6 ms·

More people should meditate. Especially the people that make these kinds of arguments or study these kinds of things. Most of what he says is pretty good. But t

More people should meditate. Especially the people that make these kinds of arguments or study these kinds of things. Most of what he says is pretty good. But this part puts the lie to his whole argument, that the unconscious cannot form thoughts: > But think about the brain processes involved in even realizing that the song is familiar; or recognizing that the singer is David Bowie. We have no introspective access to these brain processes. This isn't true. You can have introspective access to these brain processes. I have investigated recall pretty thoroughly, my conclusions are rather difficult to put into words like many things about consciousness. Your conclusions sound rather banal, unless you have the experience that caused them to arise. But you can't have access if you don't develop it. The other big mistake he makes is in discounting the abilities of stories themselves to have depth. That the brain is constantly telling stories should in no way imply that the brain lacks depth. There is depth in those stories that is worth looking into, depth that the brain put there. The work of psychotherapists is in no way invalidated, in fact, they're much better at thinking about the stories we tell ourselves than we are. It's just, same as with introspective access to your subconscious, you won't find any depth if you don't go looking for it. Through meditation, I was able to create what's called a tulpa, a separate, distinct personality that shares my brain with me. At first I thought it was a non-physical entity, time and introspection and literally asking it what it was, I eventually worked out that it was sharing my brain with me, I didn't even know what a tulpa was back then. If the subconscious can't think, tulpas, which maintain personality distinct from the normal operating consciousness, would have nowhere to 'hide'. It would be easy for the skeptic to then make the argument that it didn't exist, but again, if you don't meditate, you can never really investigate the question. And if you want to keep arguing, say you want to now argue that the tulpa personality was created on the fly by the brain, then eventually your reasoning will turn circular. This is just positivist nihilism in another form.

