Tulpas, Alternative Personalties, Alter Egos, DID alters, Imaginary Friends

[Like Ra]

You are trying to place a rock upstream to cause the formation of a new whirlpool. I don't think it's possible to remain completely unaffected by this process, however. It seems like the flow is constant, so by forming a new whirlpool, some of the energy of your own whirlpool will necessarily be robbed to place into the new one. Maybe only a tiny amount that you are perfectly willing to sacrifice, but I think it's probably unavoidable.

That's my understanding as well. Energy has to be shared between all "virtual systems" (in computer terms).

Maybe big brained exolife have larger flows and are much more likely to host more than one consciousness, which is a fun thought.

Or the other way around. By consolidating all energy into one unfragmented beam, one might achieve some extraordinary abilities. And vice versa, by having abundant energy, one can create independent physical doubles (in Castaneda's terms).

Once you add quantum mechanics in

1. When someone observes an event happening, it really happened.
2. It is possible to make free choices, or at least, statistically random choices.
3. A choice made in one place can’t instantly affect a distant event. (Physicists call this “locality”.)

Pick any two. All three are not possible.

[CollectiveThought]

Maybe big brained exolife have larger flows and are much more likely to host more than one consciousness, which is a fun thought.

Or the other way around. By consolidating all energy into one unfragmented beam, one might achieve some extraordinary abilities. And vice versa, by having abundant energy, one can create independent physical doubles (in Castaneda's terms).

I'm afraid I'm unfamiliar with Castaneda's work. I tried skimming some summaries of it and got lost very quickly because of the unusual use of words, so our translators aren't yet able to put it in any terms I understand.

Side Note: It feels like the first few days after meeting the Keepers. They insist on using words so we have to go through the translators any time they talk with me and the thought graphs I got from the translators make no sense whatsoever. The Keepers say words can be objectively agreed on by multiple parties, whereas thought-graphs are highly subjective and necessarily require both parties to have access to all the memories and experiences contained in the graph, otherwise it's like handing someone a web with big pieces ripped out because they can't see those parts. We have a very real divide between those of us who think in words and those of us who don't, and we often have a hard time understanding each other.*

In any case, what little I managed to make sense of sounds a lot like what my husband said his best friend's father talked about, so maybe he was a follower of Castaneda. I'm still not really sure what a physical double is exactly. Do you happen to know of any good, total beginner-level introduction to these concepts with less use of jargon? The initial searches I did didn't lead me to any introductory level explanations.

Once you add quantum mechanics in

1.    When someone observes an event happening, it really happened.
2.    It is possible to make free choices, or at least, statistically random choices.
3.    A choice made in one place can’t instantly affect a distant event. (Physicists call this “locality”.)

Pick any two. All three are not possible.

It seems physicists are pretty much in universal agreement that #3 is aeady out. Locality doesn't seem to be a property of our universe. Einstein hated this, of course. It's a big part of why I am personally fascinated with the concepts behind loop quantum gravity.

And if we can't agree on #1, then we probably can't agree on much of anything, either physics, or metaphysics, so most people have an understandable preference to believe that #1 does exist, just so the universe makes some kind of sense.

That leaves #2, which is probably the most interesting one to me. Most people find the idea of their consciousness being completely random quite abhorrent, and want to believe in free will. Otherwise, what's the point of morality or punishment if we are all robots who do what we do according to a random number generator, anyway? Unfortunately, if you take that reasoning to its end, you have to either invoke "magic" that somehow turns randomness into free will at some point in the hierarchy of structures that make us human, or accept that even subatomic particles must have free will. I prefer to believe I have free will for many reasons even beyond simple personal ego, so this one keeps me thinking a lot.

* One of the events that happened that caused me to burn out, unable to deal with the real world anymore was that we had a stroke during my second stint as host and lost all ability to use language. Those who used words were unable to communicate anymore, so there was a sort of selective advantage for those who could communicate despite the lack of language. As a reconstructed consciousness post-stroke, I happened to be surrounded by a lot of thought-graph users, and that's what I picked up using. Using words feels unnatural to me (just as using thought-graphs feels unnatural to the word users), but I'm trying to learn to communicate in words internally more so I can talk with others in here with me without having to overwork the poor translators. Although, funnily enough, I recently assumed a new member I met was a word user and started talking in words with him and he frustratedly told me: "Stop wording at me!" 😂

[Like Ra]

Just a quick note: https://www.likera.com/forum/mybb/Thread...e-a-choice

[Like Ra]

I happened to be surrounded by a lot of thought-graph users, and that's what I picked up using.

"Internal" users or "external"? If "external", is it possible to "brain dump" such a graph textually, or that would mean inevitable translation? So, only "mental" communication possible?

