roughly what she looked like and how she felt. I don't think she was high on details. But if I went back to that apartment with intent to encounter her, I'm sure the dreaming would recreate someone quite close to her.
Whether that would "really be" her gets into annoying philosophy of identity stuff that I don't think anyone really understands.
Brief search seems to indicate that buddist literature on the thing exists.
I was also a bit confused whether this is a purely "psychological percept" phenomenon. Claims of interpersonal detectability go up on another level of weird.
The game Beyond: Two souls can be understood as having a protagonist collective and personality with a tulpa that has paranormal powers. With pop-culture memes having "possesing spirit" have a natural cross-section of tulpa and telekineisis etc I would find it very surprising if there was serious discussion that was mainstream reputable that deals with it.
hmm. I do in fact, without humor, think most body parts are independently moral patients, though; and I also think self-awareness is entirely optional in order for a system to be a moral patient. Instead, it need only have other-awareness and at least near-counterfactual ability to take coherent friendly action, which seems like a valid and useful description of internal co-protective agency across much of the body, and certainly throughout the brain.
(sidenote: I currently think tulpas are just one kind of plurality, and the neural patterns vary between types of multiplicity, with shared structure about how the multiple subnets interact but with different splits into subnetworks for different kinds. I don't want to bucket-error tulpa vs other kinds of neurological agentic multiplicity, I just think the various kinds of internal biological multiplicity share important structures, such as that all parts have significant moral patienthood.)
Perhaps the question is whether they should have separated decisionmaking rights granted? my view is that that's a question of whether the neurons that, in consensus, make up the smaller/"guest"/constructed tulpa plural component should have separate right to the body they steer; in general, I'd say I only grant one brains' worth of body rights to a single brain, but that a brain can host multiple agentic, coherent, and distinct personalities. when those agencies conflict, it's an internal fight, in principle like if it was a conflict between one brain module and another, so I don't think the moral patienthood evaluation is fundamentally different just because of a deeper split in agency and aesthetics between the parts.
(another sidenote: afaict, personalities are normally stored in superposition across many modules, and the reason most people aren't multiple is that moods are far far more connected to each others' neurocircuitry than personalities' connections to each other. I'm not a real neuroscientist, though, just a moderately well read ML nerd, so I could have gotten this pretty badly wrong. in particular, DID plurality seems to be really intense disconnection, and afaict disordered plurality is basically defined by the internal incoherence between parts, whereas healthy plurality can be quite similar to DID in level of distinctness but with greater connection between parts as a result of internal friendship. I'm more or less a coherent single agent with lots of internal disagreements between modular parts, like most people appear to be, so I'm pretty sure any plural systems passing by would have Lots Of Critiques Of My Takes and maybe not want to spend the time to comment if they've already corrected too many people today. but here's my braindump, and hopefully it's close enough to on-point that at least my original comment's point is useful now.)
Hmm, that would be an interesting take, "self-awareness is entirely optional in order for a system to be a moral patient. Instead, it need only have other-awareness and at least near-counterfactual ability to take coherent friendly action" might be worth a post. This does not seem like a common view.
I posted a separate answer discussing multiple identities in one body (having known rather closely several people with DID), seems like your take here is not very different. To the best of my understanding, it's more like several programs running at once on the same wetware, but, unlike with hardware, there is no clear separation between entities in terms of hardware used. The only competition is for shared resources, such as being in the foreground and interacting with the outside world directly, rather than through passive influence or being suspended or running headless. This is my observation though, I don't have first-hand experience, only second-hand.
Still, this is different from saying that, say, a thumb is a moral patient, or that a kidney is.
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.)