Can you treat loneliness by creating an imaginary friend? | Hacker News Reader

Can you treat loneliness by creating an imaginary friend?

nautil.us

188 pointspseudolus216 comments

You people are my imaginary friends, and it does help with loneliness. It's not that you are imaginary, but it's imaginary that we are friends. We don't know each others' history or identity let alone care for each other as friends. But I can speak as if we are friends, and unlike a Wilson, sometimes get a friendly response.

Maybe you're a crutch that makes it easier to not go get real friends. But this crutch also sometimes makes it easier to get through the long night. Thanks.

I don't think it's necessarily imaginary that we are friends. Consider that a functional community is characterized by an overarching sense of cooperation and mutual support that is NOT tied to an individual's identity. HN provides succor to those who look at the world in a certain way, with a combination of probing curiosity, healthy skepticism, and intellectual humility.

It's true that there are some elements of history that might remove you from that sphere. But identity? There is no identity that would remove you.

As for getting "real" friends, that's rather tough for two reasons. Real friends are in constant, casual contact. This means proximity. Tough to do in general, and impossible in Covid times. Second, those three qualities are very rare. The only reason it seems like they are common is because the internet was created by and for us, and so it seems like we're everywhere. We're not.

So, yes, if you ever want to talk, my contact info is in my profile.

> HN provides succor to those who look at the world in a certain way, with a combination of probing curiosity, healthy skepticism, and intellectual humility.

I truly feel this is glue that binds most (if not all) HN regulars together.

I like to think we are one of the few examples on the web of a community that (1) self-regulates (somewhat) and (2) understands that the platform itself ought not to be taken for granted.

Bad faith discourse kills places like this. While I'm sure many would claim that HN experiences backsliding, it's nowhere near as bad as one might expect. Especially considering that there might actually be a financial incentive to "get into" HN and its content.

Very rambly, but that's how it goes. Cheers, friend.

Regarding the bad faith actors, HN largely (to my knowledge) self regulates; users can usually smell a promotional-type post &/or comment right away. It's something that keeps me coming back daily compared to other forums that seem to either ignore or prefer this type of content.

Cheers.

HN is very well moderated through human effort and they consciously resist updating the site design which is good. The barebones appearance naturally repels people with different interests or temperament.

I honestly don't know how to make friends anymore. I am in early 30s, program for a living, I don't like bars or loud places for reasons that would make sense if I explained them but don't want to go into full details here, and generally like sarcastic people who can have a discussion about topics and not just repeat what they have been told by headlines or what social media tells them to believe.

I mean, yes, they can have the same opinions of course, but they should be able to at least say why they believe those things.

Also, doesn't help I moved around a lot as an only child, so its almost like I missed out on "education" of keeping long term friendships.

I've tried seeking therapy for it, but can't seem to get anyone to really help me with this, since I guess they see someone who can hold a normal conversation with them, a job, and other stuff and don't get what the issue is.

I guess the odd thing is I can hold down conversations with people at work and if I get to know someone no problem. Problem is getting to know people and making connections with people who I like. Just can't really relate to many people it feels like, probably due to my unique upbringing as a child.

I have a girlfriend as well, but it just feels like we don't connect for the above reasons. Sort of wish I had a gilfriend that was goal oriented, sarcastic, and had similar interest as me. But, frankly, never seen anyone out there like that. Probably will end up marrying her and wondering if I eventually get a divorce down the line.

Feel like I would make more connections with people in a higher educated part of the country, probably near some ivy league schools or something. Although I know that sounds stuck up as hell to say, but I just would love to talk with people who can actually think for themselves, be sarcastic, and be interesting enough to bounce conversations off of.

Don't know how to solve my issues and I guess nor do therapists. Don't know why I am even posting this here I guess. Maybe on the off chance someone reads it and is able to help somehow.

My main principle of making friends is: say yes to everything and everyone.

You don’t generally just meet your favorite person out of the blue. You meet them at a party thrown by someone who is not your favorite person but you went anyway.

The reason this works is friend (and date) finding is a numbers game. You just need minor contact with thousands of people to find the handful that fit great.

It also works because of practice. You get practice building curiosity, reliability, body language, jokes, etc with the friends you don’t quite click with, so that when the right person appears you have the skills to engage them fully.

And none of this means doing the same things over and over with people you don’t really like. Do your best to find life with them, but keep saying yes to new people. Let the people you really don’t click with sort of decay out.

Another is to seek out people with similar interests to yours. Not similar to all interests, but some. Meetups for people who like hiking/programming/knitting/3D printing/weird sarcastic books/whatever. You can even go and lurk.

To begin, simply forget the dating, or even friend making; just see if you have some interesting conversations. At some point you'll implicitly make a friend, at least a casual one.

So, I get that and its a general advice you can find in win friends and influence people type books.

The problem is, what if you have no one to say "yes" to? What if you live in an area where everyone is getting married, having families, and generally either doesn't socialize outside that or has closed nit groups?

Sure, say yes to everything. But, what happens if you have nothing to say yes too?

You might have to move. Not every place has enough people to make finding your people a tractable problem.

You might also need to lower your standards. Maybe there are “losers” around who actually are worth more of your time than you think. Sometimes this just means talking to someone who is older than you, or weird looking, or awkward. Your first “friend group” might be people a generation older than you. It happens. They can connect you back to people your own age eventually.

And lastly, just doing any old thing with any old people is fine. Volunteer. Go to a city council meeting. Do an exercise class. Those “pre-social” environments can become social quickly.

And remember to “hang back”. Don’t get out of there right away. Lonely people often hang around at the end of events. (But balance that with not being a creep about hanging around too long with people who are trying to close a space or go home)

But 2020 was a bad year for all of this. I don’t know how to do this stuff in a global pandemic. That’s another thread.

> My main principle of making friends is: say yes to everything and everyone.

Another benefit was explained to me by my grandmother: if I don't say yes I might not be asked next time.

It definitely gets harder as you get older to make friends, especially lasting strong friendships. My advice would be to find a hobby or a club where you start off with some common ground. Or even sports, join a casual softball league if they have them. The thing with making new friendships is that they don't happen overnight, and sometimes its hard to tell right away which acquaintances turn into friends. On top of that, peoples' stage of life changes (marriage, kids, jobs, etc), so some friends fade in and out along the way. So cast a wide net and don't let your prejudices get in the way (too much). Sometimes it takes a year or more until some casual acquaintance (or group) turn into actual friends, just from being around them enough (via some shared hobby or club, etc...) That was all pre covid... these days in a COVID world, I imagine it can only be exponentially harder to make new friendships....

> probably near some ivy league schools or something.

I understand that feeling.

It took me a long time to discover that “intellectual” intelligence is only one small part of being smart. I now have friends that on first appearance (poorly educated, drifters, bimbos, pub drunks etcetera) look stupid but who have genius level skills in areas I am a complete moron (often subconscious or intuitive skills.)

I think it was Dunning-Kruger that clued me in - my eyes were open to looking for things in all people that I was unaware of.

Four examples where you should be able to name a person with a trait, and where you have shared enough time with them to learn from them:

* a room reader - they walk into a room and grok all the people within seconds.

* a next-level fashion dresser - it takes real intelligence and intuitiveness, and is an area many intelligent people are dismissive of. I’m not saying you should learn to dress well.

* a successful sociopath - this one is hard to find because they blend in. Worth knowing so you can recognise them, and protect yourself and others from their negative qualities.

* an intuitive - someone who just seems to solve social puzzles and see things that are “obvious” when they mention it. Humbling. They must be correct (many people say they are intuitive, but are instead Dunning-Kruger victims).

The trick is to start encouraging yourself to be fascinated by how others tick. A side-effect is that most people don’t get much attention, so when you have a deep interest in someone, they respond with friendship and caring.

Where are you unskilled and unaware of it?

For whatever reason, I haven't accumulated any real life friends with strong interests in hacker type stuff. I can have a full house of people and feel lonely without checking in on some of my online social circles.

Maybe we can fix this! Email at profile :)

This is a great comment.

I love bringing this up when HN discusses consciousness and the theory that we are all zombies.

In a chat environment like this, it’s impossible to know whether everyone else is a figment of our imagination.

Might be a cultural thing (I'm Brazilian), but I consider everyone as a friend unless proven otherwise.

Julian Jaynes' book is of course relevant. [1]

Further to that, I've read on several occasions about lone survivors of disasters who report encountering a person who wasn't there who helped them to survive.

The most common I've encountered is the stereotypical tale of "mountain madness" [2] where an injured or lost climber receives help or guidance from an imaginary being (who presumably seemed quite real to them during their escape from peril).

Literature, fiction and cinema are all full of similar tales (not all in mountain scenarios) and so I expect that this "ability" is part of being human.

There would be an evolutionary advantage to be had if the brain was able to access some "hidden partition" containing recovery instructions during times of extreme stress.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology)

[2] https://consumer.healthday.com/fitness-information-14/climbi...

Edit: better [2]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6088769/

>>who presumably seemed quite real to them during their escape from peril

There is also the possibility that they in fact never perceived this person during the events, that their brain created the narrative after as a coping mechanism for the trauma. Unless we had footage of them at the time, the two scenarios are very difficult to distinguish.

Some war stories have paralleled this. Troops cut off from chain of command have talked spoken of non-existent leaders (officers, sergeants etc) giving them instructions. After the fact this can look like lies, made up stories to excuse some behavior. They may have actually perceived the individual, or they may only later remember that they perceived the individual. They did not consciously create the person, but nevertheless the person only appears in their minds after the events. Some 9/11 survivors spoke of being rescued by people who we now know did not actually exist. That doesn't mean the survivors don't truly remember them.

In the context of human experience I don’t really understand the difference between having a memory of a person helping and having an experience of a person helping. The imaginary person is imaginary and a coping mechanism either way, right?

