Tulpa computing has arrived.
T-Wave Systems offers the first commercial tulpa computing system on the market.
Our technology.
Like many profound advances, T-Wave's revolutionary computing system combines two simple existing ideas in a nonlinear way with revolutionary consequences.
First, the crowdsourcing of complex intellectual tasks, by dividing them into simpler subtasks which can then be sourced to a competitive online marketplace of human beings. Amazon's Mechanical Turk is the best-known implementation of this idea.
Second, the creation of autonomous imaginary friends through advanced techniques of hallucination and autosuggestibility. Tulpa thoughtform technology was originally developed to a high level in Tibet, but has recently become available to the Internet generation.
Combining these two formerly disparate spheres of activity has produced... MechanicalTulpa [TM], the world's first imaginary crowdsourcing resource! It's no longer necessary to pay separately for each of the many subtasks making up a challenging intellectual task; our tulpameisters will spawn tulpas who, by design, want to get all those little details done.
MetaTulpa and the complexity barrier.
But MechanicalTulpa is good for far more than economizing on cost. The key lies in T-Wave's proprietary recursive tulpa technology, whereby our tulpas themselves create tulpas, and so forth, potentially ad infinitum. This allows us to tackle problems, like the traveling sales-tulpa problem, which had hitherto been regarded as intractable on any reasonable timescale.
The consequences for your bottom line may be nothing short of dramatic. However, recursive tulpa technology is still in its early days, and at this time, we are therefore making it available only to special customers. For more information, please clearly visualize a scroll on which is written "Attention T. Lobsang Rampa, Akashic Records Division, T-Wave Systems", followed by a statement of the nature of your interest. (T-Wave accepts no liability for communications lost in the astral mail.)
T-Wave: Imagine the possibilities.
But MechanicalTulpa is good for far more than economizing on cost. The key lies in T-Wave's proprietary recursive tulpa technology, whereby our tulpas themselves create tulpas, and so forth, potentially ad infinitum.
One day you talk with a bright young mathematician about a mathematical problem that's been bothering you, and she suggests that it's an easy consequence of a theorem in cohistonomical tomolopy. You haven't heard of this theorem before, and find it rather surprising, so you ask for the proof.
"Well," she says, "I've heard it fr...
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