2018-07-23 Notes

Neurons Gone Wild

(Previously discussed on 2017-01-02)

Can we come up with a scientific explanation for religious experiences?
Neurons, selfish and feral
- "Selfish" neurons
- Neurons are in a state of competition for resources
- Mental activity feeds neurons
- This competition is the key behind neuroplasticity - neurons actively join more active networks in order to gain resources
Agents all the way down
- Agent - any entity capable of autonomous goal-directed behavior
- Agency is a matter of degrees
- Agency is not inherent to the system, but is ascribed to the system by post-hoc analysis
- Agency is a fundamental property of the brain
- Because neurons have a higher level of agency than other cells, the brain is configured to run agents by default
Level 2: Modules
- We can describe the brain at a slightly higher level of abstraction as hundreds or thousands of cooperating and competing modules
- According to Dennett and Seung, these modules have the same sort of selfishness as the neurons they're made from
Level 3: Subpersonal Agents
- Drives/instincts
- Can "feel" these agents via introspection
- These agents aren't capable of using language, but we still speak of them "telling" us things
Level 4: The self
- Social agent
- Not in control, but is the "voice" of the most powerful faction in our mind
Birth Defects in the Self
- Is the human mind capable of supporting multiple self-agents?
Multiple occupancy
- There are multiple psychological disorders where there appear to be multiple agents in the brain
- Schizophrenia - hallucinated voices
- Disassociative identity disorder - 2 or more person-like agents in the same brain
- Posession trances - "gods" who temporarily inhabit minds
- Split-brain - when communication between parts of the brain is severed, each half acts like its own agent
- Could these agents be independently sentient?
Agent horticulture
- Tulpas - trying to create additional agents
Taking demons seriously
- What is the psychological or anthropological explanation for demon possession and exorcism?
- Can we think of curing possession as changing the agent that's in control of the brain?
- The exorcist is a person with the moral authority to negotiate with the currently dominant agent and persuade them to relinquish control
My Thoughts
- This is probably the most charitable interpretation of tulpas I've read
- Naturalistic explanation for tulpas and other religious/demonological experiences
- Still doesn't prove that tulpas are a good thing or that you should want to create additional agents in the brain