The person who perceives the non-existent person during the events is hallucinating. They are not acting rationally. If you watched them have a conversation with thin air you would call them crazy and generally untrustworthy. But the person who's mind creates the narrative afterwards does not hallucinate, they act rationally at the time and only later use the story to cope with post-traumatic stress. Note that these perceived people are generally helpful, as opposed to hallucinated people who are generally not.

People remember their guardian angel helping them climb out of a collapsed building. You don't see such people ignore firefighters to continue their conversation with the angel. That would be crazy.

It can also help to remember that memories are far from totally accurate video recordings of an event. They are highly-lossfully-compressed, and there's some evidence that the act of recalling them is destructive, so every time a memory is recalled it is destroyed, processed, and re-written.

It isn't surprising that when a very out-of-the-usual event occurs, and the memory goes through this lossy compression and lossy storage, that when it is later reconstructed with the lossy decompression schema generated by a lifetime of "usual" experiences that it would result in phantom "usual experiences" being generated. It is very similar in process to those "deep learning" pictures that turn everything picture you feed it into bizarre mixes of dogs and sea creatures, because that's all that decompression schema understands.

> It can also help to remember that memories are far from totally accurate video recordings of an event. They are highly-lossfully-compressed, and there's some evidence that the act of recalling them is destructive

We have counter-examples of eidetic memory for vision, conversations etcetera so any model has to allow for near-perfect recall.

I think what parent is saying is that subjectively the experience of remembering an imaginary person helped them is not qualitatively different than the experience of remembering a real person helping them. As far as their conception of reality is concerned, someone helped them and for some reason there is no evidence that person existed.

I was sleepy but you’re last sentence snapped my eyes open. What an incredible concept.

Reminds of the movie Inception where Robert's subconscious mind is trained to protect itself from dream thiefs.

I wonder if such training exists today. Would it be called mindfulness? Maybe it’s just meditation.

Yes, that's it exactly. "Mindfulness" or "meditation" or whatever you want to call it is nothing more than a set of practices that gives your conscious mind awareness of and access to processes in your brain that it doesn't by default have access to. There's nothing mysterious or woowoo about it, other than the fact that your brain is not a computer so the activity by which this access is gained looks a little weirder (to a tech person) than hooking up a connector to a BDM interface. But it amounts to (more or less) the same thing.

I think the brain may very well have some hidden parts. For example, when we dream, a different part of the brain comes up with a plot for the dream which we don't have control over. It's almost like the brain is being trained using an adversarial network.

Ugh, wake up and notice a typo.

> The most common I've encountered is the stereotypical tale of "mountain madness" [2] where an injured or lost climber receives help or guidance from an imaginary being (who presumably seemed quite real to them during their escape from peril).

From the article you linked:

> the researchers believe that lack of oxygen and simply being completely dependent on oneself could trigger it.

Hypoxia can have bizarre effects on the body, but especially the brain. Anyone with chronic sleep apnea or who has dealt with hypoxia in any form can attest that the brain starts behaving in weird ways when it's deprived of oxygen.

> Literature, fiction and cinema are all full of similar tales (not all in mountain scenarios) and so I expect that this "ability" is part of being human.

Cast Away with Tom Hanks is an example of that. Not sure if The Terminal or Into The Wild or Martyrs also had that concept, but it would've fit.

I wonder if (extreme) trauma can cause people to become so-called 'paranormal'.

As someone who's had this when I was a teenager, I can comment on a few things about it.

Mine looked like me. It actually was me, but younger. I imagined him when I was 11 and he never really aged.

I could see him everywhere, sometimes screaming at me from the bleachers on the football field, or right in front of my face. The unique thing though is that he would always comment on what I was doing. It was almost as if I was a machine and he would guide me to where I would go. This being said, there were a lot of disagreements I had with him.

I would notice that when I got overly emotional, he would disappear. When things settled down, he'd come back and comment saying how I shouldn't have thought of/done what I had. I'd have the emotional argument with my logical second personality. We were so distinct from each other that, even looking back on it now, he felt evil.

The biggest benefit for sure was that I never felt alone. People around me were genuinely worried about how much time I spent isolated from everyone else, but it never felt that way. It always felt like I had someone, arguably more important than friends because it seemed like he kept me alive.

The worst part about it was the 'mob' mentality. Initially it didn't seem like much but I noticed that there were some things that I wouldn't have agreed with months before. My opinions would change constantly and it all depends on what he would say. Just imagine overthinking and then having a really close and trusted friend jump to even worse extremes because they feel like it would keep you safe.

Definitely bad to my overall health but I wouldn't be alive if it wasn't for him.

You had actual visual and auditory hallucinations? Or you just felt a presence?

Visual and auditory.

Definitely saw him and he contributes to the lack of eye contact I give other people. It's hard to look at someone 1 on 1 when you see another person taking attention away. Back to the point, it wasn't super common to see him all the time. You know how you zone out of certain things but are still able to do the tasks? It was like that when he would visually appear.

Auditory would happen a lot more frequently because I was relatively focused on what was going on. Whether it be solving a problem in school and him seeing an error I had done previously, telling me to look back at the question, or him just talking with me about something random, I could hear him. Kind of like the whole whisper in your ear thing but I primarily heard it like he was right behind me talking to my brain (inside my skull to the back of my head).

Presence wise, maybe? I only say that because I rarely flinched because of him. For example, when he first started popping up, I would actually get surprised, maybe even try moving out of the way. Eventually though, I wouldn't even bat eye. I definitely knew what he was going to do and he would definitely do things that would catch others off guard but I saw it coming. If that's the presence you're referring to, then yes.

Sounds like alter ego created with techniques from MKULTRA project. It never ages. I (illegaly) read Fritz Springmeier's book about this. There's conspiracy theory too, about Katy Perry's alter ego that never ages that named Katheryn.

Where would this be illegal to read? Why was it banned?

Of course the pirated ones. It wasn't banned in my knowledge.

Ah. Cool. Well. Information wants to be free, so there's that!

I would add that an alter ego created by trauma in the brain would be isolated by the brain thus never ages.

I was hoping that it was about Tulpa. The pandemic had me look into nurturing a Tulpa again but I've avoided it for one or the other reason. I can personally attest that having an imaginary world and friends is amazing. You can practice a conversation, tell jokes and bounce of ideas. The more you practice, the more distinct the voices become.

I have often wondered whether it would be possible to encourage a split personality in myself (or other mental disorder). Psychology is all about thinking to fix yourself, so presumably you can also practice thinking to put yourself into “bad” states.

I love experimenting on my own mind, however I generally avoid doing anything that could be harmfully permanent (although I suspect I have made mistakes in the past - hard to know without an experimental control!)

Experimenting on others is not my idea of fun. Edited for clarity.

After reading about Tulpas, it seems like it's quite an advanced thing, right? It sounds like you need profound experience in meditation etc.

It seems like most people get into it from the chaos magick sort of angle, involving new-age meditation practices which are quite different to the Eastern tradition. Highly recommend reading the Psychonaut Field Manual for a deep insight into a really interesting subculture:

https://www.deviantart.com/bluefluke/art/The-Psychonaut-Fiel...

I don't think so, there are no external standards to tell you if your Tulpa is valid or otherwise. It is your own. Now, if you're regularly meditating or then thinking without distraction might come easy but don't let that stop you from trying.

You are literally withdrawing into an inner world reminiscent of autism. I would only attempt tulpas as a late stage attempt at solving your problems.

I'd worry more about ending up schizophrenic.

does it feel different (better) than vivid daydreams?

After a while, Yes. Vivid daydreams usually go around our own personal wishes to build the reality. A Tulpa or your friend would start to have a unique view and attitude towards life. Think of those voices on the shoulder, one says positive things and asks us to be kind and the other one actively asserting to be selfish.

> “There is likely no causal relation between tulpamancy and the development of psychopathology,” a 2017 paper concluded. “Tulpas are an experience of plurality [in consciousness] that seem to coexist with optimal functionality, happiness, and mental health.”

My personal experience with one of these people tells a different story. The tulpa they worked to create was a "demon" that fucked them. The person who created this tulpa completely lost their mind and thought they were going to be the prince of hell.

I know, I know, annecdotal evidence and all that, but a quick trip to 4chan's /x/ board will uncover lots of other people who are trying to create a tulpa for sexual reasons who don't seem particularly mentally well.

I think it's irresponsible for the author to recommend this practice to people.

I had an experience not quite as concrete but similar. I had a recurring dream where someone or something was banging on the door. It wanted in, I was holding the door shut, and I was scared to open the door. But at the time I was really into Jordan Peterson, who talked a lot about "embracing your shadow", and "integrating your shadow", concepts that Carl Jung came up with.

The last time I had this dream, rather than fight it, I flung open the door, and said "come in, come in". It didn't go well. It was like a demon had crept into my mind, corrupting everything I did. I got fired from work because I'd leave whenever I felt like, couldn't concentrate at all, I recklessly racked up credit card debt, I was just in general acting like a shitty human being.

Hopefully you didn’t need it, but that is a shitty job if you can’t leave whenever you feel like. This isn’t kindergarten.

Edit: Go look through the parent comment history, they worked remotely (like all of us atm) for a large cap company in their tech dept.

So...every customer service job in the world? Also, every blue collar assembly line job? I mean, I personally would hate it if the pilot, midflight, decided he was done for the day.

But the commenter isn't a blue collar assembly line worker. Go read their history, they are an engineer.

Not everyone is in IT.

Right, but the original commenter was, and that is who I was talking to.

Yeah in retrospect it was a really awful job, I can leave whenever I need now.

Did you ever get cured? How did that go?