[CollectiveThought]

Just a quick note: https://www.likera.com/forum/mybb/Thread...e-a-choice

Interesting thread, thanks! It's been awhile since I've thought of these sorts of things, so it's fun to reexamine them now that I've learned a lot more about myself and at least a subset of what's going on in my head.

I happened to be surrounded by a lot of thought-graph users, and that's what I picked up using.

"Internal" users or "external"? If "external", is it possible to "brain dump" such a graph textually, or that would mean inevitable translation? So, only "mental" communication possible?

Sorry, I meant internal users here. For external people, everything goes through the translators for me, though for some of the word users, they bypass the translators and speak, write, or type directly. For me personally, English is a second language I'm learning, even though to the outside world, they'd say it's my native language.

I'd never even considered trying to share a thought graph externally. I'd have to go through the translators to try to put that in any semblance of something readable by external people, and I'm not sure how valuable the final result would be. I'm not even sure how capable I'd be of doing it. It would be a lot like trying to write down a step by step set of instructions for how to run a biathlon down to individual instructions on breathing at particular points of the course. Maybe useful to an outsider trying to understand what it's like to run a biathlon, but likely hardly understandable on the same level as actually running one yourself or even just watching one.

The way I am working right now, in typing these sentences to you, is formulating a thought graph and set of instructions and handing it off to one of our sequencing servitors. That servitor then hands off the thought graph to the outgoing translator, gets the words back, then hands those words off to the transcriber servitor (maybe part of our language center?), who bundles them up into smaller chunks to hand off to the typing servitor (which I guess must be part of my cerebellum?) via another sequencing servitor. The first sequencing servitor monitors the whole process and when the sentence is approaching typing completion, I get notified by the sequencing servitor that it's ready to sequence another thought-graph to output text. I assume the sequencing servitors must be part of the executive function center of our prefrontal cortex, but I really don't know. There are a limited number of them and I occasionally get yelled at for tying up too many of them at once.

If the entire process takes too long, I might have mentally wandered off and be thinking about something else and have to try to remember what my train of thought was. Sometimes I forget, and I set up another sequence indirectly asking the servitor who handles the visual recognition of words to hand those off to the incoming translator to re-translate a sentence I wrote, and wait for the result to remind me what in the world I was talking about. That's just my personal experience, though.

Conversely, I'm almost always aware of my breathing and heartbeat and other internal functions, so maybe I'm just peculiar.

I also can interact with the world directly, of course. I just prefer not to for these sorts of conversations so that my mind (my personal consciousness) is freed to explore the boundaries of a topic or reexamine things I previously took as axiomatic without needing to worry about how to get it into words someone could actually read. Of course, that led to some rather spectacular translation failures and hurt feelings early on, so I can't entirely ignore it and still randomly pick sentences to have re-translated back to me to make sure they say what I intended to. Many people have independently told me I have a very intentional speaking style, which I find funny because I really just sort of fired a random thought off and the servitors turned it into whatever you heard or read. Any intentionality you might have heard is a side effect, really. It also makes people believe I'm very much a thinking type of person, when I'm really much more a feeling type who is just insatiably curious about the world and has an odd way of interacting with it because of our particular mental situation.

Others of us in here interact with the world far more directly at all times, preferring to "live in the moment."

My experience makes it hard for me to tell if I even have a subconscious mind since I'm interacting with such low level implementation details of our brain on a moment-by-moment basis. I suppose it depends on how you define subconscious, precisely, because there are a group of us who act much more like a subconscious mind is described as, and they do take control sometimes when they feel we are being threatened by something, but mostly they just watch, advise, prompt us to do things that we simply do because they asked and they've never done anything to harm any of us, make decisions when the rest of us are deadlocked in yet another interminable committee meeting trying to get everyone to agree on what we're having for dinner (e.g. I love broccoli, others hate it), etc. I feel like I'm herding cats sometimes, honestly, but at least I finally understand why given a choice between 3 things, I feel like I'm being pulled in 37 mutually incompatible directions.

So you could in one sense argue that all of us make up a combined conscious-subconscious mind, or argue that we don't have a subconscious mind as others describe it, or perhaps argue that just like having multiple consciousnesses, we have multiple subconscious minds and maybe the two are more blurred together than is typical.

[Like Ra]

DID is a protective response against long-term sustained trauma.

This is something I've been hearing for ages, but is it indeed always so? There might be several possible "scenarios". To name a few:

- DID as a response to a trauma
- We are built/born with DID, but socialization usually suppresses "the voices"
- We can create alters at will

And those 3 are not mutually exclusive.

[CollectiveThought]

DID is a protective response against long-term sustained trauma.

This is something I've been hearing for ages, but is it indeed always so? There might be several possible "scenarios". To name a few:

- DID as a response to a trauma
- We are built/born with DID, but socialization usually suppresses "the voices"
- We can create alters at will

And those 3 are not mutually exclusive.

