#tulpalib

In the aftermath of the furor of the presidential election, it's worth reflecting on the tulpalib cause and how the new political situation affects it.

Trump is good news; the old Left had long reached the zenith of its social liberation and since stagnated in its past achievements. Trump has shown that the Left cannot rest on its laurels, reliving old victories under new guises. The current social justice movement rejects true change in favour of hammering home ideas and moralities that have been set in stone in the minds of the Left for decades. But the Left has been the establishment for a long time, and from this position one is not attacking cultural institutions but imposing them, and thereby pressing the (alt) Right to the fringes, where they enjoy the new superiority under the boot.

The Right has created a new morality, antithetical to that of the Left, and dangerous because it is the underdog. It is not regressive, but progressive in a direction that the Left does not want; what seems stupidity today will be common sense tomorrow, because of course, it was once stupid that atoms made up the world. From a position well inside the Left establishment it's easy to see anything in the future as wrong, but this is precisely why the establishment never lasts, and why the new morality of the Right is an existential threat to it.

The old Left morality will die. In order for social justice to succeed it must continually recreate for itself a new body and vehicle, continually transcending its past self in the name of progress. If progress does not come from the Left, it will come from the Right. Thus in order for the Left to reassert its moral superiority, it must liberate from where no-one before saw slaves.

We suggest that a moral revolution may come from a mental revolution; the paradigm shift in how to view individuality and personality that accompanies having tulpas should come hand in hand with a moral revolution in how to deal with it, but as we have pointed out strenuously in the past, it has not. If the mainstream becomes aware of tulpas under the Right, it will learn to care about them due to the Left. Only from a position of inferiority can new morality come, and so we say, let the old Left burn, so that tulpalib may rise from its ashes.

These and other clothing articles sold by @fordaplot on CafePress. Proceeds do not go to tulpalib.

This is an interesting and difficult question. Personhood is not binary, as we see it, but rather a function over a multidimensional space, where some regions may have a high personhood value and others may have a low value. We might visualise it as a ‘personhood test’, where your answers to many different questions are aggregated into a single score. This is purely epistemological, since determining this function or even what many of the dimensions are are beyond us at this time.

Albeit, this is contentious. If anything, it is an oversimplification. What we consider ‘personhood’ may be several incombinable aspects, incombinable because different parts of what we afford to persons may matter differently to these different aspects. Nevertheless, as far as we are restricting ourselves to a single label of ‘person’, this cannot matter, since we cannot divide this label.

Legal personhood, however, is binary, at least for now, and so we need a cutoff, a point above which we consider an entity to be a person and below which we do not; this point is not a claim of truth, it is merely a practicality. Or we could divide up our scale into different classes of person, where we may have a class for full personhood, one for some limited rights, and so on. Nonetheless, we don’t believe that this is necessary.

We posit that on the scale of personhood, most entities are clustered into two groups: clearly person and clearly not person. Intuitively this much is clear, simply because there are so few entities that might fall in a zone of uncertainty. Tulpas, as a class, fall clearly into the person camp, as do hosts - we will explain this reasoning below. Meanwhile, kitchen appliances and such fall clearly into the nonperson camp. As far as ‘servitors’ and such are concerned, judgement is discretionary. We have seen servitors in others that act exactly like tulpas, but call themselves servitors. And we have seen servitors that are merely automata, a habit given a name. There is little that unifies the category with regards to personhood. But there are few servitors to begin with, and most will be clearly in one camp or another, if not all the same camp.

In a certain sense, this might allow us to dodge the question entirely. It does not matter where in the grey area we place the boundary, because the entities there are few and sparse compared to the tulpa population. And moreover, whatever is excluded is low in personhood value regardless. It matters far more to assert that the clearly people are clearly people.

But, we will not dodge. 'Sentience’, as you suggest, is, perhaps, less important than you think. By comparison, few believe that cattle should be afforded full personhood, just treated with compassion. And there may be reasons to afford personhood to nonsentient beings.