The origins of tulpamancy, as I understand them, were kind of with the “forever alone” crowd - people who had a hard time getting along in society for whatever reason, and fashioned an alternative reality. Nothing wrong with that, up to the point where you become further disconnected from the more commonly agreed upon norms. Do you carry on conversations with the tulpa in public? Does it result in you being even more isolated? Being alone has its own seductive qualities, quite apart from loneliness, do you just stop trying to make real friends at some point?

Do tulpamancers hang out with each other, and do their tuplas come along? It is a problematic dynamic. I’m not sure it’s really doing anyone favors. I could see it being useful as potential practice/conditioning to get past social anxiety but I could also see it becoming a crutch and a magnification of underlying mental illness. People can be tough to deal with, is an imaginary friend an exception?

> The origins of tulpamancy, as I understand them, were kind of with the “forever alone” crowd - people who had a hard time getting along in society for whatever reason

I recently watched a talk about people on autism spectrum (Asperger's Syndrome and full-blown autism) and it literally says that. People with Aspergers often can't fit in, don't get the rules by which others socialize, so they pretty often create a friend to escape loneliness.

  Channel:  Generation Next
  Title: Could it be Autism?
  Speaker: Prof Tony Attwood
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIrxgD3oqYc

Founder of tulpa.info here. Perhaps I could weigh in.

The most recent wave of tulpamancy, which I would say started late 2011-early 2012 arose from a metaphysical imageboard of all places, until people started trying to understand the psychological rationale for the creation process. I started ".info" more or less as a blog to figure out if any of this was real and as a central location to host guides and community discussion.

Over the years, I've seen a multitude of different kinds of people create tulpas, many of these are lonely, others are bored, and some (like myself) were just trying to see if it was possible. I know one military veteran who created a tulpa due to having PTSD and his tulpa was able to help stop his nightmares.

One thing that I've found is that much of the time if the creator is very introverted, the tulpa tends to be more extroverted. They often encourage the creator to get out more, talk to more people, kind of like a life coach. Being an introvert myself, I know that I've taken social steps that I wouldn't have otherwise had Chess not encouraged me to try. More often than not, I'm seeing tulpamancy resulting in the opposite of isolation. For those suffering from lonileness, having a single friend (especially one who's encouraging) does wonders for self esteem, and means you're more likely to become more social in the long run.

I would love to do a study to find out how the brain responds to hanging out with your tulpa compared to hanging out with a real-life friend, but from what I've seen, I have a feeling that it reacts very similarly. And then there's the growing tulpamancy community.

There's a lot of message boards, a subreddit, and several discord chats for tulpamancy, and even a discord bot that can help the creator "proxy" the tulpa[1]. This means that not only are the creators talking amongst themselves, but tulpas are talking with creators and even talking with each other. Offline, a few of my friends know about my tulpa, but they I rarely proxy her, it would just be similar to telling a friend about a text you just got, "Hey, Chess says XYZ." I know people who hang out with other tulpamancers "in real life" though, and for them it's just normal conversations.

As for carrying on conversations with my tulpa in public, I often just talk with her using my "mental voice" -- that little voice inside of your head, think internal monologue. I've also had a Bluetooth adapter in my ear before so I can just talk out loud in public without looking weird, but even then I would just chat with her under my breath. When I'm home or out hiking, it's just more natural to talk out loud, and so I do.

I'll be happy to try to answer any other questions or weigh in.

[1] https://top.gg/bot/431544605209788416

Looking over some basic info, I'm kind of surprised that I haven't tried this before. This is because I've played around with Jungian active imagination techniques and IFS.

In the first case (and I haven't really researched this deeply) one way is to enter a recent dream world while awake and "allow" it to play out, talking to the people inside and letting them respond. The approach you decide take with the people is somewhat circumscribed by Jung's archetypes, where you may encounter a guide of the opposite sex, embodied neuroses, other advisors, and eventually connecting with a "Great Man" or God-man figure (the "Self") who is your ultimate truth or something and lets you truly grow (don't think I've gotten this far). According to Jung, the archetypes you encounter are part of the human unconscious mind the same way that eyelashes are part of the human body, and they both give rise to and provide a key to interpreting human religion and spirituality.

In IFS, you meet or summon "parts" of your psyche that may be malfunctioning or acting up because of past trauma or defense mechanisms, getting to know them and healing them. Once they're healed they can help you out, tulpa-style. But the emphasis is on letting them take shape, not creating them. In IFS, you have to be able to connect to your core, non-judgmental spiritual "base" (which is called "Self" in IFS) before talking to the parts.

So this leads to my questions about tulpamancy. How "freeform" are the decisions people make when creating tulpas -- do you see enough commonly shared traits between people's tulpas that would make you think you could "systematize" access to them like above? Do you think that the tulpas are always there in the mind in some form and you're just bringing them out or changing them, or are you actually casting them into existence? Do people ever make mistakes with their tulpas that cause them to be malicious rather than benevolent thoughtforms? Do you have any personal opinions about Jung or IFS?

This is my first time reading about Tulpa, so perhaps this observation is old news, but it sounds an awful lots like how many around me communicate with Jesus day to day. In that sense, perhaps it’s actually historically uncommon for people to have no imaginary friends.

It's been a while since i've been around that community, and recently i wondered what developed between 2013-ish and now.

More specifically, has the recent rise and push for recognition of plurality originated from tulpa communities? [1], for example. A lot of the terminology is different from what i remember, so i wondered if it's an evolution or a parallel development.

[1] https://morethanone.info/

Is imaginary friend a thing at all anywhere outside USA?

In Poland it seems to be extremely rare. To the point that parents who easily accept kids naming, talking and ascribing emotions and speech to toys, are concerned about their child mental health if they start talking to something only in their imagination for prolonged period.

Meanwhile in USA over 60% of kids have one?

Is there any international imaginary friends research?

Article on wiki about imaginary friend doesn't seem to have many translations.

I remember a Swedish children's book from the 70s with a theme that imaginary friends are a normal childhood thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfie_and_His_Secret_Friend

Never heard of anyone actually having an imaginary friend, I thought it was some kind of narrative trope, similar to how daydreams might be represented as vivid realistic hallucinations in a movie.

Maybe imaginary friends are a normal childhood thing... among children who grow up to write children's books.

I would love to peruse a library of children's books all written by the not neurotypical or otherwise marginalized. A very different idea of how society should work might be revealed.

I think the definition of "imaginary friend" might be messing up statistics here? As a kid I definitely made up friends in my mind, but only as a way to make myself seem better in front of other people.

Other than that, is talking to an imaginary person any worse than talking to yourself in the shower, or re-doing past conversations with others in your head?

I will also offer similar anecdata. I had an "imaginary friend", but my memory is that he was a tool for spinning stories ("oh, yeah, I've got this friend who lives in New York..."). Pure roleplay, I don't recall that I ever believed him to be real.

In Poland it's treated just as a subset of children magical thinking and story telling.

I'm Polish and I had one. Then again I was born abroad. My SO and her sister had those as well though.

I don't think it's that rare. It's just that there's - like with multiple other things - a social stigma connected with it, so it's not talked about.

There is definitely social stigma around "talking to yourself". As a kid, I've been told that only crazy people do that. This made me uneasy, as my mind tended to - and still does - reason through a dialogue with itself.

I'm not saying it's bad or non existent. Just that prevalence varies from culture to culture possiby due to suppression/encouragement but possibly due to other factors as well? Maybe suburban life has something to do with it? Or high mobility?

In polish article I found a statement that nearly a third of kids have imaginary friends at some point.

I think it's more rare here than you would guess from our media and fictional accounts. When I was a kid I think I only met one kid with an imaginary friend, so the article's statement that "If you didn’t, chances are you know someone who did" was true in my case. On the other hand, it did seem really weird and notable to me at the time. In contrast, lots of kids in stories and on TV and in movies had imaginary friends. In the 1980s it freaked out American parents, too, and they worried about their kid being unable to tell the difference between fantasy and reality, and it became a huge media and cultural thing to talk about how it was okay and not something unhealthy, like "cross-dressing" more recently. I think in the service of that, it was not surprising for a kid in a story to have an imaginary friend. To me, it was something that was normal in a story but not in real life, like when a character in a story got to fly in an airplane.

It's quite common the UK, I'd say.

Though personally, I spoke to my cat.

Personifying of pets is as normal and common in humans of all ages as possible. :-)

In the US, often parents who are lazy or overworked ignore it because of it interfering with their lives. Or they could be the next child where the parent doesn't care as much about and ignores things that need to be addressed early.

Few thing pop to my mind about subject Tibetan Buddhism “tulpa”:

1. If I remember correctly, one of Thinking Techniques I read long time ago (not sure Edward de Bono) is to create distinctive quorum of distinctive characters you look up to, each having a different hat (book "Six Thinking Hats"). So when we think about problem, we should talk with each person to get its view.

2. Improving Chess ability can be done by playing on both sides.

3. In the movie "A Beautiful Mind" mathematician John Nash had vivid hallucinations indistinguishable from reality. (edit: it looks like rogue "tulpa")

4. Nikola Tesla had ability to imagine any object so intensively on demand they would float like a hologram, with eyes wide open.

What is amazing is that brain can do so much, and our knowledge about its abilities is so small. It would be nice if we knew techniques how to wake up some parts of the brain on demand, the same way one would learning hot to read or write.

