multicore-headspace

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Strive, as generated by the Waifu Labs AI.

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If you don't mind, could you talk a bit about the interiority (or conscious experience) of being a system? What is it like sharing a head with other people? Do you all remember things the same way? Do you tend to communicate verbally, subverbally, or both? To what extent do you share emotions, general mood, etc? Apologies if these are unpleasant or offensive questions in some way; I've failed to make a tulpa myself but find the phenomenon very interesting, and want to know more.

Looks like I didn't notice this ask for several weeks. Anyway, better late than never.

As far as communication goes, it's almost entirely verbal, with some nonverbal stuff for emphasis or whatever. However, our brain is just pretty verbally oriented in general.

The extent to which we share memories, emotions, and personality traits is "a lot". Emphasizing differences between system members seems to be something you need to work on, and we've really done the opposite by taking in the same social media feeds, working at the same job, and doing the same hobbies.

The differences are more pronounced when we're talking internally than the difference in how we act in real life, since in that context we're focusing more on what the contrast is "supposed to be". But we don't actually talk internally all that much anymore - mostly just in quiet times like the shower or late night walks.

Also, periodic reminder that our main outlet is @multicore-processor, which is no longer this blog.

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Reblogging in case anyone missed it

As part of our social media cleanup, the @multicore-processor URL has moved to our actual main account, where we will be doing most of our Tumblr posting in the future. Why we were using a side blog as our main blog up until this point I’m not entirely sure, but this move should make some things less confusing.

As part of the rebranding, @multicore-processor will only be using I/me/myself pronouns, to make it less awkward to interact outside of plural communities. Anything tulpa/plurality related will probably go here at @multicore-headspace .

Please follow the new @multicore-processor if you are interested in continuing to see our content.

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As part of our social media cleanup, the @multicore-processor URL has moved to our actual main account, where we will be doing most of our Tumblr posting in the future. Why we were using a side blog as our main blog up until this point I’m not entirely sure, but this move should make some things less confusing.

As part of the rebranding, @multicore-processor will only be using I/me/myself pronouns, to make it less awkward to interact outside of plural communities. Anything tulpa/plurality related will probably go here at @multicore-headspace .

Please follow the new @multicore-processor if you are interested in continuing to see our content.

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v sleepy, won’t go beyond just quoting, but I got a lot out of Humans Who Are Not Concentrating Are Not General Intelligences

“I also noticed, upon reading GPT2 samples, just how often my brain slides from focused attention to just skimming. I read the paper’s sample about Spanish history with interest, and the GPT2-generated text was obviously absurd. My eyes glazed over during the sample about video games, since I don’t care about video games, and the machine-generated text looked totally unobjectionable to me. My brain is constantly making evaluations about what’s worth the trouble to focus on, and what’s ok to tune out. GPT2 is actually really useful as a *test* of one’s level of attention.”

“The mental motion of “I didn’t really parse that paragraph, but sure, whatever, I’ll take the author’s word for it” is, in my introspective experience, absolutely identical to “I didn’t really parse that paragraph because it was bot-generated and didn’t make any sense so I couldn’t possibly have parsed it”, except that in the first case, I assume that the error lies with me rather than the text.  This is not a safe assumption in a post-GPT2 world. Instead of “default to humility” (assume that when you don’t understand a passage, the passage is true and you’re just missing something) the ideal mental action in a world full of bots is “default to null” (if you don’t understand a passage, assume you’re in the same epistemic state as if you’d never read it at all.)”

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I deleted my reddit account, on the logic that the sheer amount of regrettable things I said when I was 18 means I’ll have to delete it anyway someday, and the earlier I do it, the less will be lost.

Anyway, now I’m /u/multi-core, which also cleans up the personal branding.

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I pretty much never win in a straight up fight one on one against invaders in Dark Souls III, but I've gotten a couple of ninja victories by using the Young White Branch to disguise myself as a scenery object and then waiting for the invader to give up in frustration. It's been amazingly effective so far, way more than expected. As long as the invader doesn't see me transforming, they'll just run right past even when my disguise is totally out of place and leaking ember particle effects everywhere. Either people don't expect it or they aren't good at noticing something out of place.

