Shoulder Advisors 101

It's also important to avoid bad shoulder advisors. I've spent several years trying to reduce the influence of miniature copies of abusive family members on my thinking.

EDIT: The most effective counter I've found for this is to 1) Notice that the thought I just had is actually coming from a bad source, 2) Remind myself that that person wanted me to believe/act that way for selfish and narcissistic reasons, and I shouldn't take their advice for the same reason I wouldn't take moral suggestions from people who go around kicking puppies.

I'm fascinating by the mechanisms here! You said:

This is not schizophrenia (though for all I know it may use some of the same hardware, or may be a low-key, non-pathological version of schizophrenia in the same way that a healthy self-preservation instinct could be thought of as a low-key, non-pathological version of a phobia or an anxiety disorder). 

This accords with my own sense. 

My current central model for schizophrenia starts with Sapoloski's evolutionary hypothesis (sorry for youtube, it works at 1.75X and I just rewatched all of it to make sure I'm not wasting too much time), which links with how cluster A personality disorders are heritable and occur more frequently in people with schizophrenic parents/cousins.  

On this model, a few of these genes make you a tribally useful shaman or successful leader, and get positive selection (hence why the individual alleles exist at non-trivial levels), but too many all at once in the same person can predispose one to fall into a dysfunctional mental attractor.  

Cluster A disorders (classicly, the 3 on the left in the diagram below) are then maybe "very mild 'schizophrenia', with enough perks to make up for the downsides" and the downside here is evolutionary... so presumably there are phenotypes that have some advantage in some environments? 

Basically, Sapolsky thinks these phenotype/niches are spiritual/cognitive roles common to hunter gatherer society (which become dysfunctional in excess).

So then my guess is that there are ways of using one's imagination, and eventually these tip over into clanging and auditory hallicinations of Satan telling you to kill yourself (or whatever).

I find it useful (thinking of hallucinations) to also think of afantasia and then generalize that into all the sensory domains. 

Can you "imagine" a taste? ...a kinesthetic/tactile feeling? ...a smell? ...a sound? For some of these things, can you not avoid imagining them, or are you stuck with them?

In each sensory domain the resolution could be high or low, in its own subspace or in the shared one where sense perceptions are, and so on with limits or powers... kinda like dreams (which are potentially a variation on all this)? 

I don't know that I can really imagine "the taste of cinnamon" exactly, but if I try to imagine it, a picture of cinnamon toast pops into my mind (with my childhood kitchen in the background) and my saliva glands sorta tingle and my lips purse as if in expectation of bitterness?

The key dimension here is maybe not the vividness dimension but more precisely: intrusiveness.

I personally mostly don't have intrusive stuff if I don't want it. This goes all the way to having an "inner monologue". I don't need one mostly that I can tell? If language is specifically useful, rubber ducking often helps, but I don't have to pretend (that I've noticed) that I am the duck, or I am the one talking to the duck, to get the benefit.

Sometimes I'll remember bad experiences as if in reverie, but that is pretty rare and almost entirely under my control. Sometimes I use my audio memory loop to remember or rehearse speech. Most of my thought thoughts are nonverbal (though often they have visual or kinesthetic components). Often my imagination is just silent, or has music playing.

The idea of hearing voices on a regular basis, with no off button, that were also unhelpfully critical initially seemed (once I realized that many people have this) "totally batshit fucking crazy" to me. I remember the moment I realized this might actually be common.

It happened after learning about people with afantasia, and how they sometimes report that "all that talk about pictures in the head was, I thought, just a metaphor".  That gave me sensitivity to "<X> is all just a metaphor" being a template used by people with psychologically false universal theories.

This was a lightning bolt realization I had when wandering through a bookstore grabbing random books and hit my third random self help book with some version of a bit of wisdom about how "we all call ourselves inadequate all the time in our head".  I rolled my eyes (again) at this (essentially false to my experience) metaphor... and then it struck me that maybe it IS NOT A METAPHOR for "so many people that this author thinks it is universal"?!?