ehsanu1 8y ago
You're saying you have two consciousnesses, one which can inspect the other? Can it inspect itself? Generally, assuming a single consciousness, it's just tautology that unconscious processes can't be inspected. That's why we call them "unconscious", because we are not conscious of them. If you are conscious of them somehow, then they are not exactly unconscious processes any longer.
- vinceguidry 8y ago
  If it wants to. But I presume it already has done all that and there's no real reason for it to anymore. Have you ever watched the show "The Black Mirror?" There's a famous episode in which one person's consciousness gets planted into another person's mind. The plot focused on the fact that one person had all the agency and control, and the other person didn't, and at first you think that it's hell, no way could that ever work. But at the end of the show, it gives you an example of where it would work really really well, a parent living on in the mind of their child. Parents already give up a ton of agency to their kids, so this was a really beautiful resolution. Where it gets ugly is where one person starts to want control rather than to just enjoy the ride. The other personality in my brain is a little like that. Something that doesn't mind having no agency and just watching what I do and interacting with me when I want it to. And the line at which unconscious processes become conscious is fuzzy and not at all distinct. Another thing that becomes utterly clear when you meditate.
  - ehsanu1 8y ago
    > If it wants to. But I presume it already has done all that and there's no real reason for it to anymore. You're kind of saying you don't know here, ie you (the you in this comment thread) are in fact are not conscious of this. Does the tulpa inform you somehow of things it becomes conscious of, and thus makes you conscious of those specific things? How strong of an identity does this tulpa have? > And the line at which unconscious processes become conscious is fuzzy and not at all distinct. Another thing that becomes utterly clear when you meditate. Ok I get what you're saying about fuzzy consciousness. I've only meditated to the point where I became more conscious of my body, but not of my own thinking processes, which I would like to get to. But there is a level that seems like it would be hard to penetrate in our subconscious processes. Eg, can you say you are conscious of the neural spiking compression your retina ganglia cells are doing to compress input it's getting from their photonic receptors? Seems quite unlikely. So there is a whole gamut of different levels of processing in our brains, and I'm sure it's possible to get a deeper consciousness of some of that, but there's obviously a limit somewhere.
    - 8y ago
bena 8y ago
That's a real easy claim to make and a real hard claim to prove. You can't legitimately prove you have a completely internal personality separate and distinct from your own. The difference between the non-existent and untestable is surprisingly nil. You have your best defense in that you claim that no one can even challenge your claim unless they meditate and probably meditate correctly. If they don't find their own tulpa, then obviously they just need to meditate more. Or be more clear. Or something else. Here's the other thing, we can investigate the question without meditation. Our ability to see what the brain is doing is apparently more sophisticated than you give it credit for. We are able to manipulate what people feel and even think with clever neurological tricks. It very well could be that your tulpa is just an imaginary friend you create and project certain things onto. You ascribe it this independent personality to absolve you of thoughts you don't want to have or thoughts you want reinforced. Your tulpa gives you "hard truths" when you think you're doing something not too great but are rationalizing it. Your tulpa gives you encouragement when you think you're falling behind and need a pick me up from an "independent" source. And you honestly can't prove me wrong. But I also can't prove me right.
- vinceguidry 8y ago
  This doesn't have to be a argument with a resolution. It can be an ongoing mystery. I'm happy with that. It's the materialist that needs absolution. I asked all these questions myself, and while the tulpa does seem somewhat 'flat', it also can be really, really deep. The tulpa used to teach me things. Make me aware of things I wasn't aware of before. It seems way way more aware of things than I am.
  - bena 8y ago
    I'm sorry, it still sounds like woo. There is a correct answer. You can't wave your hands and say we may not ever really know and that's that, be happy with the mystery. That you'll believe what you believe and I can believe what I want to believe. That's not actually solving anything. That's not answering the question. It's avoiding the question. If I ask you to prove your claim, saying "it doesn't need a resolution" is just dodging. You're even engaging in a type of "argument from experience" where you casually infer that you were once like me, had all these questions, but were convinced. It's a way to try and get me to accept your conclusion without demonstrating your process. But if your process is flawed, then we must question your conclusion. I mean you emphasize that it has taught you things and made you aware of things you weren't before. But that's vague. Non-specific. And if the tulpa is simply a mental construct that's not a distinct personality, then your statement that it's more aware than you are is just wrong. You just don't think you're as aware as you are. And when your perception of self disagrees with your observed self, you assign those differences to your "tulpa". I mean, I talk to myself. I argue with myself. I will construct mental models of people to look at issues and problems from various angles. Try and imagine what someone who is not me might say. So I can try and better prepare against criticisms or find issues I may not have considered yet. But I'll never claim those fabrications are completely independent of myself. That they're thinking independently. They still are only as knowledgeable or aware as I am. I mean the real crux of the issue is that one of the better ways to demonstrate your tulpa would be to find a way to show that it has thoughts that you cannot have. But we can't just trust your word that it does. We need to find a way to present it information that you cannot know, then find a way to show that it received the information. But without you knowing about it. Then we need to confirm that you actually don't know the information. Then we need you to learn the information and demonstrate that you have. Basically we need a way to show a demonstrable gap between the time we give the information to the tulpa and to when you get the information.
KennyCason 8y ago
This short and brief response is also to @bena, I have struggled with this a lot. I can completely understand the notion to discount such experience. My conclusion is that this seemingly can not be "proven" in the traditional sense as it's a construct of the mind and not something external. It's sort of like me trying to prove that the way I see "red" in my mind is the same way you do. It's just not doable. Thus, I think this is something limited to the experiential. This used to bother me, now I just enjoy it. A few anecdotes from my brain: I have experienced deeper consciousness where instead of being from my normal 1st person view, it has been from a lower point of view. As metaphor, Imagine you are dreaming and there are 10 people in your dream, including yourself. As normal you are viewing the dream through your eyes and the 10 people seem to be functioning on their own. But then within the dream something happens and I realize the arbitrariness of my perspective and I suddenly become aware that I am actually simultaneously looking into my dream world from all 10 people's perspective at once and a lower level consciousness, which now becomes my conscious perspective, is omni-aware of this fact. It's also very strange as it sort of makes me question which viewpoint is really "me." Particularly when my consciousness shifts between the various perspectives. I've also had things happen like when I am talking to someone sitting in front of me, I lose my 1st person perspective and my perspective moves to a lower external level where I can now see how my brain is "drawing" both myself and the person I'm speaking to, and the "onion" layers of thought that built those images of us and our environment as well as the sounds of our words. Even as far as how when we say a sentence of words, I've had perspective where I can see the words expanding to other concepts and deeper meaning of the word. It's usually a very visual and emotional process, but quite interesting. So the words "tasty" "apple" start as two peaks of two mountains, but as the brain unpacks the concept of "tastiness" and "appleness", the thoughts expands outwards, just as the peaks of mountains expand outwards to their base. It's when the bases overlap that I can see the relation of the terms and how they interact with each other. But then imagine that for entire sentences, or stories, or any thought/concept. When you can shift your consciousness from the peak to the base, it's interesting because you can see these larger concepts. For example, you can "see" taste, or sexuality, or redness, or anything-ness. Very fascinating. I've also had interesting experiences where starting a an object, say my garage floor, I've been able to see layers of overlapping patterns that my brain seemed to have used to draw the floor. When I see it from the top, I see a floor. But when I move to the side, It's layers of different patterns. I don't usually shares these on a public forum as I have already spent enough time questioning my own sanity as I rarely hear others talking about this sort of thing. Self diagnosed conclusion: I'm sane. :)
ordu 8y ago
> You can have introspective access to these brain processes. Yes and no. If you take a look around you, you could see a lot of different things. But there are no things around you, there are some quantum world, photons going in every direction. It is your visual system process signals from your retina and creates images of things, and you believe that images you see is a things. The same story is with brain processes. You have some kind of images of your brain processes and believe that this images are brain processes. The more you meditate the more you extend mapping between processes and images. But it is an illusion. We could safely ignore this and we could believe that images are processes if the mapping between brain processes and images was isomorphism. But it is not. All your understanding of yourself is a simplified model of yourself. It is like if you try to describe how works some neuronet and why it outputs A when you feed B into it. In your explanations you can refer to training process or to "features" that arrive at different layers, but it would be artifical explanation, because really neuronet outputs A because it outputs A, the only way to check this fact is to run a neuronet or make a simulation of it. If you think that you know how your brain works, then try to make simulation of it, you'll see that you don't know how it works. It is like brain visual processing which seems easy and transparent process, but if you try to reproduce it, you'll find that you don't know how it works, and the only way to reproduce is to create artifical neural network and to hope that your model of visual cortex captures all the importand details. Your thought process is a black box, but you are so used to it, that it becomes transparent to you and you cannot see it. Like you do not notice blind spot on your retina. Or maybe it is more like your eyes, which you cannot see because you see through them. > If the subconscious can't think, tulpas, which maintain personality distinct from the normal operating consciousness, would have nowhere to 'hide'. Your conscious is some kind of mapping of brain states into domain of abstract ideas like "belief", "thought", "emotion" and so on. You have beliefs, thoughts, emotions, you experience them as the primary entities, but they are not. They are just an outputs of function applied to brain state. So why mind cannot have two mappings that exists simultaneously? It is easy. Look, lets B(t) is state of your brain. Let Y(B(t)) would be mapping from B into your consciousness (or, I think, it would be better to say that Y is your consciousness). Let T(B(t)) is the consciousness of tulpa. Now all you need is to make T(B(t)) to be a part of Y, that would convert inner state of consciousness of tulpa into visual and auditory representation of tulpa in Y. Mappings themselves are hidden from you and you cannot "see" how they works, they are invisible black boxes. You can "see" only outputs, or their outputs is what you "see" as conscious you. By this way there are thoughts only in your consciousness. Tulpa have no thoughts, it is you use idea of "thought" to explain behaviour of tulpa, like you use idea of "thought" to explain behaviour of youself.