With regard to number 4. I always assumed everyone had this ability, it's only in the last few years I've realized this wasn't at all the case. I was discussing study techniques with an anatomy and physiology prof, they were the first to really clue me in that it wasn't typical to just 'see' the entire human structure in detail. It has it's ups and downs for sure though, not sure how people get by without it to be completely honest. The obvious perk is tinkering with mechanical items or woodworking, can essentially create an exploded part view with full manipulation/rotation of parts, extremely useful in the drafting stage. It looks fairly close to the hologram view from the 1st Iron Man movie [0], just a lot more vivid. It didn't register that it was a hologram the first time I saw the film as a kid, I just thought that was his mental image. It seems like a skill to me more than something I was born with though, biased of course, and I have gotten better at utilizing it in my day-to-day work. For one example of non-obvious utility, through a lot of practice, I am now able to read a function module, then keep the screen state of that function in the corner of my vision, almost like having a floating monitor, biggest difference is that I'm able to update the image on command to whatever I need just by thinking. The biggest issue I have with this, and why I'm still looking forward to high-res VR goggles to do the same thing, is the issue of interruption. It takes a lot of effort to build the state of 6 or 7 'screens' and it takes 1 stupid slack message to bring the tower down. The programmer interrupted comic strip [1] is something that I've passive aggressively had to print out and hang next to my desk.

[0] https://i2.wp.com/medialist.info/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/... [1] https://heeris.id.au/trinkets/ProgrammerInterrupted.png

I would like to say, "teach me" but unfortunately it does not work that way. Over time I learned that there are different brain abilities. Some people are blessed with more, some with less, some people have synesthesia some aphantasia.

Anyhow, it would be cool if we could learn how to tap into potential... As I personally think that people who have a more vivid imagination have less fear of death. As they have more colourful dreams, it is easier to imagine "other" worlds... equally as it is easier for a person who seen to imagine colours than those who were born blind.

But I guess, at the end of the day, for the sake of the spices' survival, all those differences are essential as they push as to excel in different fields, and therefore survive.

That's pretty cool. In tiberian literature, this skill is called "shamatha" or just concentration. Lamrim says that it's reachable within 6 month for a person of high ability and may take longer than a lifetime for someone average.

With regard to Nikola Tesla, I see some interesting parallels with Elon Musk. Below is an excerpt from his biography.

  Elon exhibited all the traits of a curious, energetic tot. He picked things up easily, and Maye, like many mothers do, pegged her son as brilliant and precocious. “He seemed to understand things quicker than the other kids,” she said. The perplexing thing was that Elon seemed to drift off into a trance at times. People spoke to him, but nothing got through when he had a certain, distant look in his eyes. This happened so often that Elon’s parents and doctors thought he might be deaf. “Sometimes, he just didn’t hear you,” said Maye. Doctors ran a series of tests on Elon, and elected to remove his adenoid glands, which can improve hearing in children. “Well, it didn’t change,” said Maye. Elon’s condition had far more to do with the wiring of his mind than how his auditory system functioned. “He goes into his brain, and then you just see he is in another world,” Maye said. “He still does that. Now I just leave him be because I know he is designing a new rocket or something.”

  Other children did not respond well to these dreamlike states. You could do jumping jacks right beside Musk or yell at him, and he would not even notice. He kept right on thinking, and those around him judged that he was either rude or really weird. “I do think Elon was always a little different but in a nerdy way,” Maye said. “It didn’t endear him to his peers.”

  For Musk, these pensive moments were wonderful. At five and six, he had found a way to block out the world and dedicate all of his concentration to a single task. Part of this ability stemmed from the very visual way in which Musk’s mind worked. He could see images in his mind’s eye with a clarity and detail that we might associate today with an engineering drawing produced by computer software. “It seems as though the part of the brain that’s usually reserved for visual processing—the part that is used to process images coming in from my eyes—gets taken over by internal thought processes,” Musk said. “I can’t do this as much now because there are so many things demanding my attention but, as a kid, it happened a lot. That large part of your brain that’s used to handle incoming images gets used for internal thinking.” Computers split their hardest jobs between two types of chips. There are graphics chips that deal with processing the images produced by a television show stream or video game and computational chips that handle general purpose tasks and mathematical operations. Over time, Musk has ended up thinking that his brain has the equivalent of a graphics chip. It allows him to see things out in the world, replicate them in his mind, and imagine how they might change or behave when interacting with other objects. “For images and numbers, I can process their interrelationships and algorithmic relationships,” Musk said. “Acceleration, momentum, kinetic energy—how those sorts of things will be affected by objects comes through very vividly.”

It can also have an opposite effect.

For me, trying to make a tulpa 10 years ago ended up amplifying my loneliness, as well as placing it front-and-center, impossible to ignore.

In retrospect that was a good thing, since it prompted me into dealing with a lot of issues as well as discovering some i wasn't explicitly aware of. Trying to create an imaginary person you unconsciously wish you were born as could really sharpen and highlight everything that is different.

But it might as well have ended worse.

The same experience. I felt much anger from my invisible buddy when they discovered I was trying to "destroy" them from my mind.

Cannabis use only made it feel more real and I spiraled out of control with the substance just so we could hang together.

"This problem (which is the topic of the hit Metallica song “One”) is..."

Actually, no. Metallic's song, "One", is based on the novel, "Johnny Got His Gun".

I happen to be a fan but it is not that difficult to research this stuff.

As another fan, it’s my duty to share the video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iT6vqeL-ysI

Also, it’s worth reading the book.

I'm not even a fan and I can attest you that this is well known pop culture trivia.

I don't know one way or another, but your argument doesn't actually convey wherever it's true or not.

It may not help locked-in patients, but instead of lonely people trying to self-induce schizophrenia, maybe somebody should use GPT-3 to create an automated active listener.

"Really?" "What did she do next?" "Mmm-hmm" "Mmmmmmm" "Did you really think that would work?" "No he didn't!" "Nice."

Isn't that what ELIZA was meant to be, really? With an automated active listener and automatic transcription, it would probably make it very easy to write that book one was meaning to write (or even the book one wasn't even thinking about writing.)

On second thought, I'm not sure if we're capable of this. To my (weak) knowledge, all of these models seem to disregard time. They just wait their turn and spit out the number of sentences they were told to spit out in advance.

An active listener would have to understand when to interrupt, which means it would have to be trained on audio (or timed transcriptions.)

I did have a funny thought that you could do this for Indians with a video of an attractive person "head-bobbling" at various rates of speed, and periodically humming an encouraging note. It's so efficient to have a physical gesture that means "I (still) see, yes. You can tell that I'm getting confused when I stop doing this."

While on some level it feels 'wrong', I do agree that a GPT-3-based active listener might offer useful help in a variety of ways to a variety of people.

For example, I have had more than one schizophrenic friend, and my role in the conversation often boiled down to figuring out how to best respond to a usually disjointed and often incomprehensible message.

What the friend got out of it was someone who listened and enjoyed the company (which can be challenging for people suffering from schizophrenia).

What I got out of it was not just feeling good about being a rare and listening friend, though. I found that what my friend said, however difficult or impossible to comprehend, would often trigger interesting new thoughts or ideas in my own thinking that a more 'normal' friend would never have accomplished.

I could see how GPT-3 could perhaps help in playing both those roles. Listening as well as 'prompting' creativity.

Shizophrenia isn't the same as disassociation, which this clearly is.

It's still on the spectrum. Loneliness shouldn't be treated by detachment and doing so can only lead to a lack of interest in social relationships, a solitary lifestyle and an exclusively internal fantasy world.

You can call it what you want but it's definitely Cluster A.

I'm no expert, of course, I'm just a guy speaking out of line on the internet, but... From what I saw from a cursory Cluster A search, this behavior is literally not even tangentially related to the criteria for Cluster A disorders. It's not paranoid, it's not schizoid, it's not schizotypal. These are lonely people who disassociate a part of their internal monologue. Please elaborate exactly, in your opinion, which Cluster A criteria these people display.

How is it not schizoid? It's literally treating loneliness by directing attention toward one's inner life and away from the external world. I'm no Eugen Bleuler, but his definition is exactly this, the self in exile.

If you want to talk about specific criteria, from the ICD-10, I fear it in the long term would lead to:

1. Almost always choosing solitary activities.

2. An excessive preoccupation with fantasy and introspection.

3. Neither the desire nor existence of any close friends or confiding relationships (or only one).

You're extrapolating. Those aspects aren't part of the matter. There's nothing about these people that indicates they want to be alone. Making a tulpa literally depends on the person's desire for companionship, not their desire to be alone.

Schizoids are lonely and they choose (quite paradoxically) to be alone because of it. The internal fantasy of the schizoid exists solely to fill the hole left by their lack of emotionally intimate relationships.

That is, the steps of the schizoid personality is:

1. Loneliness

2. Escapism in the form of internal fantasy

3. Choosing to be alone, because the internal fantasy is judged to be enough

"Disassociation" is not a psychological term, it means "to end association with" e.g. to get fired or to get divorced, or to leave the professional fishing community.

"Dissociation" means to feel separate from your own physical body and actions. This (tulpa-summoning) is "externalization," which is to see your own internal thoughts and states as external. This is what people who hallucinate (or project, like paranoids) do. The etymology of schizophrenia is literally "split-mind."

I'll try to remember that. You learn something new every day.

It doesn't seem like a good idea.

When you are lonely and sad, conjuring up entities could probably lock-you up in a mental hellish prison of bad thought cycles, where lack of imagination feeds into itself.

Imagination is a very powerful tool that is very under-utilized in our modern western societies. There would be a lot to gain by teaching the basics, providing some guidance and a safe-environment to let it run.

Once you have enough imagination so that your mental world feeds itself plenty of interesting novelties, you probably haven't time to be lonely anymore.

Growing an interesting mental world, probably benefits a lot from experiences in the real world from other real people and an escape from reality probably isn't the solution.

Specifically confronting reality is a great way to discover holes in your mental models.

Unless these comments are trolling, it now seems very believable to me that some people talk to Jesus or God and hear back. If you do an atheism-Christianity debate with such a person who actually hears God all the time, you'll have a hard time I guess.

The amount of such threads I've read here and elsewhere strongly suggests to me than this isn't trolling. I think it's reasonable to conclude that people who claim to talk to God and hear back may actually be experiencing this (though with no actual God being involved).