After that point I started asking people about their inner "imagination in general" experiences... and I discovered seemingly highly normal people (often quite smart, and maybe with some shaman genes?) could imagine things so vividly (often sounds or sights) that it was indistinguishable to them from "real perception" except that they know it is fake because they can control it and no one else sees or hears it. It is just imagining in EITHER or BOTH of the private mental workspace or "the workspace where sensory data lands" to them.

But then ear worms could often not be banished by people. Like in general, intrusive ear worms seem to be quite common.

But supposing one's ear worms were very high quality, and had a mentally simulated source location in their visible space, and (like ear worms in general) you couldn't turn it off... then it could be annoying. A useful technique was to keep GOOD music available, not to stop having an earworm (an impossibility for some?) but rather to change the channel <3

This loops back, for me, to this assertion by you:

It's important to be clear that the experience of "hearing the voices" actually happens, in many people. This is not a metaphor, and it is not hyperbole or exaggeration. I'm not saying that people tend to hallucinate actual sounds—that probably would be schizophrenia.  But in the same way that most people "hear" their own thoughts, people also "hear" the voice of their dad (or "see" his facial expression), offering thoughts or advice or reacting in real time to the current situation.

Sapolsky's actual lecture on schizophrenia helps make clear that the full blown version of schizophrenia is just really bad, really complicated, and related to an objectively broken brain (I have re-watched the full video at 1.75X, and it is pretty good but it mostly is just linked here to give Sapolsky a second chance to talk about the subject with a different (and more boring) kind of nuance than the video I started with.)

However, breaking down the mechanisms, and the sensory imagination/hallucination/dream aspects... 

....I think the concepts "ego syntonic" and "adaptive" are very useful here.

I suspect that for tens of thousands of years, there were no books, and so things like griot songs and homeric poety were the best form of inter-generational idea transmission that existed. 

This plausibly was culturally useful enough to have evolutionary implications for making us "genetically better at culture"?

Thus, in general, I focus on adaptiveness (for what is good) and intrusiveness (for bad things that can not be controlled). Skilled controlled musical "hallucination" is probably not necessarily maladaptive.

What about other skilled controlled imagined material?

In "Personality Characteristics of Tulpamancers and Their Tulpas" they find some evidence that many pairs (mancer and mancee) reported mutual satisfaction. So that seems like maybe sometimes it isn't maladaptive? 

Or at least it is sometimes not ego dystonic?

This gets around to the point that Gunnar makes [LW(p) · GW(p)] which is that I think some people have ONE big privileged special Tulpa that they think "is themselves".

To go further, I think some people have a special Tulpa like this, which assumes and extends the assumption, in its imagined speech performance, that it is, in fact, "the person themself". 

With the "me tulpa" conceptually bound to the "actual me" symbol in an identity relationship, the tulpa's performance comes to be called "my inner monologue" and its speech (true, false, bullshit, funny, or whatever) is NOT treated as "merely an inner monologue from an imaginary friend, named after and inspired by my total self, whose shape and actions are generated according to a huge number of criteria, many of which have nothing to do with epistemology".

Instead the person just thinks, roughly "my inner monologue just IS my thought and so my inner monologue is the totality of my cognition". Maybe?

If this is true, then the whole Inner Simulator part of the CFAR curriculum is perhaps a way to get these people (without having to do an enormous extended explanation of what they might be routing around) to tap into the mental powers that are not normally recruited by their Self Tulpa, but which do exist in their brain...

...with the practical upshot of helpfully using parts of their brain that their Self Tulpa often does not regularly use (and which are perhaps less liable to the rounding errors and half-truths inherent in mere speech).

Ben Pace has an interesting sequence of comments [LW(p) · GW(p)] (click and read up and down (it is not just the one comment)) about removing shoulder advisors that are problematic. I'm not sure if it would be safe to apply Ben's techniques to the removal of the central shoulder adviser? Deciding that a Self Tulpa doesn't deserve social status (while at the same time not making clear that the real person does, because everyone deserves care, but also because the tulpa isn't the totality of the real person, and is just a tulpa, and so on) seems like it could have bad side effects if not done very very carefully.

I think Buddhism has techniques here... but also i think maybe some of these techniques were designed by psychos trying to herd a bunch of teenagers into submissive participation in armies as soldiers? So: approach with caution?