Highly Advanced Tulpamancy 101 For Beginners

The brain is probably one of the most complex things that we know of
We don't model ourselves as complex chaotic systems of firing neurons, we model ourselves as entities that have a discrete existence in the world
Our model of ourselves has the self as a distinct entity
- This entity, like all other entities in the world, has various attributes
- However, unlike other entities in the world, the self is a far less well-defined category than other categories we're used to
- Can put almost anything as an attribute of the self
  - Meyers-Briggs personality type
  - Physical characteristics
  - Neurotype
This broad conception of the self is adaptive - allows us to feel like an attack on those similar to us is an attack upon us
This broad conception of the self can also be maladaptive
- If you are given a label, you can come to associate attributes associated with the label with yourself, even when there is no reason to do so
- Example: if you associate "depression" with laziness, then getting a diagnosis of depression can cause you to think of yourself as lazy, even when there is no other reason for you to do so
An extensional definition of the self:
- Experience of perception - our senses provide an extremely high fidelity feed of information about the outside world (within certain limits)
- Experience of internal mind voice - many people experience an internal monologue or dialogue
- Experience of emotion - most people experience emotions, although the strength of this experience varies from person to person
- Experience of the body - various signals about our bodily state (pain, hunger, etc.) - distinct from experience of perception, since perception is about things outside the body
- Experience of abstract thought - mental images, imagined scenes, mathematical calculation, etc
- Experience of memory - the experience of calling up past memories
- Experience of choice - the experience of having control over our lives
This extensional definition is incomplete
People also define themselves intensionally - with various attributes that they've chosen for themselves
- Religion
- Nationality
- Age class
This self-definiton creates a self-schema - a collection memories, attitudes, demeanors, generalizations, etc that defines how the person views themselves and interacts with the world
People can have multiple self-schemas for various situations
- I might think of myself as an engineer primarily at work, and "the dude who does notes" when I'm at RRG - these are different schemas
A tulpa is a highly partitioned and developed self-schema that is "always on"
More specifically a tulpa is: "an autonomous entity existing within the brain of a 'host'. They are distinct from the host in that they possess their own personality, opinions, and actions, which are independent of the host’s, and are conscious entities in that they possess awareness of themselves and the world.'
- That's not the same thing as a self-schema and claiming that it is, is a form of motte-and-bailey
The challenge with creating a tulpa is to extend the intensional-definition split of having multiple self-schemas out into the extensional definition of the self
- Have different senses of perception, internal mind-voice, etc. when you're in a different self-schema
- Yeah, this is dangerous; so the first rule is don't do this
Changing our extensional definition of the self is far more dangerous than changing our intensional definition, but maybe we can compartmentalize our changes
- We can't. Nothing that I've read about rationalists dealing with tulpas or narratives in their daily lives has convinced me otherwise
How to tulpa
- First learn how to build a mental compartment
  - Pick an idea
  - Let go of all the system-2 safeguards that you have protecting you against bias when dealing with that idea
  - Ignore all counterevidence
  - If the idea forms a successful prediction, keep the warm glow of success in the compartment
  - If the idea fails, keep the failure outside and don't let the compartment update
- Pick the beliefs that you want to have, and sort them into compartments
  - If two beliefs would interact destructively, put them in separate compartments and don't let them interact
- Regulate information intake, deciding which compartment each new piece of information should go into
  - Normally this is done unconsciously, but you'll have to have to have some conscious control since you're attempting to build up multiple selves, rather than having a single unitary self
- Once the sorting becomes automatic, then you'll end up with multiple categories, each with radically different beliefs about the world
  - These categories are tulpas
Failure mode - tulpa doesn't seem to be "talking back"
- You need to put beliefs and experiences into your tulpa in order for it to do things
- If you have to ask whether your tulpa is working, it isn't working
- Your self of sense is how your mental algorithms feel from the inside - if you feel the same, you haven't managed to change your mental algorithms
The real trick with creating a tulpa is somehow seeing yourself as multiple entities, not a singleton
My thoughts
- Did I just read a guide on how to make yourself go insane?
- Sometimes I think Hive is normal, and then I read stuff like this
- And Hive doesn't answer the real question: why would anyone want to inflict this upon themselves?

