Your reasoning for claiming tulpamancy isn’t plurality is baffling. You define plurality in the context of dissociative disorders, as a “involuntary response to overwhelming stress” but plural was coined to distinguish itself from dissociative disorders: https://healthymultiplicity.com/loonybrain/Info/VickisPowerOfNaming.html. And plural as defined by the plural community is “the state of having multiple headmates sharing one body” https://pluralpedia.org/w/Plurality. Academic work also use similiar definitions “a plural system (more than one person sharing a body) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S246874992300042X
Tulpas are widely understood to be their own people in the community. In the FAQ of the official subreddit it defines tulpas as “The simplest way to describe a tulpa is simply another person who was created intentionally/unintentionally through repeated interaction and shares a body and mind with their creator” https://www.reddit.com/r/Tulpas/wiki/faq/ (Note, tulpamamcy isn’t always a cultural thing, it can be done accidently.) so yes, by definition tulpamancy is a form of plurality.
Academic articles make this connection too. For example this study: https://pubs.sciepub.com/rpbs/5/2/1/index.html#:~:text=This%20paper%20opposes%20this%20bias,conscious%20entities%20within%20the%20mind. “by analyzing one form of plurality in consciousness: tulpamancy.”
Usually, I ignore these asks if they cite sources like reddit or pluralpedia of all things, but I'll hear you out for this.
Our host is currently taking a break, so, you're stuck with me—Geo. Woohoo. Just use it/its for me.
First off. Your argument centers around community definitions, philosophical considerations, and sociological observations—and crucially not scientific evidence, and that's a very important distinction I would like to make here.
Secondly, citing Pluralpedia, FAQ on Reddit, or plural community jargon does not prove that tulpamancy is scientifically recognized as plurality. It is completely permissible for any social community to call themselves whatever they like, but this self-definition is not a form of validation. The pluralpedia is a community user edited wiki and FAQ's on subreddit are written by the community. That doesn’t mean that tulpamancy is endorsed in clinical terms, recognized neurologically or have any diagnostic confirmation.
The fact you bring up that 'plural' term was created precisely to separate itself from dissociative conditions ironically weakens your argument more than anything else. If the plural community originally created it precisely to be separate from dissociative disorders, that would mean the plural community itself defines it as a social or community identity, not as a recognized natural occurance. Creating a broader social concept of "plurality" doesn't retroactively mean DID and OSDD now have separate medical definition by the creation of a social construct.
The academic papers that you provided, don't prove what you think they prove. Almost all modern studies that use the word 'plurality' do so in sociological, anthropological, philosophical, and identity research looking into online communities and subjective experience.
Sociological papers tend to analyze self-identifications and community formation in online environments, analyze the narration of individual experiences, or the creation of meaning within internet sub-cultures; this is not evidence that the research team are asserting the metaphysical or neurological validity of participants claims. If research was carried out on communities of self-identified vampires, reality shifters, or otherkin then this would not be proof that they were literally vampires, traveling realities or non-human beings—it would simply be proof that such a community existed, and thus was socially viable to study. This applies directly here. Descriptions of how communities define themselves does not prove the existence of multiple sentient individuals inhabiting a single brain.
The SciEP paper concerning tulpamancy is also much weaker evidence than you claim. This is not a high-level clinical or neuroscience journal; it is rather more theoretical and philosophical about consciousness and subjective experience, and does not indicate separate neurologies, separate identities in the brain, or evidence for clinical non-pathological multiplicity. The most this paper does is assert that people describe experiences which are considered plurality, and this merits further philosophical exploration of these experiences. It does not provide evidence of tulpamancy as a scientifically established non-disordered psychological phenomenon.
There is also an important issue that you are conflating the broad social use of "plurality" in the online plural community with its clinical interpretation as a dissociative disorder. Official psychiatric conditions such as DID and OSDD are classified as trauma related dissociative disorders recognized by DSM and ICD. They are widely acknowledged as having extremely high prevalence and correlation with traumatic development, typically overwhelming trauma in childhood. The plural community use of "plurality" is broad to describe disparate types of experience which include the notion of tulpas, soulbonds, spiritual systems, RP-based identity's and various other internally claimed headmates. Widening of this social term doesn't retroactively change the established definitions of psychological trauma, the same definition of multiplicity, in clinical settings.
