Our brain is a storyteller, not a reporter from an inner world

Only if it actually exists. There's the rub.

> I think psychosis itself invalidates it.

Why? What if psychosis is a surface level event? You aren't psychotic, you'd have no idea what would be going on in their minds to make such a determination.

> You're agreeing with him

Not necessarily true. I can say your reason for disagreeing with him is spurious without actually agreeing with him. And that's what I've done. I don't recall anywhere where I've said that he was right. I've just said you haven't given a good, demonstrable reason as to why he's wrong.

> I've explored questions that dive all the way down to the very nature of existence, including stuff like multiple universes.

That doesn't mean anything. If your tulpa isn't real, then none of those answers mean anything. It's just you talking to you, speculating on the nature of the universe. Those aren't "rigorous questions". And once again, you substitute claims for evidence. You've claimed to have done the work, but aren't really showing the work.

Oh. There is, but you wouldn't accept it. You'd likely just say that's how it presents. You've likened your experience to those of the religious and that's way more true than you may realize. And one can ask you the same question as any follower of faith: How do you know they're wrong and you're right? You've given no answer that differs in any meaningful way than any apologist. Answers that work for everything; work for nothing.

> But on the face of all of this, this is just a guy making these arguments.

Yes. But so are you. And if I need to decide which one of you I'm going to believe, I need reasons that will satisfy me. I haven't read his book, so I haven't fully explored his claims or evidence. But I'll admit that it is interesting. I can see how it works. I can frame things within that model. I will probably read his book. I can also frame things as "deep" thoughts. I'm not so ready to simply dismiss his ideas because I want to be deep. But all of the arguments you've presented me with are ones I've already seen in slightly different context. They're hollow. You've said his ideas are bunk, but your reasons, your evidence don't give me confidence in your assessment.

The current thesis is that the brain ( consciousness ) is a predicting machine. A very interesting lecture by a neuroscientist.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRel1JKOEbI

That all said, you're just rehashing the millenia-old debate between rationalism and mysticism. There are interesting points to dive into and I want to do that but you need to want it too. You want to believe your conception of the world is the right frame to conceive of it in and I just see it as one of many. I'm going to want to adjust your thinking to accommodate mystical frames by disillusioning you of your certainty. I will absolutely spend the time with you to do that but you have to want it.

Look, I don't care who you want to believe. It's not a material question to me. I've talked to people that believed that they were interacting with angels and demons before and, well, sure, let's talk about angels and demons. You want to believe me, or you want to believe him. It matters not to me. You want me to justify my beliefs further than he's justified his. I don't have anything other than my experience. We all have the same level of ability here. I claim to have access to a reality that can only be described as spiritual. That spirituality is exactly as you've described it, inconclusive. It remains meaningful regardless, and you need to accept this otherwise we can't go further.

When I apply my programmer's mind to it, what I come up with is the realization that experience is just too dense to be able to communicate at speed. So I can't use my experience to prove to you that I'm right. I can only describe what I've experienced and allow you to draw your own conclusions, and couch them in ways that display to you that I'm not a crazy person, which is absolutely a concern when you start questioning the nature of reality.

Your mind requires proof. Mine does not. Mine is happy with "reasonable suspicion". Perhaps you're happy with "a preponderance of the evidence". Reasonable suspicion allows me to continue with my inquiry. The existence of my tulpa in my mind is predicated on reasonable suspicion. If you consider why you're more apt to think flat consciousness is the actual reality rather than deep consciousness, I think you'll find that your inner beliefs are doing this. You want to ask me for evidence, not the guy saying it's flat. That's why I say you're taking my lived experience as an attack on your world view. I don't feel attacked. But I do use your attitude towards my arguments to decide whether I want to continue interacting with you or not.

I will say that if you want to continue denying that my lived experience has meaning, I'm not going to be interested in interacting with you further. It's just more nihilism. Experience has meaning. The things we do in our lives mean something. Things don't need to be proven in order to have meaning. Lived experience is all we have. I will take even a psychotic's lived experience seriously. Let's examine the morality of the demons attacking your mind. Or the specifics of the end of the world that you're prophesizing.

Is their experience actually relevant to all? Probably not. But it's still meaningful. Meaning it hits upon transcendent truths that you can dive into and find. If you can't agree on the existence of these truths than there's no point in going further.

Yes and no.

If you take a look around you, you could see a lot of different things. But there are no things around you, there are some quantum world, photons going in every direction. It is your visual system process signals from your retina and creates images of things, and you believe that images you see is a things.

The same story is with brain processes. You have some kind of images of your brain processes and believe that this images are brain processes. The more you meditate the more you extend mapping between processes and images. But it is an illusion. We could safely ignore this and we could believe that images are processes if the mapping between brain processes and images was isomorphism. But it is not.

All your understanding of yourself is a simplified model of yourself. It is like if you try to describe how works some neuronet and why it outputs A when you feed B into it. In your explanations you can refer to training process or to "features" that arrive at different layers, but it would be artifical explanation, because really neuronet outputs A because it outputs A, the only way to check this fact is to run a neuronet or make a simulation of it.

If you think that you know how your brain works, then try to make simulation of it, you'll see that you don't know how it works. It is like brain visual processing which seems easy and transparent process, but if you try to reproduce it, you'll find that you don't know how it works, and the only way to reproduce is to create artifical neural network and to hope that your model of visual cortex captures all the importand details.

Your thought process is a black box, but you are so used to it, that it becomes transparent to you and you cannot see it. Like you do not notice blind spot on your retina. Or maybe it is more like your eyes, which you cannot see because you see through them.

> If the subconscious can't think, tulpas, which maintain personality distinct from the normal operating consciousness, would have nowhere to 'hide'.

Your conscious is some kind of mapping of brain states into domain of abstract ideas like "belief", "thought", "emotion" and so on. You have beliefs, thoughts, emotions, you experience them as the primary entities, but they are not. They are just an outputs of function applied to brain state.

So why mind cannot have two mappings that exists simultaneously? It is easy. Look, lets B(t) is state of your brain. Let Y(B(t)) would be mapping from B into your consciousness (or, I think, it would be better to say that Y is your consciousness). Let T(B(t)) is the consciousness of tulpa. Now all you need is to make T(B(t)) to be a part of Y, that would convert inner state of consciousness of tulpa into visual and auditory representation of tulpa in Y. Mappings themselves are hidden from you and you cannot "see" how they works, they are invisible black boxes. You can "see" only outputs, or their outputs is what you "see" as conscious you.

By this way there are thoughts only in your consciousness. Tulpa have no thoughts, it is you use idea of "thought" to explain behaviour of tulpa, like you use idea of "thought" to explain behaviour of youself.

His broader point about flatness may be justified, but his entire school of thought is no less nonsensical than Freud's, which acolytes also try to revive by sprinkling with modern research from time to time; so this "debunking" leaves me unimpressed.