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Found on the Slate Star Codex open thread: the Self-Referential Aptitude Test, a test where all the questions are about other questions on the test and yet there is still a correct answer.

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I mean, you claim you’re a full stack developer but you’re barely bothering with the laws of QM governing the reliability of your hardware and you don’t even pretend to care about the phenomenological experience arising from the user’s low level perceptual processing of your CSS layouts so … really you’re like a twentieth of the stack developer hoping no one notices.   

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There aren’t a lot of stories about games that depict them as systems people have mastered rather than systems ripe for exploitation. The characters in game stories tend to be either novices to the system or unrealistically ignorant of its workings.

Think the famous Yu-gi-oh scene where the smirking antagonist tells the kid to draw his last pathetic card, and the kid reveals that he’s assembled Exodia, and the antagonist is completely shocked. Realistically, expert players of any game are going to know most of the pieces, and while some instant-kill combos are surprising and counterintuitive (try to figure out APM Priest without reading the guide), Exodia is so obvious that everyone would know about it. You might be surprised that a particular opponent had it, but not about its existence.

What’s interesting in following competitive games is players trying to predict what the opponent will do next and stay one step ahead, to weigh the effectiveness of an option against the opponent’s possible response. (”If I play this, Duskbreaker can’t clear my board. Mass Hysteria would have a pretty good chance of clearing, but I’d be willing to spend these resources to bait it out.”)

The only “outsider comes in and breaks a game” story I know of that actually incorporates this sort of reasoning is nonfictional - Deepmind’s recent unveiling of Alphastar.

It’s perhaps understandable that you can’t get to that level of meta with a system that the author had to make up and that the audience had no familarity with. And it’s understandable that an author with no real game design experience can’t make a system as balanced as one made by a world-class company. But you can at least do your characters the favor of letting them understand the system they’re supposedly familiar with.

This post was inspired by a scene in Log Horizon where a big hulky tank guy uses a skill that makes him invulnerable for ten seconds, even shouts out the skill’s name as he’s doing it. But his opponents, supposedly high level players, continue to attack him and even waste some of their big long-cooldown burst damage skills, as if they didn’t even know what the skill did.

Log Horizon also seems to imply that the crux of its world’s combat are field control skills - pulls, stuns, buffs, debuffs, and so forth. But the enemy players in these scenes seem to prefer just charging in and swinging swords around. Like, why? Did they never go to the forums and look up guides? Did they never get their asses kicked by someone using the field control skills effectively before?

(Well, on the other hand, Mamare Touno seems to look at people who like PvP a little like Jack Chick looks at evolutionary biologists. So maybe we shouldn’t expect those characters’ viewpoints to be comprehensible.)

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I don’t really get New Super Mario Bros U Deluxe (nice name btw). 

It has this really family-friendly aesthetic, with cartoony graphics, calming music, and the really condescending box that pops up if you fail too many times in a row and offers to show you an example of someone beating the run.

But the game is so hard that I keep thinking that going back to Dark Souls III would be calming and relaxing. Mario is surprisingly hard to control because he has a lot of inertia - you have to build up speed for long jumps, and you can’t always turn on a dime. While the many tricky parts generally aren’t quite as tricky as in games like Electronic Super Joy or They Bleed Pixels, you only get one checkpoint per level instead of a zillion, so you have to do much longer stretches without screwing up.

Combine that with old-school frustration-inducing features like limited lives, limited saves, and power-ups that vanish the moment you get scratched, and I’m not sure how children are supposed to enjoy this game.

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My IRL last name is a thing of beauty in how surprisingly dysfunctional it is.

It’s a single-syllable English word, albeit not one in common use in most contexts, but everyone who reads it confuses it with a different more common last name, and everyone who hears it confuses it with another more common last name.