ehsanu1 8y ago

You're saying you have two consciousnesses, one which can inspect the other? Can it inspect itself? Generally, assuming a single consciousness, it's just tautology that unconscious processes can't be inspected. That's why we call them "unconscious", because we are not conscious of them. If you are conscious of them somehow, then they are not exactly unconscious processes any longer.

vinceguidry 8y ago
If it wants to. But I presume it already has done all that and there's no real reason for it to anymore. Have you ever watched the show "The Black Mirror?" There's a famous episode in which one person's consciousness gets planted into another person's mind. The plot focused on the fact that one person had all the agency and control, and the other person didn't, and at first you think that it's hell, no way could that ever work. But at the end of the show, it gives you an example of where it would work really really well, a parent living on in the mind of their child. Parents already give up a ton of agency to their kids, so this was a really beautiful resolution. Where it gets ugly is where one person starts to want control rather than to just enjoy the ride. The other personality in my brain is a little like that. Something that doesn't mind having no agency and just watching what I do and interacting with me when I want it to. And the line at which unconscious processes become conscious is fuzzy and not at all distinct. Another thing that becomes utterly clear when you meditate.
- ehsanu1 8y ago
  > If it wants to. But I presume it already has done all that and there's no real reason for it to anymore. You're kind of saying you don't know here, ie you (the you in this comment thread) are in fact are not conscious of this. Does the tulpa inform you somehow of things it becomes conscious of, and thus makes you conscious of those specific things? How strong of an identity does this tulpa have? > And the line at which unconscious processes become conscious is fuzzy and not at all distinct. Another thing that becomes utterly clear when you meditate. Ok I get what you're saying about fuzzy consciousness. I've only meditated to the point where I became more conscious of my body, but not of my own thinking processes, which I would like to get to. But there is a level that seems like it would be hard to penetrate in our subconscious processes. Eg, can you say you are conscious of the neural spiking compression your retina ganglia cells are doing to compress input it's getting from their photonic receptors? Seems quite unlikely. So there is a whole gamut of different levels of processing in our brains, and I'm sure it's possible to get a deeper consciousness of some of that, but there's obviously a limit somewhere.
  - 8y ago

