Neurons Gone Wild

(From our discussion 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

Highly Advanced Tulpamancy 101 For Beginners

  • We don’t model ourselves as a chaotic system of firing neurons, we model ourselves as a single discrete individual in the world
  • We think of the self as a distinct entity
  • However, this entity is far less well-defined than other entities in the world
    • We can add almost any attribute to our self-model
      • Physical characteristics
      • Personality type
  • This broad conception of the self can be adaptive or maladaptive depending on the circumstance
    • Allows for greater group unity and cohesion - an attack on our group can feel like an attack on us, personally
    • However, we can also take negative labels associated with groups and associate them with ourselves – e.g. if you think people with depression are lazy, then receiving a diagnosis of depression can cause you to think that you’re lazy
  • We define the our self both extensionally and intensionally:
    • Extensional self-definition
      • Perception - what our senses tell us about the outside world
      • Internal mind voice - internal mologue or dialogue
      • Emotion - people experience emotions at differing levels of intensity and this feeds into our sense of self
      • Bodily sensations - pain, hunger, etc
      • Abstract thought - mental images, imagined scenes, math, etc.
      • Memory - experience of calling up past events or experiences
      • Choice - experience of having control over our lives
    • Intensional self-definition
      • People choose various attributes about themselves to emphasize
      • This choice of attributes (hobbies, race, religion, etc) is your intensional self-definition
    • This self-definition creates a “self-schema” – a collection of memories, attitudes, demeanors, generalizations, etc. that defines how the person interacts with the world
  • People can have different self-schemas for different situations
  • A tulpa is a highly developed and partitioned self-schema that is “always on”
  • The challenge with creating a tulpa is to extend to self-schema split beyond the intensional definition of the self and into the extensional definition, so that you can perceive the world and yourself differently
  • Changing our extensional self-definition is more difficult and dangerous than changing our intentional self-definition, but it is possible to compartmentalize these changes
  • How to tulpa
    • First, learn how to create a mental compartment
      • Pick an idea
      • Put all the evidence you have supporting the idea into that compartment
      • When the idea generates a correct prediction, put the positive reinforcement into the compartment
      • When the idea fails to generate a correct prediction, keep the negative reinforcement out of the compartment – just tell yourself, “Oh well, it was just a compartment”
    • Pick the beliefs that you have, then sort them into compartments
    • Regulate information intake, consciously deciding which compartment new information should go into before you internalize it
    • Once this sorting process becomes automatic, you’ll have multiple compartments, each holding radically different beliefs about the world
    • Each of these compartments is a tulpa
  • Failure modes
    • The most common failure mode is that the tulpa doesn’t seem to be “talking back”
    • You have to put beliefs and experiences into your Tulpa in order for it to do things
    • Your sense of self is how your sorting and information processing algorithms feel from the inside - if your sense of self is unchanged, then you really haven’t managed to change your mental algorithms
  • The real trick with tulpas is to see yourself as a collection of entities, not a unitary person

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
  • But this raises more questions
    • What does it mean to give up control of the body and the senses
    • How can you do this without permanently damaging yourself?
  • Start with the question of how we create our identity, as a singleton
    • Take in or discard parts of our identity, based upon our worldview
    • Many parts of our identity, especially those having to do with our inner-selves, are defined solely by the way we say they’re defined
    • More precisely, these parts of our identity are defined by the self-reinforcing narratives we create for ourselves
    • These beliefs have a strong influence on whether we can do something by influencing our motivation and our priors for success
    • Our minds normally model the world in terms of high-level entities that often don’t directly correspond to things in the world, and changing our narrative can change the process by which we model the world
  • Chuunibyou Hosts On Turbo Gender
    • At some point everyone realizes that they’re an independent person, capable of making choices about who they are and who they want to be
    • When children realize this, they often act out or behave strangely
    • Usually what happens is that under social pressure people rein in their weirdness and become more normal and well-adjusted
    • However, the moment in which people understand that they can change their identity is of interest - can we have more than one such moment?
  • Plato’s Caving Adventure
    • In Plato’s analogy, you don’t perceive the world directly; you perceive the “shadows” the world casts upon your senses
    • At this point, you can do one of two things
      • “Smoothen” the cave wall to perceive the outside world more clearly
      • “Carve” the cave wall to manipulate how the shadows appear
    • Almost everything about your inner self is decided, either directly or indirectly, by you
  • A Brief Detour Through Enlightenment
    • Cognitive fusion
      • Person becomes so invested in the content of a thought or an emotion that the content of the thought or emotion is taken as a fact about the world
      • This can be helpful or harmful, depending on the thought
    • The Buddhists think of the mind as a set of interacting subagents or thoughts
    • There is a narrative agent, the “I”, which takes the output of these interacting subagents and knits them into a coherents self
    • We are cognitively fused with this agent
    • It is possible to unfuse ourselves from our sense of ‘I’
    • Once you have done this, it is possible to change the story that you’re telling about yourself, and even enact stories that have multiple characters
  • A Return To Cognitive Trope Therapy
    • You can make your life a lot more pleasant by choosing the correct narrative spin to put on events
    • The process of creating tulpas is taking the subagents in your mind and treating them as characters in a story
    • Once you have done this, it’s easier to alter the story you’re telling about yourself
    • However, you do need to make sure that you retain some level of conscious control
    • The stories we tell about ourselves give us a sense of purpose and meaning, by stimulating our emotions more strongly than reality
  • Storytelling, character creation and GM-ing your life
    • The first thing to decide when turning your life into a narrative is what genre your story is
    • Genre defines the tropes that you’ll use to interpret events in your life
    • Your internal narrative can be as weird as you want it to be, so long as it produces good outcomes on the outside
    • Having awareness of your internal narrative is a good thing - you can control it and change it so that it’s not having a negative impact on your life
    • Everything you do is, to some extent, performative, even if the only audience is yourself
    • So take control and choose the kind of character you want to be

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