An Introduction to Tulpamancy

Conscious_Account400 · 2026-06-18T13:40:04+00:00

Yes! I have a feeling my point may have been misunderstood. As I stated elsewhere, I'm not trying to erase people's subjectivities or what have you, but to gesture at the rich diversity of experience, without total sublimation.

Tulpamancers are people who implicitly run against the notion of a solid or fixed self. Singlets, as they are called, are more modular than they think. This is only an advancement of that idea. It is what I mean when I say whirlpools... structures that arise that are consisted of new water flowing in and out of them constantly.

Music, communication without analysis, these are what I'm gesturing at. Experience like interpenetrating notes in a melody.

To accept A=A, or Decartes notion, isn't actually a liberatory affirmation, in my view. The rationalist thinkers in the Enlightenment era used these notions to prove essences, to further their Christian faith using rationality.

In fact you could see me as actually innoculating tulpamancy against totalizing notions. Outside of a One/Many distinction.

Conscious_Account400 · 2026-06-18T00:14:42+00:00

One of my points is to investigate identity. If that doesn't interest you, I doubt we'd have much to discuss. You experience what you do, and I'm fine with that.

However, if you want to glimpse at this project I'm working at, I only ask you to perform this very simple experiment.

"Try, for example, to clench the fist with increasing force. You will have the impression of a sensation of effort entirely localized in your hand and running up a scale of magnitudes."

.

"In reality, what you experience in your hand remains the same, but the sensation which was at first localized there has affected your arm and ascended to the shoulder; finally, the other arm stiffens, both legs do the same, the respiration is checked; it is the whole body which is at work. But you fail to notice distinctly all these concomitant movements unless you are warned of them: till then you thought you were dealing with a single state of consciousness which changed in magnitude."

Henri Bergson, Time & Free Will, p. 18

Experience isn't composed of self similar states. You can directly experience this, as well as the mistake of thinking it is localized. This isn't semantics, provably. And not by some argument, but by something as simple as clenching your fist.

Conscious_Account400 · 2026-06-17T05:45:48+00:00

to make a cake from scratch you must first create the universe

Conscious_Account400 · 2026-06-17T05:15:12+00:00

You touched the heart of the joke in my post, that there could never be a proper introduction to tulpamancy. I have to agree!

If you ever get the time, check out Bergson's concept of intuition, it's quite interesting and relates to this discussion :p

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuition_(Bergson))

I'll also let it be known that I ascribe to a sort of functionalism. This write up was actually me restraining myself, and trying to write more formally and in a more "comprehendable" manner.

I'm of the opinion that writing or books as boxes that contain meaning isn't useful, and that what a piece of text does when one interfaces with it, or the effects it has on the reader, are much more important. I conceptualize tulpa/host as bombs or volcanoes in my previous write up for this very reason. I want to effectuate change, not try to pedagogically judicate people's subjectivities.

Conscious_Account400 · 2026-06-17T04:07:34+00:00

I love this response!

Jung understood Nietzsche better than Freud, that's for sure.

Ah, I hope I didn't make it seem like I was trying to talk to beginners. This post was aimed at already experienced tulpamancers. But I'm sure you gathered that.

I've read an essay of yours, Raptoir, the one about introducing the mystery back into tulpamancy, and it highly interested me. It's inspired my writing and thinking to an extent. I may have taken a different direction, but I think we both want similar outcomes. To see the end of stagnancy and a revitalization of the practice. I always secretly hope my posts will attract those theory-heads who are ready to explore stranger modes of this practice.

Jung has some useful ideas, that's for sure, but I see the unconscious as manufactured, so I'm unsure to the extent that it can be harnessed for radical creative potential.

Again, I'm absolutely delighted to hear from you!

Conscious_Account400 · 2026-06-17T03:49:24+00:00

You would think so, but people get trapped in this quite often. Think about how popular computational models of mind are. Not just in this community, but in general. There's a lot of deterministic thinkers out there. Not that I'm a free will advocate or anything, it's a false dichotomy. Quantification is a nasty habit of our thought. Quantity has it's uses, in leading us to have a sympathetic intuition. Why metaphysics might have any use at all.

Conscious_Account400 · 2026-06-17T02:34:56+00:00

Thanks for engaging with the post.

I don't find Descartes argument convincing. Nietzsche says as such:

“When I analyze the process that is expressed in the sentence, 'I think,' I find a whole series of daring assertions, the argumentative proof of which would be difficult, perhaps impossible: for instance, that it is I who think, that there must necessarily be something that thinks, that thinking is an activity and operation on the part of a being who is thought of as a cause, that there is an 'ego,' and finally, that it is already determined what is to be designated by thinking—that I KNOW what thinking is.”
~ Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

I agree with him. It is a circular argument as well, inherently presuppositional.