The history of the tulpa argument is also quite troublesome. Modern day internet tulpae have very little in common with the original Tibetan Buddhist concepts, but are primarily influenced by Western interpretations of concepts like Tibetan Tulku's and emanation based beliefs, transformed in to creating intentionally autonomous other people in your mind that you interact with through repeated imagagination-led visualization; not original Tibetan concepts of consciously generated masters who are recognised as reincarnations.
Overall the overwhelming evidence your provided did not claim what you said they did, at the end of it all none of them prove existence of "endogenic plurality", at most your evidence does show that:
- Some individuals claim to experience things that they perceive as plurality
- Social groups around these ideas exist on the internet
- Some people intentionally actively create their own incredibly anthropomorphic internal companion(s)
- These phenomena may carry psychological meaning for those people who experience them.
This is not equivalent to evidence of multiple people existing in your brain or evidence of non-pathological multiplicity.
Let's see what ELSE you said about us.
“Omg I can not with this person. They said tulpamancy wasn't plurality and I corrected them using community resources + academic ones to explain that by the definition of plurality tulpamancy is plurality. And then they vagued me complaining about using Reddit and pluralpedia as a source. These are not medical terms their definitions are the ones the community uses. I swear anti-endos don't know how words work.”
You keep shifting your words throughout the argument and you are unintentionally proving my point. Your first tactic was to use academic papers and dissociate terminology to try and argue that tulpamancy is recognized as a valid form of plurality on par with DID/OSDD, but then you suddenly declare "these aren't medical terms anyway."
If plurality is just a social term made up by the community, then you cannot use sociology/philosophy papers and treat them as evidence that endogenic systems are fact.
Yes, people can choose to use words socially to mean what they want. Nobody is claiming plural communities don't use the word "plurality" broadly. The actual point is that many of these online communities and concepts do blur the lines between social identity and clinical dissociation, and stating that "this is what the community calls it" doesn't prove it's medically recognized as on the same level as any other form of plurality.
This is the whole reason I'm calling out Reddit and Pluralpedia as weak evidence. They're good at showing what words the community use and how they define things within their own framework but they are not evidence of scientific legitimacy. If the only point you're trying to make is that "the community uses this word for it", that's a social claim, not a scientific one, and you cannot claim that social definition overrides existing psychiatric understandings of dissociation.
And again, none of your papers actually prove your point, they are all primarily sociology/philosophy papers dealing with identity, subjective experiences, and internet communities. Being in an internet community to write about it doesn't mean you agree with and validate every belief those people hold. A researcher can write a sociology paper about tulpamancy without claiming there are literally 2+ human beings living in one head.
And, truthfully, a lot of the arguments hinge at this point. What many critics are NOT saying is that people can't have inner monologues, rich inner fantasy, fractured self-experience, absorption in roles, parasocial relationships, or embodied personified inner experiences.
Human beings are more than capable of that. What they are saying is that these inner phenomena aren't equivalent in the way alters are because endos frequently use the disorder terms coming from CDDs.
Also, ignoring the historical issue of tulpamancy is a huge problem. What's generally seen today as tulpamancy (multiple consciously created & distinct characters that exist internally, often treated like 'headmates') is westernized and divorced from its Tibetan Buddhist origins in Tulku traditions.
Tulku were believed to be reincarnated Buddhist masters with prior spiritual knowledge whereas the concept of 'creating' a tulpa in modern usage has shifted from it being a form of conscious meditative practice designed to develop mental focus, to something much more similar to making up original characters in your head.
So. The problem isn’t that “anti-endos don’t know how words work.” The problem is that endogenic communities often conflate community self-identification, sociological observation, philosophical discussion, and clinical legitimacy as though they are interchangeable when they are not.
At most, your sources show that people self-identify as plural, communities exist around those identities, and some researchers find the phenomenon socially interesting.
They do not establish scientific consensus that non-traumagenic plurality is a validated natural occurrence comparable to dissociative disorders.
