[Link] Death, long lives, uploading - a conworlding perspective

3 Vulture 27 January 2014 04:04PM

Death, long lives, uploading

Mark Rosenfelder (aka zompist, of language construction kit fame) writes about the advantages and drawbacks of mortality and its alternatives, in fiction and real life. Rosenfelder, as an author, clearly takes Fun Theory very seriously. After discussing the mental and physical decline that age usually entail, he assumes that the most difficult to surmount of these problems will be the loss of mental flexibility and tolerance of novelty. He then uses this obstacle to offer interesting fun-theoretic arguments against uploading and cryonics:

One futuristic approach to the problem: get yourself uploaded to a computer, so you can stay alive indefinitely.  I think it’d be horrible to give up food, sex, exercise, and the rest of our bodily experience, even if we posit that you can still somehow retain your visual qualia.  But I can see the attraction of wanting to find out what’s next.  Perhaps you could hibernate for fifty years at a time, then wake up and avidly consume all the pop culture that’s been created since last time.  Avoid Sturgeon’s Law and read just the best 10% of stuff, forever!

However, I suspect the plan would fall apart in under 200 years.  How much really grabs us from that long ago?  We do read stuff that old, of course, but it’s only a tiny fraction of our mental diet.  The past is a strange world that takes some effort to immerse ourselves in– when it doesn’t repel us with a mindset that’s now confusing, boring, or vile.  400 years ago is even harder to grok, and 1000 is an alien world.  And looking back, I’d maintain, is far easier than looking forward.  We’re exposed to the past as history and literature– we can read Jane Austen or Jonathan Swift or Molière far easier than they’d be able to understand us.

Imagine Jules Verne, for instance, trying to make sense of a Laundry novel.  The prose itself might not be too difficult.  The idea of monsters and government bureaucracies would be understood.  But he’d miss the allusions to Lovecraft and spy novels, and references to the Cold War and computers would require a whole education to follow.  Something like an episode of The Simpsons would probably produce complete befuddlement.

I’m not saying it couldn’t be done, just that it’d require quite a bit more work than it sounds like.  And just visiting the future in one-year reading binges, you’d never really fit into the culture– you’d be an increasingly alienated dinosaur.

And how he addressed the issue in his own far-future conworld:

In the Incatena, I posit that the problem is solved by people loosening up their brains once a century or two.  Basically, you lose a bunch of memories, fade out some of the more habitual neural pathways, recover some of the intellectual flexibility (and ignorance) of adolescence.  Maybe change your body type and/or sex while you’re at it.  You want to be you just enough to feel continuity, but not enough to become a curmudgeon.  (And becoming an AI, though it’s an option, is viewed as a form of death.)

Tulpa References/Discussion

13 Vulture 02 January 2014 01:34AM

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)

  • In this article1, the psychological anthropologist Tanya M. Luhrmann connects tulpas to the "voice of God" experienced by devout evangelicals - a phenomenon more thoroughly discussed in her book When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God. Luhrmann has also succeeded2 in inducing tulpa-like visions of Leland Stanford, jr. in experimental subjects.
  • This paper3 investigates the phenomenon of authors who experience their characters as "real", which may be tulpas by yet another name.
  • There is an active subreddit of people who have or are developing tulpas, with an FAQ, links to creation guides, etc.
  • tulpa.info is a valuable resource, particularly the forum. There appears to be a whole "research" section for amateur experiments and surveys.
  • This particular experiment suggests that the idea of using tulpas to solve problems faster is a no-go.
  • Also, one person helpfully hooked themselves up to an EEG and then performed various mental activities related to their tulpa.
  • Another possibly related phenomenon is the way that actors immerse themselves in their characters. See especially the section on "Masks" in Keith Johnstone's book Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre (related quotations and video)4.
  • This blogger has some interesting ideas about the neurological basis of tulpas, based on Julian Jaynes's The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, a book whose scientific validity is not clear to me.
  • It is not hard to find new age mystical books about the use of "thoughtforms", or the art of "channeling" "spirits", often clearly talking about the same phenomenon. These books are likely to be low in useful information for our purposes, however. Therefore I'm not going to list the ones I've found here, as they would clutter up the list significantly.
  • (Updated 2/9/2015) The abstract of a paper by our very own Kaj Sotala hypothesizing about the mechanisms behind tulpa creation.5

(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