And in the meantime... maybe tulpas are great! Maybe the more tulpas the merrier?

Just a little bit of context here. I tend to be the kind of person who is generally able to cope DURING an traumatic event but then it may or may not take an emotional toll after the fact. That's context. 
Post- COVID American 6 month lock down (that's what it was for me), during 2021, I became majorly depressed and basically.... well, i guess the word would be ""broke". the best way my phsycologist and i can figure out how to explain it was that my personality fractured. not in terms of voices in my head exactly but i had a sort of ego death where i dissolved into a personal set of shoulder Advisors, demons, and other assorted folk who instead of talking to me were talking to each other. there was no me to talk to. but in more tangible terms my head couldnt cope with itself and my personality just became a set of shoulder personas.

The way i see this article, the shoulder advisor thing works because on a meta level you are in fact that smart. you can make better decisions/ notice more things/ do more things if you have a "trigger" that lets you bring that pattern into a higher level, more in control space. people are relatable in the sense that we relate to people pretty well and if we think about a certain person in conjunction with a certain trait we can capitalize that and emulate our "copy of them inside us.

But after my episode ive learnt that shoulder advisors dont have to be people. my personality didnt deconstruct into a linear set of voices; there were other things going on there as well. there was a lake, and a rock, and they participated in the "conversation" as much as any of the others. and i'm alot better now. but i still can use those voices when i need them. i can slip back into that space albeit with more control. people tell me that im very in touch with myself, almost too in touch with myself, and i think that's part of it.

apologies ahead of time if post is too personal; or too vague, or just oversharing and weird. it was good to write this out and i'd give it a coin flip that someone finds this helpful so here goes.

Thanks for this great post!

TL;DR for my own thoughts:

• I speculate on why shoulder advisors are useful
  • Drawing from ensemble methods in machine learning
  • Drawing from predictive processing and overfitting
• I discuss generating a common corpus of training data for useful shoulder advisors
• I discuss a few archetypes for useful shoulder advisors and their uses

Ensembles

Shoulder advisors seem to mirror a common machine learning technique, ensembling, which combines multiple ML models to get better overall performance than any individual model can reach. E.g., an ensemble of ERNIE models holds the current first place on the GLUE leaderboard (a metric for evaluating the general capabilities of language models). Shoulder advisors let you sort of ensemble thoughts across different personalities. Ensemble approaches are most helpful when the ensembled population is diverse and each model tends to specialize in particular types of tasks. That matches your usefulness criteria fairly well.

Predictive processing

If we extend predictive processing theory to internal personality traits, then our own personalities are generated by a predictive process, presumably one that bootstraps itself by predicting behavior and emotional reactions from family and friends in childhood ("other-prediction") before specializing in predicting/generating our own thoughts and emotions ("self-prediction"). Under this view, we use broadly similar neural circuitry for self-prediction, other-prediction, and generating shoulder advisors. Presumably, these three processes share common features in the brain, but with their own sets of neurons that specialize in each.

We spend far more time on self-prediction than on other-prediction, and have far weaker external signals while doing so. It's possible that the neural circuits specializing in self-prediction "overfit" more strongly than the circuits specializing in other-prediction. If you're repeatedly taking counterproductive actions, the negative reward signal from doing so may not be enough to push the overfit circuits out of predicting/generating that behavior.

Generating shoulder advisers, as a intermediate between self and other prediction, may counteract such overfitting by prompting your self-prediction neurons to interact more strongly with your other-prediction neurons. This allows the more general features and patterns learned by the other-prediction neurons to more easily feed into your own behavior and allows you to more easily pick up useful strategies and drop maladaptive behavior. In this view, it may be useful to continually rotate shoulder advisors, so that your self-prediction circuits receive constantly evolving feedback from your other-prediction circuits.

Training corpus

If shoulder advisors are beneficial, we should systematically aim to further improve their quality and the ease of generating them. One option would be to create a set of shoulder advisors whose personalities and mannerisms are optimized to fulfill common needs. Then, we can compile a corpus of "training data" for each advisor, meaning text describing the advisor and showing their responses to a variety of situations. Then, a person who wants to "install" a particular advisor reads the training data while having their current instantiation of the advisor predict how they'd behave in each situation supplied by the training data. 