Someone else mentioned rotating 3D shapes in their head, and I think this is a good point of reference. I have somewhat strong aphantasia. On this test image[0], I score 2, maybe 3 on a good day. I've managed 4 when tired. I showed that to my wife the other day and she says she does easy 6. That suddenly explained various arguments we had in the past, that boiled down to me requiring explicit presentation of something that she, as it turns out, was entirely capable of processing in her head.

People's minds are diverse.

[0] - https://i.redd.it/uf5brm3to1e21.png

Very interesting little test. I wonder if you've tried it at different times of the day or different states of mind? The ratio of neurotransmitter chemicals that are dominant in the brain changes widely with different conditions, which affects function.

For example, I just tried the test and felt like it was a great effort to visualize the star. I've just had a cup of coffee (similar to amines). But this morning, transitioning from a very restful sleep (when acetylcholine levels would have been high), I was having clear, partially directed mental images, similar to dreams, but wakeful.

EDIT: And even more interestingly (to me) I'm having a very _easy_ time with the other exercises you linked below...

I knew there were people who don't see anything, but I would have thought anybody could do 6. I can imagine far more complex 3D stuff (more than rotating, also complex movements) but it's blurry unless I designed it or know the thing/place well (like my house), but I can "zoom" into things to get more detail.

You learn something new every day I guess. I wonder if this can be used to predict what fields someone goes into or could go into that they'd be good at (engineering, etc).

I asked half a dozen friends. Only one could see more than 1, and in that case they reported only 3. Most of us are in engineering. The one that could see 3 is closest to an artist out of us all. Those of us with strongest engineering background reported 0.

Would love to see if there is more to it.

Mmm, strange. I do some minor diy stuff and I can't imagine not imagining stuff. I do draw on paper to brainstorm and use CAD but most of the design problem solving goes on in my head.

But then I am also an artist... Although more because of this than the other way around. Although drawing has further trained this ability, I have accurate detailed childhood (~5-6y) memories (of houses, schools, objects, etc) from before I was drawing consistently enough for it to matter (high school).

I wonder, can people who see 0 imagine movement if they're seeing the object right in front of them? And if they can draw 3d objects, can they still do so if they close their eyes?

As I said in another comment I think it's a communication issue. I guess it doesn't literally float in front of their eyes as part of the world for those who say 6.

Perhaps a better test is how difficult someone finds these exercises:

http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/docs/education/institute91/handouts...

It's less ambiguous than the star thing.

> As I said in another comment I think it's a communication issue. I guess it doesn't literally float in front of their eyes as part of the world for those who say 6.

That's the thing, though: apparently the same thing was being said about internal monologue historically, with people assuming claims contrary to their experience are just turns of a phrase. Until, the legend goes, somebody got enough academics in the same room that they finally realized inner voice is a thing that not everyone has.

So I'm leaning towards believing that people claiming they can mock their own visual input actually can do it.

(The hardware for that is already there. Despite being 1-2 when awake, every now and then I wake up remembering a dream that was a clear 6.)

Not sure if it connected, but this internal monologue is another thing that I fail to understand. I think I do not have internal monologue, but this is especially hard to describe.

Perhaps there is some crossover between people who can't visualize and those who do not experience internal monologue.

Another aspect I've known for a long time is that I have bad "situational" memory. I have good trivia/history memory but very bad memory about personal situations or events. I am not sure about faces, I didn't really notice myself struggling with it but hard to really judge.

Makes me wish somebody would do a study of all these facets simultaneously and put the answers on a scatterplot.

For me, it is:

- 1-2 / 6 on the "mind's eye" scale

- perfectly working internal monologue; almost all of my conscious thinking involves me "hearing" sentences in my head (I don't experience actual auditory stimulus, but I can "hear" the words, the cadence, and sometimes even tone)

- good trivia/history memory

- bad situational memory, bad memory for people's names

- I can only recognize faces of people with whom I dealt for prolonged periods of time

> perfectly working internal monologue; almost all of my conscious thinking involves me "hearing" sentences in my head (I don't experience actual auditory stimulus, but I can "hear" the words, the cadence, and sometimes even tone

Do you feel like it's always "you" who is actively saying the monologue, or is it being "dictated" from the outside, you are listening but not saying it internally? Perhaps by an imaginary friend, Jesus, aliens, gods, buddhas, whatever?

It's always just me. I never had an imaginary friend. I never felt a different entity speaking in my head. It's always my own voice in my head saying things or conversing with itself.

Strangely I did not have a strong internal monologue when I was young. My thoughts were mostly "visual" unless reading. It is more 50/50 now, but I still "see" most of what I think/read if that makes sense.

I can do mental rotation quite okay, but it's not really visual. It's kinda in the back of my mind, colorless, faded, greyish etc. but I'm aware of the shape "outline", well not really the outline but just aware of the shape, without actually seeing it. As if you were in a dark room and were feeling out the objects by touch in part (but I am aware of the whole 2d projection at once, unlike touch). I can only really visualize things while drifting to sleep. If people can do that level while awake, that must be awesome.

But I do wonder how much of it is about different uses of words by different people. I do have an internal monologue when I want to build sentences, eg crafting a sentence for writing or just imagining talking to someone and trying to convince them as if practicing arguments for a debate (though decidedly not hallucinating someone to talk to). Or when trying to serialize so explicit steps I need to do, I may list them verbally in my mind.

I may call this a conversation with an entity, but actually I feel I'm just talking to myself. I identify with the speaker. I guess, and I'm trying now, I can sort of feel as if the stream of sentences is coming from a different entity.

It might be that we have very similar (though not equal) experiences we just use different terms and stories to make sense of them.

There's a book that argues that Ancient Greeks in the time of Homer also believed their gods talked to them and it might have been something like this. And that the idea of an individual free-will autonomous singular human is a relatively modern cultural concept.

> But I do wonder how much of it is about different uses of words by different people.

There are qualitative differences, however. I think a better question would be not how vivid the imagined shape is, but how connected and contextual it is.

Someone might imagine a 6 red star and stop at that, someone might imagine a 3 star, but with the whole Kremlin tower attached on a snowy night with distant car sounds.

Testable things i found are looking for reactions. Imagine yourself at the beach, standing half immersed in the sea, enjoying the view, then something grabs your leg underwater.

-Did you flinch, or was these just words? Some people would, since they are contextually immersed in the scene.

-Can you answer side questions, like how calm the sea was, were you looking towards the land or the horizon, were there any birds in the sky, and so on? Some people can, because they were visualizing the scene, some people won't unless prompted, since they were constructing the scene.

In the similar vein, do you project your imagination over the world around you? People who do tend to not comprehend how you can lose things, like forgetting where you parked your car.

I do think there is something to this, but it's exceedingly difficult to communicate about the differences.

For example English is not my native language and even though I'm basically fluent as far as understanding any TV show or reading books goes, but I still notice it doesn't reach me as viscerally as speech in my native language. It's blunted, it's like touching things with gloves on. So there is some sort of vividness of ideas, but it's hard to describe.

I think people who claim they can visualize something don't actually pixel for pixel visualize it. I read about some study where these people only realized this when followup questions came. I think you can excite your neurons to represent the visual concept of a house without having to expend all the effort to actually create all the parts, decide on the color of window frames, all the small details.

Overall I'm torn. I guess there are differences and we should listen to descriptions like these. On the other hand, I also know how unreflective and un-introspective average people can be.

"-Can you answer side questions, like how calm the sea was, were you looking towards the land or the horizon, were there any birds in the sky, and so on? Some people can, because they were visualizing the scene, some people won't unless prompted, since they were constructing the scene."

- this is exactly it. I seem to be unable to visualize things in my mind. If someone asks me to visualize a beach, I can create a description of a beach and know what exists on the beach, I am able to give an verbal explanation of it. However I do not at any moment see it, nor do I have insight into the beach that I didn't construct. I don't notice that there is a hotel in the distance, but I can think about it and add it in the description. I feel this is very different to what apparently majority of people can do.

Do you find the following exercises difficult? http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/docs/education/institute91/handouts...

Hm, not at the speed of reading. Takes a bit of slowing down to get some.

A complication is that a lot of these are from elementary school geometry books, so i tend to just remember the answer before getting a chance to look at it.

Can you imagine each Tetris shape, one after the other, in some kind of spatial way? Can you "make" the L shaped one sit on its short side then lie down on the long side?

Sure. And it makes a clang as it falls.

Can't quite play tetris, however - i start to lose track of the pieces once there are like 5-10 of them.

I can think about L shaped one standing upright or lying down on the long side. I don't see them though.

Can you do this? "You see the silhouette of a cube, viewed from the corner. What does it look like?"

Or mark the edges of a cube into thirds, and cut off each of its corners back to the marks. What does the result look like? Can you mentally rotate this shape around?

I don't really see anything. If I attempt to visualize a cube from the corner, I can maybe say I can see the corner and three edges leading from it (to be honest, it's hard to say that I truly see it, but maybe a vague outline of three lines). I don't see the remainder of the cube.

If I try to imagine a cube, and then mark the edges into thirds, I cannot imagine what remains when I cut off corners back to the mark. And the cube itself is more of an idea of a cube rather than visual representation.

I cannot mentally rotate the shape as I do not see a shape.

I'm sure it's hard to believe, but trust me, it's hard for me to believe people can visualize in the way people describe.

Yes I do. Since I can't visualize a triangle in my head, it's hard to visualize what is left over when I cut off at thirds.

The link states that this can be trained. Is that your experience as well?

Do you see any sort of visual imagery when dozing off to sleep? Have you ever played a lot of some visually repetitive game, like Minesweeper, Tetris, Bejeweled etc? I find that if I play a lot of those (hours) then at night when I shut my eyes I can't get rid of visualizations of these shapes in my mind, it's even kind of annoying.

