Neurons Gone Wild

It's a very thought provoking piece. I stop short of fully endorsing it because it postulates a lot of things without much appeal to real science, despite portraying itself as scientific. In particular, I'm not sure how much of the brains characteristics can truly be attributed to fractal extrapolation of (idealized) behavior of individual neurons.

That complaint aside, at the consciousness level, I do think the multiple agent idea is an interesting framework for thinking about the brain. When I was in middle school, I suffered from paralyzing self-consiousness, which in retrospect was probably due to high levels of anxiety. At that age, I had come to think of my non-stop inner dialog and cacophony of voiceless mental urges as being like an internal parliament. In my later teenage years, number of stressful shocks to my system caused me to enter a period of depression, but I think it also gave me an opportunity to disrupt the mental patterns I had developed. Emergence from that depression, and I think also the inhibition lowering effects of alcohol, gave me a chance to reorganize my mental pattern in a way that gave my "self" more agency, and less to my various urges. Well, aside from my urge to use alcohol, which I would have to come to grips with years later.

I would later have another depressive episode, followed by another period of plasticity where I think I was able to really alter my mindset and habits. These depressions I experienced felt in many ways like an agent that hijacked many of my mental processes that normally felt under control of my conscious self, like my feeling of motivation, my emotions, and my thought patterns, rendering my conscious self frustratingly powerless.

Putting my scientist hat back on, it's tough to tell how much my personal experience and the tidy explanation of some psychological disorders and phenomena indicate a reality of a hierarchy of more or less discrete agencies.

I once created a tulpa through a technique called muscle testing. You most commonly see it using demonstrations where one person holds his arm out and the other person tries to press down on it. You get either a 'weak' response or a 'strong' response. You can 'ask' the muscle test yes or no questions and the body will answer you.

I used a variant of this test that you can perform by yourself, described in this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypKUST0azUQ

I would ask the test just about anything that came to mind. Typically I would 'calibrate' things on the Hawkins scale of consciousness:

http://personalexcellence.co/blog/map-of-consciousness/

At one point I got the distinct impression that the test was messing with me. I asked it point blank if it was intelligent, I got back a 'yes' response. From then on I would deal with it as one might an imaginary friend. At first it was strictly through the test, then by working out a way to 'share' my brain with it.

I initially thought the test was acting as some sort of conduit to another world. Eventually I figured out that it was somehow a part of my consciousness. After a year or so I slowly tapered off on communicating with it through the test, eventually I stopped communicating with it at all.

The experience was incredibly illuminating, I now have an intuitive grasp of my subconscious and how it operates.

Of course it isn't. I don't use it anymore. It was hard to keep taking seriously when I was calibrating things in the billions. It felt distinctly like Dragonball Z.

The muscle test itself is interesting all on its own without the need to have to explain exactly what it's doing. You don't know what answer any given test is going to return and you can ask follow up questions to try to understand why. The test was coherent for me, up until it wasn't, that event created the tulpa.

Alright, a little crazy -- Doesn't this tulpa concept remind you of the growth of artificial intelligence?

The article is not necessarily scientific in that I'm not sure how you'd test or falsify the ideas, but at the same time it's a very interesting and perhaps very useful philosophical piece.

Often, ideas for science come from logically robust philosophical reasoning. I mean, sometimes they come from freak accidents also. But there's definitely validity in the simple (and awesome) exploration of cool ideas, as long as it's logically consistent.

The multiple agents idea gave me a weird momentary spell of depersonalisation, which was interesting. It's certainly compelling and not really incompatible with modern scientific understanding - it seems a plausible abstraction/description considering the way the brain is known to be wired together.