Archetypes 

Here are a few shoulder advisor personality archetypes and associated advisor uses we might consider:

• "The friend"
  • Traits:
    • Friendly, kind, empathetic, warm
    • Supportive, encouraging
    • Calm, equanimitous, happy
    • A deep feeling of beneficence towards you
  • Uses 
    • Emotional wellbeing
    • Relaxation
    • Promoting interpersonal empathy
    • Promoting positive self-worth
• "The rationalist"
  • Traits:
    • Brilliant, analytical, incisive
    • Curious, widely-read, interested in knowledge
    • Quick to change mind in response to evidence
    • Quick to acknowledge mistaken cognition without undue emotional complications
  • Uses:
    • Analyzing data, problem solving, coming up with and evaluating new ideas
    • Learning new things
    • Motivation to read scientific papers
    • Actually changing your mind, recognizing mistakes
• "The socialite"
  • Traits:
    • Friendly, sociable, outgoing, chatty
    • Empathetic, interested in others' perspectives
  • Uses:
    • Navigating social situations
    • Overcoming social awkwardness/anxiety
• "The determinator"
  • Traits:
    • Focused, determined
    • unstoppable, absolute
    • Immense pain tolerance, little concern for own suffering
  • Uses:
    • Motivation to exercise/do chores/work
    • Pushing though unpleasantness, dealing with hardship

Two anecdotes:

...

I recall when I was 18 years old or so, and I'd been arguing with a very religious friend throughout high school. I would rehearse arguments with him in my head, preparing for the next time we'd meet and I'd tell him all the reasons I thought his beliefs didn't make sense.

And for the first couple years of this, in the arguments in my head, I'd always say things like "have you considered point X" and imaginary-friend would say "oh, man, you're right. I am wrong." But then, eventually, I hit points where I'd say "what about X?" and then my imaginary friend would say "so? X doesn't matter, because [counterargument]".

This was a neat thing to discover about my ability to model people. (It also was relevant to the entire "does God exist?" debate – an eventually cruxy point for me is that you totally can build up simulations of people in your head, and I'd expect that to be hard to distinguish from God speaking to you)

...

More recently, I received benefit from asking my own future self for advice. (In fact, I asked multiple future selves who might evolve in different directions). One future self responded with some concrete, compassionate advice about how one of my coping mechanisms wasn't actually helping with my core goals.

Curated. This is a clear articulation of a rationality skill that I've never seen or heard explained elsewhere. Someone I'm close to gained a shoulder advisor in the last few years that was a dramatic breakthrough for them, but I never thought of it as something accessible to most people, yet this post updates me that there's a lot of value here for many (perhaps myself included).

Many people have multiple shoulder advisors. ...  It's quite common in my experience for people to have shoulder copies of their parents, or their best friends, ...

Is this really the case? 

I recently discussed inner monologue with a friend a he was doubtful whether this was real or just something made up. He didn't doubt that people could imagine something like it but not as something in the way you describe here. I can relate to his view because I also don't have a persistent inner monologue - though I can bring it up. 

If you asked people neutrally what goes on in their mind I guess the results would look a lot like Galton's experiments about mental imagery (mentioned e.g. in the SCC post Generalizing From One Example [LW · GW]): Some would say nothing, some would answer like my friend, most would report some inner monologue, and a some would have a lot of inner voices. 

How solid is your evidence? 

 

Just to make explicit a connection that seems obvious to me but I'm not sure how obvious it is to others: the existence of this phenomena fits nicely together with a global workspace model of the mind [LW · GW], where the brain may spawn new subroutines that plug into the workspace [LW · GW] and then learns various rules for when to activate them [? · GW], as well as fine-tuning their properties when the system becomes aware of a mismatch [? · GW] between the model's predicted outcome and what-the-target-person would actually have said.