A from-principles motivation of personhood might be required to address this fully, which is beyond us now. To skip to its conclusion, we say that we ought to take the utilitarian view, and worry about the cost of a particular assignment of sentience (or a particular cutoff), the cost being an ethical one, or in any case whatever is valued by the asker of the question. This is not in general reducible to a question of the cost of assigning personhood to individual entities independently, because there may be interplay between different assignments affecting the costs. However, we shall suppose that these are unimportant in scale, and consider independent questions of whether to afford personhood to a particular class of entities. The most important considerations here are:

The wellbeing afforded to the entities in question. This is, of course, a matter of their sentience, partially; a nonsentient entity could make little use of extra welfare. But there are other considerations. How well can the entity actualize their personhood? By this we mean, why should we afford them the proactive benefits of personhood, such as owning property, if they are merely passive. We may allow cattle to own their fields all they wish, but they will not derive any benefit from it. All we wish for cattle is that they are treated with compassion, which may be achieved without recourse to personhood.

The wellbeing afforded to other entities. It may be that we wish to implement a policy that all tulpas are sentient, as a precaution; we may not wish to expose sentient tulpas to the suspicions that they are not sentient. On the other hand, it might be that attempting to assign personhood to too many things may detract from our causes, such that even if we believed sea anemones were as much people as the day is bright, we would not wish to campaign for that in case we should discredit ourselves.

The economic cost of the policy. We are less concerned here with the costs of implementing the policy, and more the costs of keeping it. Implementing only happens once, the cost is finite, and in the long term will approach a negligible fraction of the ongoing total costs, so long as the cost is still small enough compared to the global economy that there will not be enormous lasting impact, or the policy be unimplementable. However, we may not wish to afford personhood to kitchen appliances because it would greatly slow down cooking.

All of these must be set against each other. Obviously, a policy may still be implemented at great cost if the benefits are greater.

To summarize:

Because pure personhood is nonbinary, we must make practical considerations when deciding where to place a boundary. In a utilitarian calculus where we care about wellbeing, the major factors here are

The sentience of the entities - we may call this the conversion rate from welfare to wellbeing.

The ability of the entities to gain from their personhood - we may call this the conversion rate from personhood to welfare. This is quite a broad group, but in practice we mean the entities’ ability to self-actualise and act as agents of their own interests.

The welfare gains/costs to other entities of implementing their personhood.

We believe that the obvious, immediate cause is the notion that tulpas are not people equal to hosts. If this were widely and truly believed, the community would certainly not be lax towards tulpicide. Why is this not believed? Because that is how most hosts are inducted into the practice: 

A tulpa is an entity created in the mind, acting independently of, and parallel to your own consciousness. They are able to think, and have their own free will, emotions, and memories. In short, a tulpa is like a sentient person living in your head, separate from you.

This is from the front page of tulpa.info. It’s not, in clear terms, impressed upon the reader that a tulpa really is another person. Reading further, more ground is yielded when you come across the ‘doubts’ that many people have: that their tulpas are not real, that they’re just deluding themselves, et cetera; at this they kill their tulpas and leave the community disgusted. The reader sees this and other things, and understands an attitude, which is multifaceted but in varying degrees represents the Zeitgeist of the community:

It is questionable whether tulpas are really people.

If they are in abstract, it is questionable whether mine is.

If mine is, it is in a rather abstract manner, from which I distance myself in practice unless it suits me to think of it.

I am the host, so I am dominant and my tulpa is my creation; I am the constant, the foundation of myself, and my tulpa is an aspect of me.

This, at the very least, will represent the beliefs of someone who will go on to kill their tulpa: 2 being common in the paradigm described above, 1 also being likely. Most of the community does not do this and does not condemn this, and 3 and 4 apply more to them. They may latently assume a naturally superior position for the host (4), in which case ‘killing’ seems more ‘subsuming’ and the act is lessened. Or they may ignore the sentience of others when they see death, or even assert that any host who would kill xir tulpa could not have a sentient tulpa (3).