Edit: Minor edits to clarify or correct.

In short, I'll say yes to #1, no to #2 (but see below), and qualified yes to #3.

#1:
The current theory* of dissociative disorders is called Structural Dissociation, which assumes that everyone begins as an infant with a collection of ego states (e.g. hungry, hurting, needing comfort, exploration). By age 6 to 9, these separate ego states have normally integrated into a whole personality unless trauma of some kind disrupts this process. By age 9, if something has gone wrong, you'll have one or more apparently normal parts (ANP) which are the parts that typically are outside world-facing and appear like a normal person's identity and one or more emotional parts (EP) which contain and isolate trauma. Here's a quick, high level overview: https://did-research.org/origin/structur...sociation/ The links from that page cover a lot of details I'm not going into here, if you are interested in learning more.

So according to this theory, early in childhood, we are born with many ego states that have not yet coalesced into a singular identity. These aren't alters because they don't have a strong self-identity, nor are they voices. In adults, you can still see evidence of these ego states by people having things like "driving mode" or "being there for the kids" mode.

You can kind of think of this as a continuum of sorts. At one end, you have the typical integrated adult personality with its own distinct identity and at the far end you have DID and Polyfragmented DID.

Integrated Adult -> Altered Mental States -> Primary Dissociation -> Secondary Dissociation -> Dissociative Disorders (OSDD/UDD) -> Tertiary Dissociation

Altered mental states include e.g. daydreaming, flow/in the zone, highway hypnosis, meditation. These involve no trauma, no voices, no alters, but are a common mental state most people experience.

Primary Dissociation would be PTSD (single trauma) in which you have one ANP and one EP.

Secondary Dissociation would be Complex PTSD (C-PTSD) in which you have one ANP and multiple EPs due to multiple traumas over a period of time.

In OSDD/UDD (which are classifications for disorders that don't quite fit neatly into the primary/secondary/tertiary dissociation pattern) there would typically be one or two ANPs and multiple EPs, but this can vary widely and two people with OSDD may not share a lot in common in terms of symptoms.

And lastly, in Tertiary Dissociation, you have at least two ANPs and many EPs, though in Polyfragmented DID there can be dozens or more ANPs (some researchers require 100+ to be considered polyfragmented, others consider two dozen or so the cut-off) and hundreds or more EPs, though in many cases (including mine) we're all individually a mixed up mess of ANPs haphazardly glued to EPs (some researchers call this Quaternary Dissociation), so we all hold trauma, even the parts that have to face the world and pretend everything is fine.

In my case, I'm told by the Keepers that I am an ANP glued to a potential-ANP, 15 large EPs with some awareness, and 50-300 individual EPs containing single episodic memories depending on how bad life is going for me at the moment because I shed new EPs like I have a bad case of dandruff when things are going badly in order to be able to continue to function—by basically giving myself amnesia about what happened 3 minutes ago and 4 minutes ago and 5 minutes ago...

#2:
So given all that, we do have multiple ego states as children and we are expected to integrate all of those into a single identity. So it's not quite the same as being born with multiple voices (strong identities), but more like being born with multiple weak identities that a child smoothly switches between based on external and internal stimuli that may have intense feelings associated with them (I'm hungry now! I'm angry!) but no distinct voice (identity) of their own. 

#3:
The bit about being able to create alters at will is really interesting though. Part of the theory of structural dissociation is that we all possess the ability to dissociate traumatic memories. Even in the wild, prey animals exhibit this behavior. When prey are caught by a predator, they can go into a completely frozen state, but if the predator is distracted somehow, they will exit this frozen state, get up, escape, and then act as though nothing ever happened. Humans do the same sort of thing, putting bad memories behind a dissociative amnesiac barrier, and we do it for the same reason: simple survival. In a dangerous world, we need to be able to get up and keep going as if nothing happened instead of getting trapped in a ruminative loop and either doing something in distraction that got ourselves killed, or giving up and dying because we can't handle the trauma. In that sense DID is a useful survival trait that allows us to continue to function almost normally instead of giving up and dying and that's why humans seem to be (nearly?) universally capable of this entire spectrum of dissociation.

And in dissociative disorders, it's even more interesting because at least anecdotally we can start attaching identities to these dissociated parts, so even as children we can intentionally create alters. E.g. It wasn't me who did the bad thing that made mommy mad, it was Eric or April who did that, and I'm the good one. I don't know how common this is in reality, but I've met several others who say they did this. My own memories are still too fragmented to know what exactly happened when, but I do know today that my system has a fair number of intentionally created alters.

Imaginary friends are similar, but lack the self-agency and will that a full alter has. An imaginary friend will bend to your will and do what you want them to do and that is because they are a projection of your own will. Alters have their own will, goals, and feelings and will fight tooth and nail for their own self-determination just like you would. So alters might start off as an imaginary friend in some cases (at least anecdotally, this isn't part of the current research, and might just be a child mistaking an alter for an imaginary friend at first), but they quickly cease to resemble one. An imaginary friend doesn't knock you unconscious and start self-harming while you are gone, but an alter who thinks everything is hopeless might.