Two shoulder advisors I have found helpful this year:

• Daniel Filan: has a knack for asking 'trivial' or 'obvious' questions in really situations that end up really opening up or clarifying what's happening. (It's part of why he's a good podcast interviewer at AXRP.) I've started to anticipate in my conversations where Daniel would ask a question, and asked it myself, and gotten great results out of it.
• Gimli, son of Glóin, from the Lord of the Rings: I read the trilogy for the first time in January, and in many situations where I've been tempted to have long drawn-out passive aggressive interactions with coworkers or wander into a pit of despair, I noticed what he'd do: he'd just get on with the work. This has been very helpful.

"it is a straightforwardly observable fact that, for many people, their shoulder advisors occasionally offer thoughts and insights that the people literally would not have thought of, otherwise."

How can this be observable, let alone straightforwardly?

Two additional beneficial outcomes of attempting to boot up / improve shoulder advisors:

1. You are more likely to really pay attention during interactions with them. You get better at interactions in general if you are quite focused. And others tend to notice and react positively when they see that you really care about what they are saying.
2. You learn to be more curious about others' thoughts, actions, and backgrounds. This can help you be more empathic, and can also help shine light on your own motivations and influences.

Anecdotal, but the friends of mine who simulate people / hear others' voices tend to be among the most thoughtful and socially-buttery-smooth people I know. 

Oh, I just realized this post is new, and not one of the 8 year old posts I keep coming across and want to participate in.

I don't think this technique works for me, at all. For several reasons. And reading through the comments section, I feel like other people can't imagine my failure case (e.g. the people surveying others about whether they do / can do this - "Can you imagine your friend saying this?")

I'm visually aphantasic, I cannot conjure a visual image at all except in some phases of sleep, or sometimes under extreme tiredness while 'awake' (I hypothesize those mental states are closer to sleep than normal waking awareness anyway). This means the 'visual image' part falls apart instantly. I can, however consciously control my auditory perceptions with extremely high fidelity.

This means I can easily make a voice in my head say anything in a specific person's voice, but that can only happen with my conscious input. These voices are purely puppets, or more accurately, just 'voice filters' I can put on my 'internal voice'.

I believe I've never 'heard' anything other than what actually happened or came directly from (or through) my internal train of thought, with rare exceptions of simple sounds hallucinated when about to fall asleep, so it's rather hard for me to imagine an internal voice that is not THE internal voice.

That all was the first reason, another one is that I don't think I can model people accurately enough to do this even consciously, let alone subconsciously. I don't have a way to tell "what would my mom/dad/Alastor Moody say?" - for fictional characters I can only produce the most stereotypical sound bites associated with them if I don't make them say anything specifically, for Moody it's "Constant Vigilance", for Princess Celestia it's "I'm so proud of you", but for Albus Dumbledore or Twilight Sparkle it's just a thoughtful hum in their voice - I at most have a "How would they say this?" component in my head that lets me reword something I want (them) to say into their speech pattern and voice.

While writing this comment I did a few experiments with the mental 'voices' I have. If I force them to produce speech, I hear nonspecific speech. That is, I hear that there are words being spoken, breaks between words and sentences, and so on, but none of the actual words. Sort of like hearing some person you recognize in a crowd, but you can't make out what they're saying.

I also reflected on "mental constructs that are not me" - I don't think I'm able to form these anymore at all. Even the few dreams I have and recall are empty of other characters (even if there are 'people'). I used to have other characters in dreams in my childhood, but even then it was at best one antagonist + a crowd.

One practice I've been doing a bit since January [LW(p) · GW(p)] has been something called Ideal Parent Figure Protocol, which includes guided meditations (e.g.) for imagining yourself as a child with the kinds of idealized parents who are always perfectly supportive and understanding and available, to correct for any emotional lacks created by the ways in which your real parents were just human and non-perfect. One of the parts of the practice is something called "microhits", which basically means making your ideal parents your shoulder advisors so that they'll be available for emotional support whenever you need it. (I haven't gotten this very strongly, but I've heard people say it's really powerful if you do get it to work.)

For some time, I have tried to create mental models of other people to improve my social skills, better tune my communication, and predict reactions. It was always very difficult to put myself in other people's shoes. For a long time, I didn't understand what that even was supposed to mean. Your instructions have been extremely helpful and I managed to bring up boot up (at this point one piped up and said "call it 'boot up'") some advisors easily.