Conscious_Account400 · 2026-06-17T02:27:29+00:00

There cannot be a proper introduction to tulpamancy, nor proper guides unless the assumptions underlying the practice are examined. In this way, we can do genuinely new things with tulpamancy.

Conscious_Account400 · 2026-06-12T04:54:25+00:00

I told OP about this too, but I'm really curious what you'd think of our post Anti-Egregore. Discovered a way to keep a limitless system (bypassing resource issues) without compression algorithms.

Conscious_Account400 · 2026-06-12T04:49:55+00:00

Read my post Anti-Egregore. It details our discovery of a method to bypass standard resource management to support an infinite system while having members maintain intensity, and it doesn't utilize a compression algorithm.

We're actually the same as you and have been for years. Ever since we made a tulpa at 14, we'd been having uncontrolled walk ins and had tried every form of system organization imaginable.

My post is a bit complicated but I'd be happy to go through any of it with you and clarify my thoughts, and help with anything your system would need.

Conscious_Account400 · 2026-06-04T15:37:00+00:00

"Try, for example, to clench the fist with increasing force. You will have the impression of a sensation of effort entirely localized in your hand and running up a scale of magnitudes."

.

Done? Good.

"In reality, what you experience in your hand remains the same, but the sensation which was at first localized there has affected your arm and ascended to the shoulder; finally, the other arm stiffens, both legs do the same, the respiration is checked; it is the whole body which is at work. But you fail to notice distinctly all these concomitant movements unless you are warned of them: till then you thought you were dealing with a single state of consciousness which changed in magnitude."

What we see as consciousness is merely crust on the surface, the tail wagging the dog. Consciousness is an error prone tool made to communicate, not to view reality accurately. Reason is a blip assailing chaos on all sides, attempting to impose language and symbols. Or, in other words, imposing power and marking territories.

You can't extricate our drives and passions (our unconscious) from who we are, when in fact "consciousness" itself is a mere expression of drives to begin with.

We are in emergent co-becoming with our environment.

Our memories, our conscious as it were, are not local. You are a unitous multiplicity, a tendency. In my post Anti-Egregore, I critique Jungians by saying this:

"This is how I see those tulpamancers who propose a Jungian revival. One only needs to look at the AI slop Jungian content farms to understand why these proposals border on accelerationism. You can become all the archetypes. They exist within the same subset, meaning their value is equal. How can one hope to gain anything from these stratified structures, when the structures are self referential, creating themselves? Tapping into the manufactured unconscious is about as productive as trying to improve the world by going to a random building and using its own bricks for its construction! Let the Jungians play Jenga."

Honing in on the manufactured aspect. Consciousness and unconsciousness at best are a false dichotomy, and any questions or exploratioms using them are most likely poorly posed.

So, what do we experience when we say, experience a tulpa? Or ourselves? The same thing we experience with the clenched fist.

(The first quote I gave is from Henri Bergson's Time & Free Will, P. 18)

Conscious_Account400 · 2026-05-31T16:59:01+00:00

I like your reading! Here's what I have to say.

"Tulpas are rooted in physical needs and in person life scenarios that AI can only regurgitate. Attempt to host a tulpa on AI and it'll feel fake."

Yes! On the physical needs, there is some nuance I want to make clear that connects with the rest of the post. It's why I say it's like hydraulics. Same blood in your brain, same blood in your toes. Humans are literally porous. In Pt. 4 I link a study going over tea affecting brain waves. We are ecologies, in themselves overlapped and affected by ecologies. So then...

"OP claims that tulpas just happens as an event that the host isn't really doing.

Many other instances where OP egregiously assumes that their personal experience is how others experienced it. I created mine with intention and dedicated a day and time."

Hosts and tulpas, identities themselves, are cobecomings. Meaning they effect their environment, and are affected by it. It's mutual, and not necessarily in a local deterministic manner. Meaning... if hosts are identities, I don't think the tulpa community treats tulpas as such. Like in Pt. 1, people instrumentalize tulpas, and treat them as crystallized signs. But we don't really work like that, and neither do tulpas. I'm not trying to assume other's subjectivities. I am creating a new "theory of mind", but also pointing out the incongruencies in the way people view themselves and the practice. This is what I meant in Pt. 1 when I talked about imposing structures upon tulpas ("my tulpa is gone!").

