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Comment by thecrash | Hacker News Reader

Some people believe that creating imaginary friends is a deliberate process, and can be done by anyone who comes across the idea:

"You’ll create a tulpa by imagining a person in your head, and treating them as a person. The exact mechanism is unknown, but as you give a tulpa attention, and believe it can be a sentient person, it will grow into one, and act independently of you." https://www.tulpa.info/what-is-a-tulpa/

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And some people believe that making a tulpa is just intentionally giving yourself a mental disorder.

I view it as running a child process inside of your brain. Tried it, didn't work. Might be related to my almost complete inability to vividly visualize things in my head while awake.

Yes and this seems related to the degrees of aphantasia we may have, there was an interesting thread a while back https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19618927

Thanks for that link! I missed that thread, and the topic is super-interesting to me.

Isn't it basically just like writing fiction in your head? The act of creating a separate being in your own mind with its own personality and desires is exactly what you need to create believable characters.

For that matter, you are at a significant advantage in many extremely lucrative professions (notably, politics, management, finance, media, UX design, and law) if you can create an accurate mental simulacrum of the people you interact with. This is basically what separates the people who control what others do vs. those who get controlled.

Many years ago, I played MUD's (text-based MMORPG's of sorts, for the uninitiated) with strict roleplaying and the characters I played were very much separate from me in that I played out their emotions, desires, strengths and weaknesses and in conversations with friends, the characters were no me, or even controlled by me, outside of general themes or play styles that we chose in advance. It was more that I reacted to circumstances how I felt the character would and, in the moment, it didn't feel like I made the decisions (of course, I obviously did). This felt very similar as when you hear an author talk about their characters as if they were real independent people.

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