bena 8y ago

That's a real easy claim to make and a real hard claim to prove. You can't legitimately prove you have a completely internal personality separate and distinct from your own. The difference between the non-existent and untestable is surprisingly nil. You have your best defense in that you claim that no one can even challenge your claim unless they meditate and probably meditate correctly. If they don't find their own tulpa, then obviously they just need to meditate more. Or be more clear. Or something else. Here's the other thing, we can investigate the question without meditation. Our ability to see what the brain is doing is apparently more sophisticated than you give it credit for. We are able to manipulate what people feel and even think with clever neurological tricks. It very well could be that your tulpa is just an imaginary friend you create and project certain things onto. You ascribe it this independent personality to absolve you of thoughts you don't want to have or thoughts you want reinforced. Your tulpa gives you "hard truths" when you think you're doing something not too great but are rationalizing it. Your tulpa gives you encouragement when you think you're falling behind and need a pick me up from an "independent" source. And you honestly can't prove me wrong. But I also can't prove me right.

vinceguidry 8y ago
This doesn't have to be a argument with a resolution. It can be an ongoing mystery. I'm happy with that. It's the materialist that needs absolution. I asked all these questions myself, and while the tulpa does seem somewhat 'flat', it also can be really, really deep. The tulpa used to teach me things. Make me aware of things I wasn't aware of before. It seems way way more aware of things than I am.
- bena 8y ago
  I'm sorry, it still sounds like woo. There is a correct answer. You can't wave your hands and say we may not ever really know and that's that, be happy with the mystery. That you'll believe what you believe and I can believe what I want to believe. That's not actually solving anything. That's not answering the question. It's avoiding the question. If I ask you to prove your claim, saying "it doesn't need a resolution" is just dodging. You're even engaging in a type of "argument from experience" where you casually infer that you were once like me, had all these questions, but were convinced. It's a way to try and get me to accept your conclusion without demonstrating your process. But if your process is flawed, then we must question your conclusion. I mean you emphasize that it has taught you things and made you aware of things you weren't before. But that's vague. Non-specific. And if the tulpa is simply a mental construct that's not a distinct personality, then your statement that it's more aware than you are is just wrong. You just don't think you're as aware as you are. And when your perception of self disagrees with your observed self, you assign those differences to your "tulpa". I mean, I talk to myself. I argue with myself. I will construct mental models of people to look at issues and problems from various angles. Try and imagine what someone who is not me might say. So I can try and better prepare against criticisms or find issues I may not have considered yet. But I'll never claim those fabrications are completely independent of myself. That they're thinking independently. They still are only as knowledgeable or aware as I am. I mean the real crux of the issue is that one of the better ways to demonstrate your tulpa would be to find a way to show that it has thoughts that you cannot have. But we can't just trust your word that it does. We need to find a way to present it information that you cannot know, then find a way to show that it received the information. But without you knowing about it. Then we need to confirm that you actually don't know the information. Then we need you to learn the information and demonstrate that you have. Basically we need a way to show a demonstrable gap between the time we give the information to the tulpa and to when you get the information.