For reference, this is what happens to me. If I spend a few hours playing a particular videogame, its imagery "burns into" my mind - when I close my eyes, I can see recurring patterns from the game (like ground textures or UI elements); if I'm tired, that's an easy way to get me to high level 3 on the "starn scale". The effect disappears after I sleep for a few hours.

The topic came up with friends one night. What seemed pretty common was people talking in their heads or out loud to their passed relatives, parents, less so friends. Sharing your thoughts with your gone mother or father, brother or sister, grandparents - and hear back their thoughts - can be nice and assuring. Gives you a sounding board in your head for your own thoughts, to take time off and reflect. Kind of like journaling. They are real in a sense that they did exist, but imaginary because they don't anymore.

There's an important difference between loneliness and being alone. I'm slightly sceptical of how healthy this Tulpa concept is because I don't think the answer to loneliness is necessarily literally conjuring up another person.

Loneliness can be used as an opportunity for people to explore their own mind. Why they get anxious if they're lonely, how to be more comfortable without someone else around, and how to confront uncomfortable states of mind without deflecting.

Given that a Tulpa is obviously not real and already part of the person who invents it I'm not sure if compartmentalizing that way is a good thing.

This is incredibly interesting, but also a bit scary. I was under the impression that a "Tulpa" may not necessarily be friendly and can manifest as a cruel or spiteful entity, depending heavily on the emotional state of the practitioner.

Like Harvey? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1wf8qenBzc

I'm going to create an imaginary friend who has better recall of our shared memories so I can get helpful hints and tips when doing stuff I keep forgetting. Like writing god aweful powershell.

My imaginary friend's name was "Thesis" in grad school.

Never thought of it as a friend though...

So this got my curious and I joined /r/Tulpas

This is the most hilarious question I found right away:

> When I have sex with my girl is there a way to make sure my tulpa doesn’t see

But then it also gets you thinking.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Tulpas/comments/kzq9jr/some_questio...

This makes tulpamancy sound like a voluntary version of what happens when multiple personalities form due to childhood trauma, but that wasn't how the original article made it sound.

From what I understand, recognizing each of the personalities and integrating them into a cooperative "system" is the standard of care for multiple personalities, but trying to induce this voluntarily is a lot different from just creating an imaginary friend.

In this case, a tulpa would share, and sometimes control, your own body.

There is some controversy regarding multiple personality disorded. From what I remember, the amount of multiple personality disorders diagnoses exploded in the 70s and 80s in the USA while the same disorder is rare in the rest of the world.

If people are able to generate Tulpas, it might mean that these multiple personality disorders were in fact generated by the psychiatrists treating these people. This could explain why there was such an increase in the USA while at the same time do not require large number of patients lying about what they are experiencing.

Weird edge cases: You create a tulpa, but then you’re so busy socialising with other tulpamancers you neglect it until it gets lonely and decides to create a tulpa.

Recursive tulpamancy.

This has actually happened before.

Can recommend this replyall episode about people with Tulpas

https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/49hr6k

I’m still not sure how I think about this, it sounds scary and interesting at the same time.

Thanks for sharing. I listened. I was surprised that it didn't qualify as a mental illness because it didn't cause distress. I didn't know about that qualifier in regards to mental illness. And then I was surprised the interviewer didn't call it out as mental illness when it turned to distress (eg wrecked her marriage and isolated her away from society into a small group of fellow tulpamancers)

> wrecked her marriage and isolated her away from society into a small group of fellow tulpamancers

We don't call being part of a cult a mental illness either. It's just a poor life decision :)

Tangentially related, but I'm adding this as it may help someone some day.

I never really thought about it until a co-worker, out of the blue, asked me, and I had to give words to the phenomenon.

I was walking in the hall at work one day, and said co-worker came up to me and asked. "Hey, distantaidenn, why do you always seem so happy?" I was a bit taken aback, because I never smile, but I suppose I do have an upbeat, and almost relaxed attitude about me.

Then I told him, "You know that voice in your head?" Assuming, most people have one. "Well, the voice I use is constantly giving me positive feedback. Even when things are going bad, it's supporting me and telling me anything is possible."

Until that coworker had asked me, I didn't even realize it, as it was just something I learned to do. When I was younger, and still trying to "figure people out", the voice was somewhat negative and doubtful. I lived a life of confusion and fear. But since adulthood, the one person that I can always count on to keep me upbeat is that little ever present voice, supporting me and pushing me forward each day.

- Does everyone have internal monologue? Google results aren’t clear about this, it seems everyone does but at varying degrees.

- I’m personally overriding mine with podcasts, because my thoughts are extremely dark. The only place where I can channel my thoughts positively is when interacting with people and at work, since I have tasks to do. Better not let that mind wander ;) (I’m joking but many people know how much past experiences can haunt — I miss when I was 15 and able to dream about an imaginary world where we’d invent AI and how we’d organize society about it).

> Does everyone have internal monologue?

No, I think in pictures, smells and shapes.

> my thoughts are extremely dark

If you have harmful thought loops that give you problems in daily life, that's something to seek therapy for.

Therapy can only explain things, not solve them. I’m a man. A man can be dead in a ditch, he won’t get help. A woman or a dog would. Such is life. Can’t change that. I have been to about 200 therapy sessions of 5 different psychologists. Cost me thousands. But people don’t offer their nice side to men. Can’t change that. Not many other ways than silencing your internal monologue to shut up the frustration. We are supposed to take all of them, together, and not ask.

I do have negative thoughts.

Of course it can solve them. If none of your therapists offered you tools to help you get out of a web of thoughts that you suffer under, that is on them. Of course, if it is your own choice then it is on you :)

For what it's worth, what you're talking about just isn't my experience at all. Perhaps it is your perception, and how that impacts the world around you (both what you see and how people respond to you). It's really no different than reading about a car and seeing that car in traffic a hundred times. You see what you focus on - in this case you're focusing on whatever it is you're seeing here and therefore you see it everywhere. That doesn't make it true.

There are certainly men who have benefited from therapy.

I don't have an autonomous internal monologue, but I can speak in my mind, meaning just like actual speech but without the physical sound making. But it's not some other entity saying stuff.to be honest, if someone told me they hear voices in their head I would assume they are not 100% alright mentally, which is totally okay of course but I'd suspect perhaps they should seek treatment. Now that I'm seeing so many commenters (probably a biased self selected sample though) saying they hallucinate all the time,see entities and hear voices, I'm less sure and perhaps it's normal?

That sounds exactly like a book[1] I've been reading to my toddler. It hadn't occurred to me while reading you could experience the titular "moon" so viscerally.

1: https://mindhealth.org/store/Theres-a-Happy-Moon-in-My-Side-...

Doesn't this just come back to a flavor of superstition? Mine were imaginary enemies. I didn't have any imaginary friends, rather, monsters in closets and under the bed or in dark rooms but I clearly remember talking to one when I was 3 or 4 trying to be polite to it so it wouldn't drink my blood. It would also make more sense people have more imaginary enemies than friendly too right? We know that fear really hampers our intellectual faculties and I had learned through evolution we have confirmation bias in that regard as well.

There are a raft of names for these things in the West, but I suppose it's inevitable that they would become popular again via their Eastern name.

You could associate the 'Tulpa' phenomenon variously with familiar spirits, guardian angels, demonology, and all sorts, and obviously there's a wide variety of literature on it. My first impression is that doing this without direction (spiritual or otherwise) may not be 100% without risk.

The author of the linked article is clearly an enthusiast, but all medicines are poisons too, right?

I think a lot of people would reject this practice out of hand, without realizing that they do something very similar: imagining conversations with real people in which they project their own internal attitudes into other people's mouths. When the words that people direct to us inside our heads are emotionally powerful, it's often because they resonate with our own attitudes toward ourselves -- because it's actually us talking.

This is...a little terrifying to read knowing that I could do this any day now if I decided to. I’m almost afraid of what it would be like, and the possibility of liking it.

This "tulpa" thing looks similar to the standard meditation practice, which is imagining a small buddha, not as a statue, but as an alive, though still, being. Given the nature of the topic, it's not a stretch to mention that from the occultism's point of view, such practice creates a "nest" that will eventually attract a "bird" suitable for that nest and most of the time you wouldn't like the nature of that bird.

many years ago, i attempted a shamanic soul retrieval journey/experiment with a shaman trained in the south american tradition. the idea is that with every trauma we experience, a piece of our soul flees. sometimes, a piece of one's soul is stolen from them or ripped away from them. other times, it simply wanders away because it doesn't want to be with us and would rather go searching for something else.

but, you see...we are never whole until all the pieces of our soul are together and as one unit. the retrieval is a journey to the three worlds..upper, middle and the nether worlds to plead with the piece of the detached dismembered soul to return. one is accompanied by a shaman or psychopomp in this journey. it was also accompanied by a lot of rhythmic drumming.

anything can happen during this journey. one may meet helpful guides or animal guides..or dangerous elements that want to hold on to your piece of lost soul and wouldn't let it go free. sometimes the piece of the lost soul doesnt want to return because in it's detached state, it finds healing because the trauma memories were too acrid.

the shaman sometimes acts on your behalf to wrestle or fight or even kill these hostile beings if they prevent the soul retrieval. sometimes its peaceful. sometimes dangerous. retrieval is not guaranteed. it was one of the many trippy experiences i have had...there was no use of drugs or alcohol. there was no burning incense or smoke or any such thing as i had requested that we dont do any of that. it was just the drumming.

i continued to feel trippy and spaced out for 3-4 days after the experience. i stopped driving for a week or so because i had trouble focusing visually even though i was able to continue functioning normally. i slept a lot and i slept well. but a lot of 'beings' i met during the retrieval trip stayed with me for a long time.

did i imagine them? was it a suggestion by the shaman? maybe. did it matter? i felt so much better and had a certain clarity of mind and lightness of spirit for many many months afterwards.

i was not necessarily a skeptic but neither was a believer. i like to walk into experiences with an open mind. sometimes it works. other times it fails. but in this particular case, it was more beneficial than detrimental.

during the journey i created a few characters to support me during my journey into the under world. i created a different kind of companion for the upper world. i conversed with them for a long time after the experience and then slowly as i got busy with work and other things consumed my time, they slowly faded away. but i like to think that they still reside somewhere deep inside my consciousness. and that they will come back if i beckon them or if the need arises that i have to go retrieve another piece of my soul.

