That's interesting. Do you have a link for this?
I saw it multiple time while reading through the tulpa sites but I don't have a special link for it.
But it's nothing surprising to me. Waking up at a specific time is an ability that plenty of people have without exerting too much effort.
It's interesting ability because there's no step-by-step instruction to do it that works predictably. It works by intending to wake up at a specific time and then let your unconscious figure out the rest. There a study who suggest that people who went through university are worse at it.
I believe that tulpas expend host's attention, unless proven otherwise.
Why do you think that attention is a central part of human thinking?
Have you never had the experience that you searched for a piece of information in your mind and can't find it, then two hours later it pops into your mind?
Tulpamancers haven't proven that they can be more effective than other people by any metric
From what I read of the field there nobody even making a business out of the topic, that would incentivise them to proof something to the outside world.
From a bayesian perspective there no reason to expect a strong effort into proving effects.
I believe that tulpas expend host's attention, unless proven otherwise.
Why do you think that attention is a central part of human thinking?
Here's what I am thinking: Attention seems to be a crucial and finite resource. I could certainly become more productive if I become more attentive, and vice versa. If creating a tulpa expends my attention, it is a negative-sum game for me; if it makes me training attention as a side effect, that's good, but not better than just training attention.
...Have you never had the experience that you searched for a piece o
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