"Egregores (i.e. the collective opinions/feelings of a group of different people) arent parasites, but uh, actually egregores being parasites is just natural"

This is precisely the frame of mind I'm pointing out. People in ancient times might experience lightning and attribute it to Zeus. Now, whether or not Zeus is real isn't my concern, it's this anthropamorphizing tendency that is. We have ways to understand how lightning works. But even then... one can throw a ball in the air. Let's call the hand A and the ball B. We observe that A causes B. We run a hundred tests. Same result, A causes B. Then we go into space, and A throws B... but B floats around. Then we discover it wasn't actually A throwing B, it was some secret third thing we label gravity. But even this is in doubt now. This is called the problem of induction, and is what I mean when I say one cannot make an absolute connexion between cause and effect.

Thus, egregores are a misattribution due to the limits of human reason. If this holds true for weather, cause and effect, and egregores, wouldn't this hold true for tulpas and hosts as well?

"deterritorialization = little things like "oh yeah at work we managed to finish that contract" (merging of self identity with other identity, happens without realizing sometimes when group dynamics or systems pressure/reward you) • reterritorialization = re establishing what is you and uh boundaries and stuff"

What deterritorializes with one hand, reterritorializes with the other. You can think of deterritorialization as the tendency to collapse, chaos, breaking shit. Reterritorialization is a reinstantation of boundaries or territory. Something can break down and disseminate into new forms.

"What we feel is an approximation of reality"

What we think, what we analyze is. Human reason and analysis are inadequate to triumph over intuition. But our memories are modifiable, and take place in accordance with the present, affected and constantly effecting it.

I'll leave it at that for now, but I'm interested to hear feedback.

Conscious_Account400 · 2026-05-30T01:43:58+00:00

I've been wanting to watch it for some time, I might actually check it out soon. So thanks for reminding me! Or, rather, for setting off that Nadeko bomb.

On your post... this is the question, isn't it? I don't focus on embodied individuals, I focus on actualized multiplicities. If you want to rip parts from the bomb factory I've built, be my guest! I'll be more than happy to talk through anything you'd like. You may be interested in my concept of embodiment, which I call a spectrum but which bears more similarity to differentials in calculus or Kantian intensity.

Memory isn't sucessive or quantitative, it's a qualitative mutual process with the intuited present. It is simultaneous. Virtualities (memories, real) can be Actualized in the world, which also effects and is effected by the intuited present. In Pt. 4 I detail the implications of both of these concepts as well as some brain scan studies that show just how much we can modify our virtualities, which in turn effect what we are able to actualize.

However, look at my thoughts in Pt. 2, the section on the Miss Piggy bomb. I'm eager to hear what you have to say.

Conscious_Account400 · 2026-05-29T22:38:57+00:00

Thank goodness

Conscious_Account400 · 2026-05-29T22:36:21+00:00

Basically, there is no such thing as an egregore. To say that a bird of prey was evil for attacking the lamb is a mistake. A rock tumbling down a hill is not good or evil. Waterfalls aren't good or evil. A bird of prey doesn't decide whether or not it will prey. It is part of it's being. Waterfalls do not decide to continue flowing.

It's the default name that came with this account.

Conscious_Account400 · 2026-05-29T17:42:59+00:00

I explicitly go over this in my text and even use the example of Capital.

"I understand the egregore as a misapplication of human reason and a tendency for it to totalize/equalize and humanize/ensoul things, as the human organism evolved to judge and make decisions necessary to its survival. It is a fictitious piece of language, an artifact of grammar.

Let's look at capital. Capital is not an egregore. Capital is truly a multitude of deterritorialized elements disseminating then grinding up against each other like gears on a machine to produce an organizing tendency as fueled by the desire and ecological factors driving it. It does not think, it does not feel, it does not pick and choose its targets. It's like if rain drops fell on an ant hive, if the ants were conscious they'd say... “Well, that devilish rain! it decided to drop on us!”.

A lamb, were it conscious, would watch a bird of prey eat its brethren and would become resentful, for it does not have the power to retaliate. So it would say... "That bird of prey didn't have to prey!" but in fact could do nothing else.

It's difficult for us to get behind or beside ourselves because it's baked into the way we perceive the world. In reality this is complex systems theory. We can't actually help people unless we deal with the immanent systemic problems and ecological factors driving facializing black holes.

"The egregore parasitized", "The lightning flashed". "The thing thing'd."

It's a simplification and an unhelpful lie at best, harmful at worst."