KennyCason 8y ago

This short and brief response is also to @bena, I have struggled with this a lot. I can completely understand the notion to discount such experience. My conclusion is that this seemingly can not be "proven" in the traditional sense as it's a construct of the mind and not something external. It's sort of like me trying to prove that the way I see "red" in my mind is the same way you do. It's just not doable. Thus, I think this is something limited to the experiential. This used to bother me, now I just enjoy it. A few anecdotes from my brain: I have experienced deeper consciousness where instead of being from my normal 1st person view, it has been from a lower point of view. As metaphor, Imagine you are dreaming and there are 10 people in your dream, including yourself. As normal you are viewing the dream through your eyes and the 10 people seem to be functioning on their own. But then within the dream something happens and I realize the arbitrariness of my perspective and I suddenly become aware that I am actually simultaneously looking into my dream world from all 10 people's perspective at once and a lower level consciousness, which now becomes my conscious perspective, is omni-aware of this fact. It's also very strange as it sort of makes me question which viewpoint is really "me." Particularly when my consciousness shifts between the various perspectives. I've also had things happen like when I am talking to someone sitting in front of me, I lose my 1st person perspective and my perspective moves to a lower external level where I can now see how my brain is "drawing" both myself and the person I'm speaking to, and the "onion" layers of thought that built those images of us and our environment as well as the sounds of our words. Even as far as how when we say a sentence of words, I've had perspective where I can see the words expanding to other concepts and deeper meaning of the word. It's usually a very visual and emotional process, but quite interesting. So the words "tasty" "apple" start as two peaks of two mountains, but as the brain unpacks the concept of "tastiness" and "appleness", the thoughts expands outwards, just as the peaks of mountains expand outwards to their base. It's when the bases overlap that I can see the relation of the terms and how they interact with each other. But then imagine that for entire sentences, or stories, or any thought/concept. When you can shift your consciousness from the peak to the base, it's interesting because you can see these larger concepts. For example, you can "see" taste, or sexuality, or redness, or anything-ness. Very fascinating. I've also had interesting experiences where starting a an object, say my garage floor, I've been able to see layers of overlapping patterns that my brain seemed to have used to draw the floor. When I see it from the top, I see a floor. But when I move to the side, It's layers of different patterns. I don't usually shares these on a public forum as I have already spent enough time questioning my own sanity as I rarely hear others talking about this sort of thing. Self diagnosed conclusion: I'm sane. :)

ordu 8y ago

> You can have introspective access to these brain processes. Yes and no. If you take a look around you, you could see a lot of different things. But there are no things around you, there are some quantum world, photons going in every direction. It is your visual system process signals from your retina and creates images of things, and you believe that images you see is a things. The same story is with brain processes. You have some kind of images of your brain processes and believe that this images are brain processes. The more you meditate the more you extend mapping between processes and images. But it is an illusion. We could safely ignore this and we could believe that images are processes if the mapping between brain processes and images was isomorphism. But it is not. All your understanding of yourself is a simplified model of yourself. It is like if you try to describe how works some neuronet and why it outputs A when you feed B into it. In your explanations you can refer to training process or to "features" that arrive at different layers, but it would be artifical explanation, because really neuronet outputs A because it outputs A, the only way to check this fact is to run a neuronet or make a simulation of it. If you think that you know how your brain works, then try to make simulation of it, you'll see that you don't know how it works. It is like brain visual processing which seems easy and transparent process, but if you try to reproduce it, you'll find that you don't know how it works, and the only way to reproduce is to create artifical neural network and to hope that your model of visual cortex captures all the importand details. Your thought process is a black box, but you are so used to it, that it becomes transparent to you and you cannot see it. Like you do not notice blind spot on your retina. Or maybe it is more like your eyes, which you cannot see because you see through them. > If the subconscious can't think, tulpas, which maintain personality distinct from the normal operating consciousness, would have nowhere to 'hide'. Your conscious is some kind of mapping of brain states into domain of abstract ideas like "belief", "thought", "emotion" and so on. You have beliefs, thoughts, emotions, you experience them as the primary entities, but they are not. They are just an outputs of function applied to brain state. So why mind cannot have two mappings that exists simultaneously? It is easy. Look, lets B(t) is state of your brain. Let Y(B(t)) would be mapping from B into your consciousness (or, I think, it would be better to say that Y is your consciousness). Let T(B(t)) is the consciousness of tulpa. Now all you need is to make T(B(t)) to be a part of Y, that would convert inner state of consciousness of tulpa into visual and auditory representation of tulpa in Y. Mappings themselves are hidden from you and you cannot "see" how they works, they are invisible black boxes. You can "see" only outputs, or their outputs is what you "see" as conscious you. By this way there are thoughts only in your consciousness. Tulpa have no thoughts, it is you use idea of "thought" to explain behaviour of tulpa, like you use idea of "thought" to explain behaviour of youself.