I'm not sure if it's really possible for everyone. I tried it once (though not very hard) and nothing came out of it.

This reads like an incredibly poorly researched article. As in, it sounds like it was written after an hour of googleing and skimming a few of these guides.

It might be interesting to get the opinion of somebody who tried this, mostly out of curiosity.

1. One of the core guidelines is "Don't question it. If you think you may have heard a voice, it was your tulpa." - This becomes important later on

2. True 'sentience', in the meaning that there's a different entity that thinks in parallel to you, is something that seems impossible to achieve. There are a few people who claim that they can do that, but nobody seems to be able to replicate that and at this point I believe that some of the people who think they have a very well manifested tulpa actually suffer from real mental issues that get misinterpreted as tulpa.

After some (a lot) of time spent on creating the Tulpa, I did actually hear a voice that at first surprised me. It genuinely felt like I might be talking to a different person. A huge success, surely, how is it possible that nobody talks about this. However instead of not questioning it, my inquisitive and critical side took over to figure out how it works. These are my personal findings:

The process of "forcing" a tulpa, not dissimilar to meditation, conditions yourself to:

a) Build a well thought out alternate personality

b) Disassociate certain thoughts from yourself and attribute them to the tulpa

c) Rapidly context switch between two personalities while maintaining the illusion that you are not in fact talking to yourself

In summary, you're training yourself to context-switch and impersonate an alter ego, while also crafting a strong conditioning to ignore that process and instead attribute it to a sentient thought-form

I haven't tried much forcing in earnest, but I've talked to voices in my head that didn't feel like part of me, and I've lurked in r/Tuples for years. It seems pretty common to have "parallel" consciousness among tulpamancers, though I think it depends on how you define and measure that.

Our sense of "continuous consciousness" is already an illusion, built from a series of moments. There are a lot of things about the brain/mind like that that I think make tulpas less unbelievable the more you think about it. Another is that there is a lot of diversity among "normal" brains. If someone can rotate a 3D shape in their head and you can't, you could say one of you has a "real mental issue," or just acknowledge the diversity. Also, a lot of our "thinking" is not conscious; it seems like we experience certain thoughts as "our thoughts that we are consciously thinking" because some process picks out a thought here and there and presents it that way. If another process were to come along and pick out a different 1% of our ongoing thoughts and present it as a coherent stream of consciousness, conforming to a certain personality, it could be another consciousness.

I don't think the brain/mind has one CPU and one program counter and that's that, and anything else is an illusion; I think it's got lots of cores and lots of threads, and if anything the idea that there's one hardcoded main thread is the illusion.

Initial reaction to the title before reading the article: yes, and it's called Twitch.

I think this Tulpa thing is a really fascinating idea but not for treating loneliness unless people are truly locked in.

Now that we have the internet there are a lot of other ways to connect to people that I think are better.

I actually think it may be okay to talk to yourself as a tool for figuring things out. But I don't think that is a good way to relieve loneliness.

But as an example of the power of meditation, it seems interesting. Because normally these types of hallucinations only happen close to a dream state or while asleep. So if people can trigger them while awake that is pretty powerful.

I suspect it might involve entering a bit of a meditative state quickly though.

That's one of the interesting things about brain computer interfaces. Someday we may be able to directly tap in to these simulation capabilities in terms of more conscious control and also recording them.

Or maybe we will someday be able to do a sort of waking lucid dream with a computer display. So for example I could be looking at my code or whatever and visualizing a diagram that would be recorded by the computer.

I found out about this just recently, from an old new york times op-ed by anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann (https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/15/opinion/luhrmann-conjurin...).

Basically it's a non-superstitious variant of the prayer meditation practice well-established in Christianity (she talks about modern evangelical Christians, but there's also medieval mysticism).

It seems to use the same mechanism that makes us feel a nasty presence when going to bed right after watching a horror movie.

I think that it might help cope with life better, sort of a mental refuge like Buddhist meditation (which only makes sense if you believe in reincarnation), but I've been procrastinating trying it, because I'm quite sceptical that it works and that it's worth the massive effort. One thing is if you actually think it's a supernatural Being watching over you, another if you know it's just an illusion.

> One thing is if you actually think it's a supernatural Being watching over you, another if you know it's just an illusion.

If it's anything like building a "mind palace" it's a little bit of both. I started trying to do that 18 years ago and have a very good positional memory now, but it definitely started out as me pretending to see houses in my head.

that's a different practice though, just uses the same tool (visualization). The goal is not happiness/serenity/inner strength but powering up your memory.

It's fundamentally the same thing, at first I was pretending. Now when I have to access positional memory I see it in my mind and it doesn't feel artificial at all. I can walk through places I've been and remember small environmental details if I focus on them, which is very convenient when I get lost (I have no sense of direction). It's real in a way that it never was before, which is not dissimilar to what we're talking about.

Hinduism has 33 million gods. unlike monotheism, hindus get to choose their gods. and we can talk to them. not just gods, there are demons and demi gods, hybrid creatures and celestials and elementals.

tulpa sounds like a product of polytheism.

and yes, it works. i have been exploring my religion during this past covid year and i have remained largely unscathed emotionally/mentally due to this journey. i am not hating it.

I credit a deeper connection to religion with enabling me to thrive over the past few months (though I'd be fine anyway I think.)

In my case I connected with Judaism.

Prayer is your avenue for pouring your heart out to G-d though I'm working on that, doesn't come naturally. On the flip side, I don't think we should confuse the "other" part of our inner monologue as G-d speaking back to us.

> On the flip side, I don't think we should confuse the "other" part of our inner monologue as G-d speaking back to us.

How would one know? Would not a G_d talk back to us? G_d spoke to Abraham and Moses. The covenant itself comes from a chat with G_d.

I looked up this Hebrew word from a Leonard Cohen song.(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cK4iAjzAoas : You want it darker.. Assassin's Creed trailer). "Hineni". It appears in the Hebrew Scriptures only a handful of times. It means ‘Here I am” and I have often thought about it. I really liked what it meant. Especially the bit about the sacrifice of Isaac on the mount in the Genesis. And when Moses says it during Exodus.

One of the most cliched but likely phased out school morning ritual I recall is the roll call when I was in school. The teacher would sit down with an open ledger and call out our names in alphabetical order. And we have to yell out ‘Present!’.... “Here I am”.

Without the back and forth, there is no acknowledgment from either side. So faith needs a Hineni. Faith needs a “Here I am.” Faith needs a back and forth. It needs a separation between the sacred and the profane. And if we can’t see, hear or touch the sacred, we will have to imagine it.

It also made me wonder...do animals and birds and insects have imagination? Perhaps that’s why they don’t have a God. Imagination is our super power. To not use it would be a pity.

Neurologically, electric impulses in the brain and imbalances of brain chemicals, seizures and epilepsy and injury can cause visions and make us hear voices from god or deja vu or even psychic abilities. This is an illness. This often causes hyper religiousity. To approach god and to realize god as an imagined entity that we will absorb later into our own psyche is not a mental illness. It is entirely rational and it operates with its own control system.

All religions are syncretic from Sumerian/Babylonian times. Even from the oldest recorded words in the Epic of Gilgamesh, we have been hearing the quiet affirmation or the thunderous demands of divinity. Imagined or otherwise.

In Hinduism, there is a concept called Brahman. (Not to be confused with Brahmin who is a person/an individual who engages in priestly activities. A generic wiki entry here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahman)

[..] Brahman (Sanskrit: ब्रह्मन्), (Hindi: ब्रह्म) connotes the highest Universal Principle, the Ultimate Reality in the universe. In major schools of Hindu philosophy, it is the material, efficient, formal and final cause of all that exists. It is the pervasive, infinite, eternal truth and bliss which does not change, yet is the cause of all changes. Brahman as a metaphysical concept refers to the single binding unity behind diversity in all that exists in the universe.[..]

On the other end of the universal cosmic principle aka Brahman is the Atman, the individual soul that is housed in this mortal sheath.

There are two broad schools of religious thought: Dvaita and advaita. Dualism and Non-dualism. Dualism says that there is the soul and then there is the unchanging omniscient godhead.

Non dualism says there is a separation between the individual soul and the universal cosmic principle. But it is temporary. Because there is no difference between the two.

With religion...because we are unable to imagine this all encompassing Brahman, we give it shape and form and names. We pray and talk and offer sacrifices and create rituals.

Believing that the microcosm is in the macrocosm and the macrocosm contains within itself all else will lead us to the Brahman eventually(or at least that’s the hope) and the way it realize the inter connectivity of it all. Because all this is maya.

When I was more atheist/agnostic, I would say all this is shite. I now say all this is maya..illusion. I don’t think I have changed my opinion.("none of this is real") I just use different words.

But surrendering to faith is not easy. To forgive is hard. To accept others as they are is even harder. To accept ‘oneself’ is the hardest part of it all.

I think the rituals, prayers, places of worship, beliefs, pilgrimage..those are the easy parts. That’s no different from any other routine I have or following them is not any more difficult than remembering and following my sequenced kettlebell routine. It’s external. Religion is easy.