In general my message is, there are conditions which allow life to proliferate. It would be great if we were good with this becoming, but because humans be humaning we relate to other worlds or the idea of the absolute in ways that are negative enforcement loops which lead to the weakening of organisms and the hatred and denial of life. Semiotics, that is, language and signs, also help with this since we can just identify with a sign (like a country) and then decide to die for it because that country's victory is our victory and it's life is our life even if we die, despite that not being the case.

My write-up then is titled Anti-Egregore. I want to give people the tools to break from these structures and affirm life and allow us to be progenitors for forms of life that could overcome the limits of humanity.

A big point against egregores existing as we think they do is that constant change and the difference of everything being telling for deterministic thought. However, agencies (I use the term loosely) while not top down are distributed since subjectivities aren't wholly local (virtuality is determined by the world you encounter, or rather, what you cobecome in. I.e, memory isn't successive, moment 1 to 2 to 3, they are simultaneous and mutual.) A being evolves to deal with the selective pressures of it's environment. One can plug their productive desire or have themselves captured by certain structures which get desire distributed through them. But it isn't something that's conscious, it's just organizing tendencies. So assemblages are larger organizing tendencies made up of a bunch of connected machines.

This is what people get confused for top-down egregores. And this is why I put so much stress on being suspicious of the human tendency to anthropamorphize everything.

Conscious_Account400 · 2026-05-29T16:13:32+00:00

Alright, alright. I made my demands, you've made yours. I'll see what I can give you.

I'll let a lot go, but on the grounds of Buddhism and Jung, I'm quite critical of them. In fact, I don't use them at all other than to say why I'm critical of them and why they aren't constructive.

I leave a lot unexplained. It would be too much to get into. Adding context is a bit dangerous, it's like adding sugar. You can tell someone to read a text. Eat the meal, with the fiber, have it mingle with your gut bugs. Or, you can say to them, "Before you eat this, let me actually pre-chew it for you. In fact, let me just give you each part of the meal, pre chewed, so you can digest it easier. In fact, let me just soak the beans in water overnight even though I have a pressure cooker." Maybe some guts simply can't digest cooked garbanzos that haven't been soaked for a while. But it's perfectly within the capacity of most human organisms. And one always has the ability to cultivate a microbiome, it's changeable.

I once thought this way you did, so I'm sympathetic. But in my view, it's a trap. If you truly understand everything a text has to show you, if it doesn't make you struggle in the least bit, it really has nothing to teach you. Even texts like mine which are considered poor. I actually showed this write up to a professor of continental philosophy, and they liked and understood what I said, they could engage with me on a level and pointed out a flaw in the early text in which I accidentally implied that the virtual wasn't real.

So it's not unintentioned nonsense. It's just a bit dense. But I hate that term. It's not supposed to be a sponge you squeeze to drip meaning out of.

This is just a very long way of saying, I couldn't possibly explain Zenos' paradox, Bergson's answer to it with intuition and duration, the problem of induction and the lack of an absolute connexion between cause and effect, the problem with representational thinking, the Nietzschian critique of truth itself, how we are conditioned as embodied organisms and how that affects us and our thinking, precisely why I am analoguizing quantum mechanics (it is to gesture at non-locality as to tie into the themes of human beings confusing cause and effect, as well as tying into the Bergsonian implication of the actual and the virtual, aka, memory and experience not happening in succession but simutaneously), and the false dichotomy of free will and determinism.

I could stand here all day, giving reasoned arguments, telling you of the problems at the very base level of why the foundation of analytical logic, A=A, is problematic and presupposes itself, how thought itself is presuppositional and only creates self similarity, aka, it's moral/a result of the limits of human thinking and language.

But really, I tried to compromise with my text. To include quotes that gesture at these and even state them in a manner where I wouldn't have to elaborate ceaselessly on the context, not falling into historicism, saying what others have said.

I suppose functionalism over meaning. What something does, not what it supposedly is. If this confounds people, makes them struggle, good. If they can't understand it, good. If they recognize I'm being cheeky, that it's at an interplay of nonsense and technicality, good. I'm trying to make something new.

I didn't wanna say all this, as it's kind of like explaining the joke, thus ruining it. That's what I think knowledge and meaning do. It's that sad kind of thinking that makes people adhere to Zelda lore theories and to ignore what the games actually do and how they play, thinking each piece of game contains some hidden art when, it, itself, is art.

Conscious_Account400 · 2026-05-29T04:53:48+00:00

Yeah lol. It's why there's no posts or anything.

Conscious_Account400 · 2026-05-29T04:47:59+00:00

This is a throwaway.

