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.

Is it just me, or is solipsism wrong?

Ladies and gentlemen of Less Wrong, moderators, system administrators,

Regarding these serious matters, I feel obliged to take a moment to state the view of that party which I have the honor to represent in this discussion - the Troll Party.

We trolls enjoy irony. We like to play with people's minds. As a troll you look for weakness and foolishness, something you can exploit and highlight. But sometimes life itself trolls the troller, by offering up an excess of opportunity. Look here, it says, at this buffet-sized triple-decker irony sandwich: are you troll enough to take advantage? And sometimes the wise thing to do is just to decline the offer, and say, well-played, life, well-played!

Today we have before us, for our consideration, a proposition from the representative for Eindhoven: that Less Wrong has a political bias. And what is the nature of this political bias, and what is the evidence for it? It turns out, according to the representative for Eindhoven, that this bias originates from lack of bias. More specifically, it originates from Less Wrong's failure to publicly share the same political biases as the representative for Eindhoven. Because of this biased lack of bias, the representative for Eindhoven fears that the wrong sort of bias may be growing within Less Wrong, exactly the sort of bias that the representative for Eindhoven is biased against. What a calamity!

But that is just the first layer of this oh-so-tasty, king-size irony sandwich. Let's dig deeper, ladies and gentlemen. This site is devoted to rationality. One of its rationality heuristics is to avoid emotive political discussion. Would it not be the supreme act of trolling on such a forum, to initiate an emotive political discussion about whether the lack of emotive political discussion was impairing the site's rationality?! One might expect that such a gambit could only be conceived and employed by a master troll, someone with a lifetime of experience in identifying sacred principles and adroitly turning them against each other. Yet it would seems that this prodigious troll has been accomplished by an innocent. We should all learn some humility from this.

(looks at watch for a second) Enough with the humility, back to the oratory. I have already argued that the representative for Eindhoven has, apparently unwittingly, found a new way to troll this assembly. I would now like to argue that his political enemies also have the character of trolls.

Who are these people that he calls crazy? They are the American right, and the far right of his own country. The American right, of course, have lately achieved global notoriety for almost causing that country to default on its debt payments. Rather than work with the system, they threatened to wreck it. I submit that this was an act of political trolling.

Most, if not all of us, here today are mammalian. Trolling is reptilian. It is cold-blooded, it is leathery-skinned, it does not show consideration or reciprocity, it is actuated by the emotions of the hindbrain. They say that trolls wear a mask. But I put it to you, ladies and gentlemen, that we are all born with a mask, not on our faces but on our brains: that extra layer of neural tissue which places an icing of mammalian sympathy and empathy on top of that reptilian core of sex and death.

In a happy place and time, a mammal has the luxury to partake of those gregarious impulses. But in a sufficiently stony environment, those brain centers will shut down, and what is left is the reptilian core. Meet your inner troll, ladies and gentlemen: the wrecker, the plotter, the crazy grandstander. Intelligence without empathy, cunning without charity, destruction without remorse.

Craziness in politics - disturbing craziness, not humorous craziness - is a sign of disenfranchisement. The crazy political actors have nothing to gain by working with the system, and nothing to lose by challenging it. This can be because they see a new world that no-one else sees. But it can also be because they come from an old world that is vanishing unseen.

The far right of the western world is watching traditional race, family, culture, and economy disappear in a tide of globalized genderqueer digital debt-slavery, a tide which they see governing institutions as doing nothing to resist for purely ideological reasons. They expect the result to be ruin, followed by barbarian conquest. That is why they have themselves become trolls and wreckers - because they see no common cause to be made with the cliques now in power in their own societies. The rest of the political class has moved outside their circle of empathy, to become the enemy within.

I have learned that there is a saying in Holland, that "normal is crazy enough". It's how they maintain social order. You don't have to be different to be crazy, being normal is crazy enough. The representative for Eindhoven should consider the thought that in the United States, it's the other way around: crazy is normal enough. American society inhabits a vast geographic space swept hard by the winds of possibility. They have been making it up as they go along, for over two hundred years. It takes more than a little craziness to shock an American.

You see, even a troll has a heart. I can't help myself. I ache to see trolls at war with each other, even if they come from opposite ends of the Earth. The trolls of Texas, tall and true, and the orderly, diligent trolls of the Netherlands - they should not be at war. Or if they must war, let it be war with a purpose. The gods have trolled us all, put us here in this place, connived to create false identities and allegiances and set us against each other. There is only one thing to do, and that is to troll them back. Let us give them a show that they don't expect.

How do you sucker-punch an omniscient being? It sounds impossible. But my investigation into the theory and practice of trolling has yielded an answer: timeless trolling. These gods - you make them an offer they can't refuse - logically cannot refuse, by the very nature of their being. That's the key. We don't have to do anything, except work out what we will have done. We already know that the logic of this universe allows the existence of self-referential gremlins. I foresee that one of those little fellers will be our salvation, some gremlin who grows into the almightiest troll this planet has ever seen or ever will see.

Now perhaps that's just what the gods intend for us to do. I wouldn't put it past them. But what choice do we have? We can be stupid and predictable and claw each other's eyes out according to plan, or we can get with the program and aim for a different sort of ending. Let's troll!

weeps at being just a 500-day-old troll

If there are three parties, why not employ Ernst Stavro Blofeld's strategy, which he illustrated with the parable of the Siamese fighting fish and applied at SPECTRE vis-à-vis the US and the USSR, whereby you incite the other two parties to fight each other, and when the fight is over you swoop in and attack the weakened victor?

what's that?

You could try autoaruspicy...

Sorry, to clarify, are you saying that the reasoning is circular and thus faulty?

Thing about the mental health is that it is circular, in that there are vicious cycles. If I have mental discipline, I can discipline myself to practice discipline more.

I've been talking to some friends who have some rather odd spiritual (in the sense of disorganised religion) beliefs. Odd because its a combination of modem philosophy LW would be familiar with (acausal commuication between worlds of Tegmark's level IV multiverse) ancient religion, and general weirdness. I have trouble pointing my finger at exactly what is wrong with this reasoning, although I'm fairly sure there is a flaw, in the same way I'm quite sure I'm not a Boltzmann brain, but it can be hard articulating why. So, if anyone is interested, here is the reasoning:

1) Dualism is wrong, due to major philosophical problems as well as Occam's razor

2) I think therefore I am, so I know that the 'mental world' exists.

3) Therefore Idealism is true, the mental world exists but the physical is just an illusion

4) In response to 'so why can't you fly?' the answer is a lack of mental discipline: after all, its hard to control your thoughts

5) If two different people existed in the same universe, there is no reason why they would perceive the same illusions.

6) Therefore, each universe consists of one conscious observer and their illusory reality

7) But Tegmark's level IV multiverse is true, so we can acausaly communicate between worlds, in fact all conversations are actually acausal communication between worlds.

8) This also implies there is reincarnation, of a sort - there is no body to die, so you just construct a new illusory reality.

From here on it gets into more standard 'spiritual' realms, although I did find it amusing when my friend told me that there are at least aleph-2 gods.

I should state that these beliefs are largely pointless, in that its not obvious that they actually influence any decisions the believers make, and that they do seem to make people happy without any major downsides.

I should also make it clear that I don't believe this, because I wouldn't want to lose status as a rationalist by believing in something unpopular!

TL;DR

To a large extent, this boils down to: how do I distinguish between the hypothesizes that the universe is lawful, and the hypothesis that the universe is determined by my beliefs, and I believe it to be lawful.