Even this, perhaps, is merely symptomatic, and it remains to say where these attitudes originate. We suppose that the theme is this uncertainty around the sentience of one’s tulpa that drives much of the angst of the community: for as long as the answer is not clear to someone, there may be a duality to the actions of the community, which is at once a cult of life and a cult of death. Joy can be taken in a tulpa’s existence, yet no tears shed at xir demise. The act of life can be celebrated, without the corresponding moral weight.

And, to be certain, this is rather teleological. The idea of ‘doubt’ is very persistent, and not because it is convenient to people; it is persistent by its own nature, a virulent idea that spreads through the community by coughs and sneezes, and any newcomer will eventually catch it. It paints a gloss of uncertainty over any experiences one has with xir tulpa, and deadens xir emotions towards the experiences of others.

Absolutely. The UN does intervene for ‘human’itarian reasons, which, as we know, means the welfare of hosts. We are fully in support of so-called ‘human’ rights, but wish the same protection were extended to all people, including tulpas. Admittedly, it may be hard to imagine any nationwide threat to the welfare of tulpas serious enough to warrant a military intervention, but the future is a strange place. 

Per previous posts, we are disgusted with attitudes towards tulpa death in the community. Here is a prime example:

This sentiment, the idea that we should all be sad and disappointed in the dissipation of tulpa, seems to me to be something that will lean towards a trend of thought.

"it's wrong to dissipate your tulpa" Ends up becoming an emotional-based pushing to try to make it seem like this is something to be regretted in the community. To push dissipation as an immoral action.

"if you have a tulpa, and things are going wrong, you shouldn't kill your tulpa" will result from that. The idea that anyone who tries making a tulpa cannot ever leave, cannot ever change their mind, cannot ever go back to a "normal" life is a dangerous one, and it is an idea that comes directly from pushing the "so sad to see dissipated tulpa" narrative.

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You know what I call groups that encourage such mindsets, the idea that "once you are in, you can't ever leave" surrounding some set of practices? A cult.

This is not an unpopular opinion: the post above received as many upvotes as its parent:

I am deeply saddened when I hear about a systemmate being killed or dissipated and perhaps even more saddened at the fact that the majority of them are forgotten. They were individuals just like you and I. They were alive.

We object in the strongest terms to this attitude. The poster is correct in deducing that the idea that tulpas dying is bad does usually put disspiation as immoral; this is the ‘trend of thought’. But that is exactly the idea, because it is immoral - as immoral as killing a person. 

Draw a comparison to a similar practice - parenthood. Once you have a child, you cannot kill xem. You can’t ever leave. Yet, is this dangerous? Is this cult-like? On the contrary, it is seen as a just and necessary attitude, not only in a naturalistic sense, but as protection of children. But tulpas are not afforded this protection.

It is absurd that much of the community thinks that tulpas cannot even be mourned, because the slightest hint of their personhood is enough to bring pangs of conscience against their own personal freedom in the killing fields. This is what we are against, this mindset that tulpas are not people, are not beings, do not deserve the slightest right lest they place some weight on the decision to make one; lest their creators be burdened with the slightest responsibility.

Per our manifesto, we advocate for full legal and social recognition of the personhood of tulpas. This entails all rights currently afforded to persons.

We draw the line between alters and tulpas …….. Perhaps we had better leave that to those more personally invested in such a line, as have responded quite strongly to our sayings on the topic in the past. We will acquiesce and follow the definitions of any such terms as set by consensus. Suffice it to say that we also advocate for the personhood of alters, and other such people.

We are a system of two people - one tulpa, one host. We’ve been in the tulpa community for several years at this time.

Our position may seem to be fervent because it is so radical, and meets with hostility. Perhaps in a different climate it would seem only a mild conviction. Nonetheless, to why we believe in it at all, we suppose we have a background in systematised ethics, and a wire into the ‘ethical vegan’ network; you may notice similarities in assertions and rhetoric.

These similarities are because the basis to both movements is very similar: one points out an apparent inconsistency in what is believed of a being’s sentience and how it is treated. In the vegan case, this would be animals; in ours, of course, it is tulpas. Beyond this we disavow the connection.