Faith is difficult. The line between who you are internally and your ‘god’ is thin and blurred. As is the line between faith and insanity. maybe its fantasy. To be on the side of sanity, the faithful would need to talk to this ‘invisible omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent’ entity called God.

And if we don’t, we’d be called insane for talking to ourselves. And so to compartmentalise my god as separate from me while I sort out this messy business called life is important. To me.

Just woolgathering.

This seems way too interesting to not have more scientific studies on it.

It reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain where after cutting the connection between the two hemispheres of the brain:

> It is known that when the corpus callosum is severed during an experimental procedure, the experimenter can ask each side of the brain the same question and receive two different answers. When the experimenter asks the right visual field/left hemisphere what they see the participant will respond verbally, whereas if the experimenter asks the left visual field/right hemisphere what they see the participant will not be able to respond verbally but will pick up the appropriate object with their left hand.

So it's definitely possible to have two consciousness occupying the same brain.

> definitely possible to have two consciousness occupying the same brain

Based on the rest of your comment, I think that's quite a leap. The different parts of the brain are obviously not communicating normally with each other & the body, but I'm not sure that means two consciousnesses.

You can communicate with each of "them" individually and they have independent thought processes. Isn't that good enough?

I see them as siamese twins (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjoined_twins) where each of the twin had half their brain removed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemispherectomy).

The most recent phenomenon to get this treatment was mindfulness. The problem is that it tends to be enthusiasts who are the first to explore something in a field, with predictable results.

It's hard to call this two consciousness occupying the same brain. It's more likely that brain is flexible enough that each half works independently, creating a consciousness in each of what are now two separate (half sized) brains.

Remember when this was all over 4chan when My Little Pony came out?

I've been doing this for years if anyone has questions.

How did your tulpa manifest? Did you work actively to create one or did it occur naturally. What are the usual methods it is done?

I worked actively to create one using a modified version of this guide: https://tulpanomicon.guide/faqman-creation.html. This is very antiquated now. A better guide would probably be this one: https://tulpanomicon.guide/methos-creation.html, which represents the "state of the art" for creating tulpas.

At first she manifested as a presence. I could feel that she was there, but we weren't able to communicate in anything other than "head pressures" (I have no idea what they actually are but "head pressures" is the least bad descriptor). We used that to work out yes and no, then from there we used a modified nonverbal communication card to get simple sentences. The breakthrough into full sentences happened when I was working on a homework problem in college and I got told "no, that's wrong" and then an explanation of how to do it correctly. She was right.

how is called your friend?

I have several, but my first one is named Nicole. She's been there for me, and is probably one of if not the biggest reason that I am not currently in a box in the ground.

Practically it's been kinda useful because we can have detailed discussions about things. This kind of pair programming has been the secret to why I'm such a prolific writer and also why I have so much damn code. It's all the work of more than one.

I wrote out more words at some point:

- https://christine.website/blog/what-its-like-to-be-me-2018-0...

- https://christine.website/blog/plurality-driven-development-...

This is not a good idea. Either it doesn't work, or you've managed to get your brain to emulate two people instead of one, which… well, depending on how you ascribe value to people, it might be ethically problematic to do so if you're in a bad place, mentally.

As part of my research into AGI, which I believe hinges upon conscious reasoning and therefore conscious experience, I’ve read extensively about “Tulpas”, and interviewed a few people on a Tulpa discord.

First thing — this phenomena is predicted by the Attention-Schema theory of consciousness, which explicitly postulates that our brains generate not only our own consciousness, but also generate and attribute consciousness to external entities (whether people, animals, or as humans often do, inanimate objects whose activity seems deliberate).

Second thing — this phenomena has many analogues in other realms of human experience. Writers, particularly Stephen King, speak of how they let their characters do what their characters want to do, as if those characters have taken on agency in the writer’s own mind. There’s also the well known mental disorders of schizophrenia and dissociated identify disorder (formerly called multiple personalities). To the person experiencing a Tulpa, it is a feeling of having a sentient other inside your mind, with a mind of its own. They aren’t “parroting” imaginary friends, putting words into the Tulpa’’s mouth like a ventriloquist.

Last thing — Tulpas seem to have access to all a person’s memories and to be incapable of having their own separate ones. They do not seem to run as a “parallel” process. Moreover, practitioners often talk of “switching” who is “fronting”, i.e., of which consciousness is guiding concrete behavior of the body.

In short, this phenomena is real, and it is a fascinating topic for those interested in how the brain generates consciousness. Our brains seem hardwired to generate and attribute consciousness to not only ourselves, but to others. This “Theory of Mind”’ isn’t so controversial. What is more controversial is the claim of AST and the Tulpas, that these generated consciousnesses are just as real as the one we experience.

In other words, Frodo really is alive, even if only Tolkien spent enough time with him to develop into a short-term consciousness.

It won’t be long until we do the same with machines, and then GPT-3 is going to look laughably dumb.

I've always talked to various (mostly dead) people in my head, or sometimes out loud. For instance on everything related to music I very often talk with J.S. Bach (a good approximation for God in this case). I also almost always have long dialogues with authors of the books I'm reading. These days I'm reading Ibn Khaldun, therefore I sometimes speak with him about the world, or Islam (of which he was a true "doctor"), or politics, etc.

However usually imagining a telepathic communication of some sort is enough. I rarely need to imagine them as actually present in the room if ever, unless it's to "show them" something in particular.

Interesting to consider that if this is shown to exist and benefit people, it basically tells you all you need to know about the future of AI companionship, if it wasn’t already obvious.

Like the movie Her (2013)(https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1798709/). Pretty sad to watch but has an amazing sound track.

But AI companions are not constrained by our own knowledge or cognition like a Tulpa.

Also they exist. Already very popular in China.

That’s what I’ve done my whole life.

But instead of a “friend” it’s more like referring to myself as “us”, “we” in my inner monologues.

And it just makes loneliness worse.

Remembering Marvin Minsky's concept of agents composing a Society of Mind, I have no problem playing poker with myself or watching TikTok to overhear samples of distinct personas that I can try on for a few seconds.

Similarly, original character-driven writing gives me a number of personality templates to fit. Don't ask me what I do with the Shrike.

this makes me wonder if human-like, conversational AI is ever achieved - if such bots will replace, if at least partially, human relationships by being able to be the "perfect" partner, friend, etc. by being able to mold themselves in something fitting for a person

That is the movie « Her ».

But more seriously, TV, Youtube and podcasts have replaced most of this interaction for all the lonely people. It doesn’t need to be interactive. But we already see the drawbacks: By subtly twisting those a certain way, it makes people very angry very quickly. Debates with contradicting people on stage, depending on who you identify to; Forbidden opinions; Pushy ideologies; Pretty much everyone stops listening to TV for its upsetting and fearmongering effect, so imagine if it were tailored to everyone with a subtle twist that you can’t choose and which irritates a part of your psychology.

Why stop there? Just go straight to the Matrix!

Just get a dog. For 50 bucks a month in food you get the best little friend you could imagine.

Maybe if the dog is perfectly healthy, but that is never the case. Unless the owner has significant disposable income, they will end up ignoring problems that need to be corrected.

Just kill it and get a new one if it gets sick. Simple.

And responsibility. For some people that feels like an anchor tied to their neck.

Reading comments here and I just realized that Brandon Sanderson wrote a story about a man with many tulpas, Legion: https://coppermind.net/wiki/Legion

"WILLLLLLSOOOONNNNNN!!!!"

Sounds like replacing one psychological problem (loneliness) with another (split personality).

Possibly a similar or related phenomenon: https://neurosciencenews.com/writer-character-voice-16749/

I bought a mannequin head as a "rubber ducky" to talk to. Its eyeless stare discouraged me from sharing my thoughts, let alone my sleep.

Perhaps the form of an imaginary friend plays a significant role in coping with loneliness.

I find the web design on that site to be so user hostile, due to the header and especially the second unrelated article on the page, which is the only thing that appears in the Reader View.

Ofc no, just see how Gollum from Lord of The Rings ended.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_AEpDOuWk8

Wow this is super interesting from psychological perspective.

I have a tulpa but he stutters, it's very annoying.

This is the kind of article a schizophrenic protagonist of a horror film reads in the intro.

My friend says yes.

I'm not convinced deliberately trying to create an imaginary friend is a good idea. It sounds like deliberately inducing mental illness.

You have a bad understanding of what mental illness is then. Imaginary friend is a coping mechanism not gateway to becoming crazy.

As long as you aware that the friend is imaginary, perhaps. If it gets to real, I'd say it is a mental illness.

Not sure if you can simply create that by willpower/meditation, though. Although it seems very likely that it is possible to deliberately fuck up one's mental health. After all, it is possible to fuck up one's physical health, too.

This should have been posted around the beginning of the quarantine last year. Months of time spent alone would have been enough to allow people to construct sentient tulpas.

But almost no one was truly alone. They used voice and video chat and everything else.

This is what religious beliefs are essentially: imaginary friends.

With a very complex backstory, of course, but imaginary nevertheless.

The purpose of your brain is to avoid death. When it learns that death is inevitable, it falls into a "bad state". The human brain has built-in protections against "bad states", known as defense mechanisms... which are essentially your brain lying to you so you can feel better. The reason these defense mechanisms exist is because people that had them were more likely to survive and reproduce instead of becoming depressed and losing interest in surviving and reproducing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defence_mechanism

The belief in an immortal soul and an afterlife in heaven is the byproduct of such lies. It's your brain telling you: "don't worry bro, just keep surviving and reproducing and everything will be fine, I promise". It's not true, but as an evolutionary strategy it has worked well so far.

PS: The belief we will survive an imminent cascading ecological collapse without us doing anything is also a delusion created by defense mechanisms.

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