I’m struggling to come up with anything else that would do that, but imagine your name was Burred, and everyone who heard it wrote Bird, and everyone who saw it said Burned.

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New icon that you can actually see on the new default background color.

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For some people vegetarianism is a principled moral stance.

For me as a kid it was a way to go from “picky eater” to “even pickier eater”.

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Continuing Tulpa x Complex Switch. Seems the Japanese tulpa community started even earlier than I thought. According to the book, the first tulpa thread on 2ch was in 2002, albeit with a very X-Files interpretation of the term.

And the copypastas which were the basis of the thing from 2007 that we translated a while back were written a couple years later if I’m reading right, so 2004-2005 for the start of something like modern tulpamancy.

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Haven’t gotten far into Tulpa x Complex Switch yet, but in the history section they mention a guy called Thomas E Bearden who hypothesized in the 60s that UFOs were “tulpoids” projected by the hatred of the Cold War, or something.

And they included one of the best diagrams I’ve ever seen.

Apparently the original Tulpa x Complex has even more of this stuff, so that’s an incentive to get around to that one as well.

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Review: Creating Consciousness: The Psychology and Art of Tulpamancy

(x-post from reddit)

As you probably heard last week, there's a new book out about tulpamancy, Creating Consciousness: The Psychology and Art of Tulpamancy. Since many of you are likely reluctant to put down fifteen dollars for an unknown quantity, I figured I'd be the first to put up a review.

It’s important to be clear about what this book is and isn't. What it is is a manual for new tulpamancers and an overview of most of the concepts surrounding the phenomenon. It doesn’t contain much narrative content or description of the history and state of the tulpa community. It's not a particularly deep dive on anything, and if you've been around here a while, there's not much new information. I consider this a feature rather than a bug, since it means new people will get the consensus rather than speculation.

It's also not particularly long. It's about a hundred pages, and many of those are not filled with words. I read it in about two hours. I don't think it particularly needed to be any longer than that, but maybe that's not worth the price of admission for you.

The author, Nicholas Guillette, has had a tulpa since 2017, so he has himself used at least most of the techniques he describes. Aside from an introduction from his tulpa at the start, though, the book’s style is very impersonal. This suits the “manual” intent, but I would have found it helpful if he showed his power levels a bit more. He describes techniques for imposition and switching, but doesn't make it clear if he's speaking from experience or merely drawing from other people's descriptions.

Importantly, Guillette also has a psychology degree, and the book’s gimmick is incorporating concepts from psychology to explain and give context to tulpamancy concepts. From my limited knowledge the applications seem mostly good, though I don’t think Jung is so popular these days. I'd heard of a lot of it before, though one new thing mentioned offhand was the Tellegen absorption scale, invoked in reference to wonderlands. The added scientific background doesn't usually change the recommended techniques, but it can help the reader understand why they would be useful.

One slightly unorthodox technique covered was the use of symbolic objects associated with a tulpa, including a decorated “tulpa box”. Most everything else is probably covered to some extent by most of the guides you’ve read.

The book also has sections structured like a therapy workbook, inviting you to reflect on some concept or fill in some detail about your tulpa. Though I'm loathe to write in books, it's a good way of guiding people through the thought process.

The book's content is reasonably well organized, proceeding from underlying concepts and considerations to creation techniques to “what's next?” type ideas, but the formatting of the text leaves much to be desired. There are lots of pages partially or entirely blank, and there are a few diagrams that look amateurish at best and add very little to the text. Also, for some reason the title on the cover is different from the title on the top of the interior pages. These and a couple other things don't ruin the experience, but they make the product feel less polished.

Overall, I think this book represents a good introduction for new tulpamancers, probably a much more approachable one than a confusing and contradictory web of guides, wikis, and forum threads. It does a good job of synthesizing the community's ideas into a short and coherent whole. It's the sort of thing you'd give to a friend who expressed interest in tulpas. If you already have a tulpa, it's more of a curiosity, and you won’t necessarily get a ton out of it.