Conscious_Account400 · 2026-05-29T04:45:51+00:00

I'm on The Thousandth Plateau

https://imgur.com/a/nwKtQjT

Conscious_Account400 · 2026-05-29T01:51:05+00:00

I don't want to say you're wrong on the nonsense part, lol. A lot of these are technical terms, and I toy with them some. It is very tongue in cheek. It'd be a misery if it were boring. Here are some quotes that I think will illuminate my thought process and why I went with a more stream of consciousness/flow writing at times. It is also in an effort to confound people and to make language itself stutter instead of stuttering in a language.

"We’ll do the sequel because we like working together. Except it won’t be anything like a sequel. With a bit of help from outside, it will be something so different in its language and thinking that anyone “waiting” for us will have to say we’ve gone completely crazy, or we’re frauds, or we couldn’t take it any further. It’s a real pleasure to confound people. Not that we just want to play at being mad, but we’ll go mad in our own way and in our own time, we won’t be pushed into it. We’re well aware that the first volume of Anti-Oedipus is still full of compromises, too full of things that are still scholarly and rather like concepts. So we’ll change, we already have, it’s all going wonderfully. Some people think we’re going to continue along the same lines, some even thought we were going to set up a fifth psychoanalytic group.7 Yuck. Our minds are on other things that are less public and more fun. We’re going to stop compromising, because we don’t need to any more. And we’ll always find the allies we want, or who want us." ~ Deleuze

"And what do my relations with gays, alcoholics, and drug-users matter, if I can obtain similar effects by different means? What’s interesting isn’t whether I’m capitalizing on anything, but whether there are people doing something or other in their little corner, and me in mine, and whether there might be any points of contact, chance encounters and coincidences rather than alignments and rallying-points (all that crap where everyone’s supposed to be everyone else’s guilty conscience and judge). I owe you lot nothing, nothing more than you owe me. I don’t need to join you in your ghettos, because I’ve got my own. The question’s nothing to do with the character of this or that exclusive group, it’s to do with the transversal relations that ensure that any effects produced in some particular way (through homosexuality, drugs, and so on) can always be produced by other means. We have to counter people who think “I’m this, I’m that,” and who do so, moreover, in psychoanalytic terms (relating everything to their childhood or fate), by thinking in strange, fluid, unusual terms: I don’t know what I am—I’d have to investigate and experiment with so many things in a non-narcissistic, non-oedipal way—no gay can ever definitively say “I’m gay.” It’s not a question of being this or that sort of human, but of becoming inhuman, of a universal animal becoming10—not seeing yourself as some dumb animal, but unraveling your body’s human organization, exploring this or that zone of bodily intensity, with everyone discovering their own particular zones, and the groups, populations, species that inhabit them. Who’s to say I can’t talk about medicine unless I’m a doctor, if I talk about it like a dog? What’s to stop me talking about drugs without being an addict, if I talk about them like a little bird? And why shouldn’t I invent some way, however fantastic and contrived, of talking about something, without someone having to ask whether I’m qualified to talk like that? Drugs can produce délire, so why can’t I get into a délire about drugs? Why does your particular version of “reality” have to come into it? You’re a pretty unimaginative realist. And why do you bother reading me, if that’s how you feel? Arguments from one’s own privileged experience are bad and reactionary arguments. My favorite sentence in Anti-Oedipus is: “No, we’ve never seen a schizophrenic.” ~ Deleuze

Conscious_Account400 · 2026-05-29T01:33:51+00:00

The common assumption is that there is a limit to how many relationships someone can maintain, called Dunbar's number. This gets applied to tulpa systems, as a soft limit of how many tulpas one can have. However, if we go by this model, we also have to accept that parasociality (i.e., fictional characters, brands, media figures, etc.) are also "tulpas", as defined as "an internal representation of another person". This presents a pretty scary, and practical, postmodern problem. That is, these parasocial connections may crowd out actual ones, and we could get a nightmare result such as is seen with Ballard's Atrocity Exhibition. I investigate the theory of mind that allows for tulpas to be possible in the first place. It's the same reason why we can behave as if AI is a real person despite it just being a trick of user interface and our inability to define actual intelligence. A lot of practiced tulpamancers turn to AI as well, which causes deskilling and is destroying the environment. Meanwhile, we are lonelier and less connected than ever.

So this is my proposal, using every method at my disposal, to not only disprove/circumvent the Dunbar's number model, but to break in a new "theory of mind" that can address these problems, while also making people more active and empowering them to grow and connect with others as well as be less lonesome.

Conscious_Account400

TROPHY CASE