Highly Advanced Tulpamancy 201 For Tropers

In the previous essay, we saw how we can alter the process the brain uses to create a self and use it to create multiple selves
Further questions
- What does it mean to give up control of the body/senses?
- Is the new entity a separate person?
- What happens if there's a power struggle?
- How can you do this without permanently damaging yourself?
  - Narrator: "You can't."
Start with the question of how you create identity, in the normal case:
- We take in or discard information all the time based upon our worldview
- Many parts of our identity are defined by how we say they're defined
  - Narrative self
  - You are defined by the actions that you allow yourself to take
  - This can be conceptualized by thinking of your life as a story, and seeing what actions are available to you as the main character in that story
  - Our beliefs strongly determine whether we can do something
    - Not to an infinte extent - if I believe that imaginary energy can make me fly, it won't stop me from falling to my death
    - But if I think I can't fly, then I'm going to be much less likely to take up hobbies like hang-gliding or piloting
    - The tulpa community is full of things that only happen when you believe that you can do them
    - There appear to be large parts of the mind that can be shaped by how you believe they're supposed to be shaped
- Our minds, normally, don't model the world as it is, they model the world in narrative terms
  - Unless we're specifically investigating a phenomenon, we don't explicitly think of the world in terms of particles and fields
  - We think of the world in terms of higher-level objects
  - At human scales, it doesn't often matter whether gravity is the action of a god or a distorition in spacetime -- only matters when you're engineering things outside of ancestral human experience
Chuunibyou Hosts On Turbo Gender
- At some point, everyone realizes that they're an independent person, capable of making their own choices
- When children realize this, they often start acting out or being weird
- Usually what happens is that under social pressure, they rein in their weirdness and end up as a normal well-adjusted person
- However, this moment is interesting - people understand that they can change their identity, and realize that they have a choice in what their identity is
  - How much of this is cultural? Would someone from the Middle Ages have thought of themselves in this way?
Plato's Caving Adventure
- In Plato's cave analogy, you don't perceive the real world directly -- you live in a cave and watch the "shadows" that the real world makes upon your senses
- At this point, you can do one of two things
  - Polish your "cave wall" to perceive the real world more clearly
  - "Carve patterns" onto the wall in order to manipulate how the shadows dance
- Almost everything about your "inner self" is decided by you
  - No way to tell from the outside what your inner self feels like
  - Not really decided by you, but decided by the "plot" of the "narrative" that you're living through
A Brief Detour Through Enlightenment
- Cognitive fusion
  - Person becoming fused with the content of a thought or emotion to the point where the thought or emotion is experienced as an objective fact about the world
  - Not all cognitive fusion is bad - if we sense something dangerous, being fused with that thought allows us to take actions to get ourselves out of danger quickly and effectively
- The Buddhists think of the mind as a set of interacting subagents
- There is a narrative agent, the 'I' which takes the output of all of these subagents and knits them together into a coherent sense of self
- We are cognitively fused with this agent, and it is possible to unfuse ourselves, and see the process that creates a sense of self as just one agent among others
- Once you have done this, you can alter the story that you're telling about yourself, and even tell stories that require more than one character
A Return to Cognitive Trope Therapy
- You can make your life a lot more pleasant just by knowing the correct narrative spin to put on things
- Pleasant, but dangerously false - reality doesn't conform to tropes; truth is stranger and much more unpredictable than fiction
- It's awfully convenient how all of these stories have yourself as the good person -- does anyone tell a story about themselves where, in the end, they were in the wrong and deserved to be defeated?
- All of these techniques involve treating the agents in your mind as characters in a story
- However, when you do so, you need to make sure that there is some part of your old consciousness that retains control over the story
- Otherwise, the story plays out according to whatever subconscious genre conventions you've picked up
- Stories can give us a sense of purpose and meaning, by stimulating our emotions more strongly than reality
  - And this is a good thing?
Storytelling, Character Creation, and GM-ing your life
- The first thing to decide when turning your life into a narrative is to decide what genre you live in
- Genre defines which tropes you're defined by
- Your internal narrative can be as weird as you want it to be, as long as it produces good outcomes on the outside
- However, you need to be aware of the effect that your narrative is having on you - unhealthy narratives can be just as self-reinforcing as healthy narratives
At the end of the day, everything you do is a performance, to some extent, even if the only audience is yourself
So take control and choose what kind of character you want to be, instead of letting it happen via unconscious processes
My Thoughts
- The problem here is that people only consume stories that have happy endings
- Yet, in the real world, happy endings, at least in the sense that stories have happy endings, are few and far between
- Usually, outcomes are nuanced, with a mix of success and failure
- The problem with treating your life as a narrative is that either you:
  - Ignore the failures
  - Have a constant lack of peace, as no outcome ever seems to match the fairy-tale outcome you envisioned for yourself
- Hive seems to be advocating a policy of ignoring or compartmentalizing failure -- I think this is very dangerous
- There are so many people who got into trouble because they couldn't handle the thought that they failed, and as a result, kept doubling down on losing strategies
- This essay trips my "motte-and-bailey" alarm. On the one hand, yes, the stuff about taking control of how you see yourself is a basic tactic of psychotherapy. On the other hand, I don't think any psychotherapist would say that it's okay to split your personality, or to create additional personalities and narrative or compartmentalize to the extent that I see being advocated here

The People In My Head Who Make Me Do Things

(Previously discussed on October 30, 2017)

It can be helpful to cluster your motivations and assign a persona to each cluster
Recognize that each of your motivations has a role and purpose
Might be helpful to be more explicit about giving different parts of yourself a chance to be at the forefront