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Comment by cygnus_a | Hacker News Reader

I often have intense fantasies about conversations with personal mentors, historical figures and/or deities (what would Buddha say? How about Einstein? etc). Obviously I can't reproduce their thoughts, but knowing a little about them, I can try to think like them

Surely they're not as visceral or reflexive as the author's voices. But I have always found value in empathizing with fantasized mentors, which has given me confidence in my opinions.

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I sometimes talk to myself or to hypothetical instances of other people I know. I try to do this quietly at times since I know it might not be perceived favorably by others. Mainly I do this to verbally externalize thoughts and force them back into my auditory memory (deliberately), hopefully reinforcing or bolstering a position I want to take or a course of action I need to take later.

I hope I never lose track that I am initiating those conversations...I'm old enough to be well past the standard age for developing schizophrenia...but if I did lose track, I at least have my atheism to fall back upon and my memory of having read through Jaynes a couple of times.

> I try to do this quietly

If you hold a mobile phone to your ear, nobody will give you a second look.

Unless you get a real call while doing so.

"Please hold while I get the other line"

(what should really worry you is if you hear 'ok.')

Just make sure your phone is charged, since you'll look like a real douche if there's an emergency and you need to call police/ambulance with your dead phone that you've just been talking on...

I do the same thing. I'm actually inspired by trying to talk to hypothetical instances of other people. I never did that. I normally talk to myself and to a lesser extent to my past self (when I was younger it would be my future self, but I'm currently in 'the future').

If there's a real person around I just talk to the real person, and on non-shy days this could easily be a stranger. It could make me annoying, but I also like to listen if it's about the same topic.

To me this all seems perfectly normal. My reasoning is that by activating more brain areas (i.e. Broca & Wernicke) and preferably also the pre-motor and motor cortices by moving (so walk while talking to yourself), the brain can make more connections to the content you're thinking about. That's just my hunch though.

A lot of decisions where I work are made in meetings with at least 4 or more people. The practice "conversations" are just that... practice. Dialog is more my thing than a perpetual debate club, so I'm practicing being persuasive to authorities rather than defaulting to combative against others with different stories to tell.

Sounds a bit like like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging

There's that Hofstadterian notion that empathy consists of spawning a VM in your brain and running a simulation of another person in it, which sounds not unlike what you are describing.

I thought everyone did this? I certainly do. I remember reading Bridget Jones's Diary and cracking up at this list of statistics at the beginning of one entry:

> 124 lbs ..., alcohol units 4, cigarettes 10, calories 1876, minutes spent having imaginary conversations with Daniel 24 (excellent), minutes spent imagining rerun of conversations with mother in which I come out on top 94.

That's when I realized it's more or less a universal thing.

You're essentially creating what some people have taken to referring as "tulpas".

http://www.meltingasphalt.com/neurons-gone-wild/

People in the corresponding reddit group claim they can see their tulpas and they have their own personality and will. It's a strange and fascinating place, that group.

I made one accidentally once. I detailed my experience here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9142246

Feel free to ask me about it.

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