It is easiest to let the advisors just be there and act without speaking. Smiling, noding, moving.

Emulating by ex-wife - at least her speech - is relatively easy. I'm not sure what to make of it; we are well cooperating co-parents, maybe there will be parenting advice that will simplify things.  

Among the advisors that I brought up the most vivid were instances of myself. The first tries were rather boring because the copies didn't speak up but just thought and observed. Only when I changed the frame to include thoughts did this lead to some cool interaction. The copy was disoriented at first, explored the environment, asked for access to senses, and brought up nested instances at which point I decided to write up the experience. 

You might want to add a disclaimer when not to try this or what the risks are. Meditation risks have been discussed on LW [LW(p) · GW(p)] before. I don't want to overblow this, I think it is pretty safe. But it is an experimental meditation practice and you could link to the risks section of SSC Book Review The Mind Illuminated or offer to help if anything unexpected happens.  

Also, your mileage may vary. You couldn't sell me on all the nice points you listed - having a lot of time to work on it I arrived at a stable inner life via other means. What sold me on your practice was your aside 

... not to mention that having robust copies of my actual friends and colleagues has much better equipped me to interact with those friends and colleagues

My own personal experience following this post: I don't have enough training data for most of the people I'd like to emulate. When I think of the people I know irl that is like to learn from, I've spent about ten hours 1-on-1 with each of them; not enough to have a solid mental model of what advice they may give. At the same time, part of why I value their advice is that I can't predict it; they have wisdom and experience that I don't. Often, I'll ask them for advice and be surprised by their answer. When I tried to create a shoulder advisor of one of them, it didn't work; I just didn't know enough about them to accurately understand what they were thinking in a certain situation.

Still a great post, though; just didn't work for a specific use case of mine.

I really liked this post since it took something I did intuitively and haphazardly and gave it a handle by providing the terms to start practicing it intentionally. This had at least two benefits:

First it allowed me to use this technique in a much wider set of circumstances, and to improve the voices that I already have. Identifying the phenomenon allowed it to move from a knack which showed up by luck, to a skill.

Second, it allowed me to communicate the experience more easily to others, and open the possibility for them to use it as well. Unlike many lesswrong posts, I found that the technique in this post spoke to a bunch of people outside of the lesswrong community. For example, one friend who liked this idea. tried applying it to developing an Elijah the Prophet figure that he could interact with.

So uhh

I've been doing a bit of coaching for people recently

And then when I was thinking that I'm not going to do [THING] yet, I'm going to wait until I'm in a better position to do so, suddenly I had the experience of a shoulder advisor materializing that was me in coach mode being like "okay so do you have some actual criteria for what counts as being in a good enough position"

That was a very peculiar experience

(probably I'd have had that thought anyway but reading this post primed me to have it be accompanied by a mental image of myself standing on my own shoulder)

Great post. Two comments:

The popular saying "What would Jesus do?" suggests many devout Christians use Jesus precisely as a shoulder advisor - no doubt frequently & with intense seriousness. Hence they may well have useful insights into the technique.

Also:

It's important to be clear that the experience of "hearing the voices" actually happens, in many people. This is not a metaphor, and it is not hyperbole or exaggeration. I'm not saying that people tend to hallucinate actual sounds—that probably would be schizophrenia.

I read a book about Jaynes' bicameral mind theory which mentioned research in the 1980s into shoulder advisers (in effect) of institutionalised paraplegics. It seems many paraplegics, who couldn't move since birth, and I think couldn't speak either, had frequent auditory hallucinations of a person, often known to them (eg a parent), who would regularly talk to them, providing commentary, advice, comfort or criticism. They would hear this as a seemingly real, external voice (but not visible). Similar I assume to schizophrenics hearing voices. The book gave this as evidence of remnants of the bicameral mind in modern humans.