It's also possible that as a child you could begin forming alters, but be removed from your bad situation before age 6-9 and be able to integrate into a single identity.

Co-morbid conditions:
And in any of these dissociative disorders, there are two common co-morbid conditions: dissociative amnesia and de-personalization/de-realization (DPDR).

Dissociative amnesia we've aeady discussed as being unable to remember even important events in your life, even ones most people consider "good" (e.g. birthdays or marriage). This is why people with PTSD can completely forget what happened and only re-experience the memory in flashbacks.

De-personalization is feeling like you are watching your actions from a distance (or from outside your body). I frequently feel like I'm watching a movie of someone else's life and feel like I have no control over what's happening; this is usually because someone else is in front (in control of the body) and I'm somewhere near the front so I can see/hear what's going on, but can't control anything.

De-realization is when you feel like things aren't real, like the world is made of thin tissue paper and there's nothing backing it up, or that things are foggy, etc. I also frequently get this feeling.

* There are lots of theories about how dissociative disorders start, but this one seems to be the one with the most acceptance currently.

[Like Ra]

And I thought that I lost the ability to read long posts! I'm not hopeless hopeful! 😄

De-personalization is feeling like you are watching your actions from a distance (or from outside your body). I frequently feel like I'm watching a movie of someone else's life and feel like I have no control over what's happening; this is usually because someone else is in front (in control of the body) and I'm somewhere near the front so I can see/hear what's going on, but can't control anything.

I feel and do it quite often, and usually intentionally. I switch to the "observer" mode and watch my body "doing things". And the "things" are: spontaneous qigong, yoga, healing others, self-bondage, auto-writing, etc.

De-realization is when you feel like things aren't real, like the world is made of thin tissue paper and there's nothing backing it up, or that things are foggy, etc. I also frequently get this feeling.

That's my normal state. I call it "the world is all decorations again, and I'm flowing like a balloon without touching the earth."

And at the same time, I quite rarely experience the world of the sensory presence "in the moment", even during the meditative "no internal dialogue" moments.

Pity, that the science avoids these "shadow zones". The priests of the Hirsch Index church won't award grants to such heretics 😆

[CollectiveThought]

And I thought that I lost the ability to read long posts! I'm not hopeless hopeful! 😄

😂My newfound passion for investigating theories of consciousness keeps leading me to make posts that are far too long. Sorry! Hopefully it was useful, at least.

I feel and do it quite often, and usually intentionally. I switch to the "observer" mode and watch my body "doing things". And the "things" are: spontaneous qigong, yoga, healing others, self-bondage, auto-writing, etc.

Many people without dissociative disorders (DDs) experience DPDR like this, which is why they are considered co-morbid instead of being part and parcel of having a DD. Human brains are so amazing at self-reflection to be able to do it to the degree that you are a simple observer and it seems that Asian cultures have explored this area of consciousness far deeper than Euro-American cultures do. Even people without a DD seem to be conflicting bundles of impulses, thoughts, and emotions that they try to rationalize via the conscious mind. It's that whole concept of making a decision and then becoming aware of having done so, and yet thinking that you consciously made the decision.

Pity, that the science avoids these "shadow zones". The priests of the Hirsch Index church won't award grants to such heretics 😆

An excellent example of both Goodhart's and Campbell's laws (or even the cobra effect 😂). Science is becoming intensely distorted by the H-index and driven toward sensationalism. Careful, incisive work in any area that isn't popular is being strongly selected against, so I'm not hopeful we'll have any sort of grand unified theory of consciousness and self-awareness in my lifetime. Too many scientists feel pressured to continue to produce papers at an unsustainable rate to keep their funding and we now have an entire field gone cargo cult to some degree producing increasingly "proper" papers and overall quality and breadth of research seems to be falling as a result because of the hyperfixation on the H-index.

[CollectiveThought]

That's my normal state. I call it "the world is all decorations again, and I'm flowing like a balloon without touching the earth."

And at the same time, I quite rarely experience the world of the sensory presence "in the moment", even during the meditative "no internal dialogue" moments.

Sort of off-topic, but I think the Wachowski sisters must have experienced a lot of DPDR (especially the de-realization part) because the Matrix seems almost a literal translation of DPDR experience into movie form (and the enforcement of social control part seems very much part of their trans experience, too).

I also have problems being aware of sensory information when meditating because of that feeling that the world is merely a soap bubble just about to pop, so now I wonder if this is a common occurrence for people with DPDR. I've never had any of my alters meditate with me, though. I wonder what would happen if we somehow all agreed to meditate together?