On the having a shoulder Duncan, I explicitly tried to do this upon listening to you being interviewed by Spencer Greenberg.  Sadly, digital Duncan doesn't exist in large enough quantities to emulated.  So for those of us that don't happen to live (I assume) in the Bay Area, can Duncan increase how many podcast or video's he's on?  Having a shoulder Duncan sounds really useful to a large number of people you interact with and enlarging that pool purposely seems to be a pretty good idea. Food for thought?

This phenomenon is also why we have the term "role model." Successful examples of people similar to us are extremely valuable, and it is in fact very difficult to succeed without such examples.

I think this is part of the reason for the popularity of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.

Thank you for writing this, it really got me thinking. I'm one of those people who don't really have a firm cast of shoulder advisors. In fact, when I saw this appear in fiction (and in particular in HPMOR), I kind of assumed it was just a convenient narrative device and not something real people actually do. I suppose I should read HPMOR again and try to figure out what other blatantly obvious advice I've missed.

This does seem like a extremely useful skill to have, so I'd like to practice it if possible. I just tried to imagine one of these shoulder advisors and I do get an image, but it is very blurry and seems to be "shifting" between different states. I wonder if this is something other people have also experienced, and whether there are any tricks to get a more stable image? Perhaps a fictional person would be easier to simulate since they tend to be not as complex as real human beings. Either way I will continue to try in the coming week and report back here if I get any results.

A related (ADDED: but more intrusive and risky) technique is called Tulpa and was discussed earlier in this post: How Effective are Tulpas? [LW · GW] 

One of mine is a (real actually) gander whose name is Жирний (Fatty). The fictional him is more optimistic / not-depressed than me; a generous, unsophisticated, slightly egotistical, proud of his flock, kinda shy, but of times wordy, magnificent bird. He just never hesitates to be kind to others when my self-image would invent a carload of reasons not to.

I love how Jean-Luc Picard was selected to be one of your advisors. He is also among my best candidates :).

What is the largest number of advisers you have known people to actively use? I am a bit reluctant to cut it down to four or five.

Simulated intelligence is real intelligence. Although probably nobody is going to simulate the person/figure properly, the typical LW reader will actually occasionally outperform the actual person/figure.

Not sure to what extent shoulder advisors outperform deliberate thinking, especially compared to other CFAR handbook techniques.

I was thinking about something just now and tried to imagine some concept advising me (like morality play style, like getting advice from Temperance or something; the example isn't important and is distracting) and I realized something.

Those of you who experience this phenomenon naturally: where do you experience it? When I tried just now, I noticed my brain trying to create the presence directly side-behind my head. After this post and realizing people literally had the experience of being talked to or advised by entities, it didn't occur to me:

Do you experience the entity as spatially located near your shoulder?

I can't really decompose the location very well as it seems like it's in a hacky part of "felt location" instead of literally being part of my world model, and I suspect the disconnect is just one of those human brain glitches we have to live with for now, but I'm only realizing that this too is likely totally literal.

This reminds me of having "night terrors" as a kid, where I would hallucinate presences while having a bad time. I don't have a specific place I'm going with this, just that the "felt location of a concept" thing seems to use the same wires.

This makes me think "tulpamancy-lite". Not that that's a bad thing - perhaps it's like a safer tulpamancy. Some thoughts:

(It's just such little mannerisms that allow a shoulder advisor to be "really real"—to bring it to life, give it a personality separate from, and not dependent on, your brain's main central personality. Again, I don't have a sound explanation of the mechanics, but it works.) Would it be useful to have a shoulder-advisor not constrained by having to relate to a real example? Or perhaps, without that link it will just tend to become more and more like you, or otherwise drift into some territory outside reasonable personality-space. Although, authors seem to be able to write stories just fine.

How hard would it be to just create a shoulder-advisor from scratch? - I mean, people can do that with tulpas, and shoulder-advisors definitely seem like less work than tulpas (no need for hallucinating them).

Do shoulder-advisors have moral value?

I find that I get self-conscious when in public without close friends, and I've wanted (but have had neither the time nor motivation) to create a tulpa, with the idea that it will make everything a lot less stressful. They wouldn't really have any actual input on anything, but just sort of raise my baseline positivity and self-esteem. If there were two of me, I'd be a lot less afraid of doing anything.