The Faith of the Black Tongue

Media and Tulpamancy: Strange Mysticism and the Coupling of Media
Conversation Transcript with Ryu Hankil
Presented at Eleven Incantations, Organized by Don Quixote Collective

I first wanted to sort out, in my own way, how you are using the word media. At times it denotes technology, and at others it denotes magic. In any case, it seemed to me that your use of media diverges from the materialist approach—often preferred for various reasons—which expands media into the perspectives of transport costs, infrastructure, or the various transformations an object undergoes across its temporal cycle. After all, the tulpa itself is a thought-form that takes shape without material substrate. Because of this, when a tulpa as a mental composite malfunctions in unexpected ways and causes discomfort, the problem does not seem solvable by supplementing considerations of the physical or material.

If we ask why it cannot be solved that way, the issue seems linked to the act of naming something that exists only in imagination and asserting its real possibility of existence. Indeed, the claim that a fictional entity exists in some possible world with the concreteness of flesh and blood is generally regarded as unacceptable. It is meaningful that the philosophical position viewing fictional names and the sentences containing them as functioning only through human conventions, understandings, and agreements—through “making up” or “pretending to believe”—is called fictionalism. According to this view, fictional entities can function only when explained, elaborated, or bracketed through what is called an intensional operator. Such sentences take forms like “According to Borges’s ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,’ …” In other words, fictional entities can move only by mounting that operator and being carried by it. To claim that a fictional entity moves on its own without such an operator would incur an ontological burden: we would have to acknowledge far too many beings in the world, beings that could not plausibly exist.

Indeed, when we fail to describe fictional entities in a way that takes responsibility for the fictions we ourselves generate, a certain gap emerges—and when accumulated, that gap seems to create a “cycle of separation.” If, as you say, the present is once again moving toward some phase of recombination, then another mode of describing fiction becomes necessary. But as noted earlier, this cannot be achieved by incorporating additional considerations of materiality. Hence arises a more moderate form of infinitism that proposes: while a finite mind may not be able to accommodate or realize fiction and all its possible sets, such a realization is possible at the level of a latent or sealed dimension. Of course, even this view faces the same problems confronted by fictional realism. Whether the possibility of realization is latent or not, what would it mean to acknowledge the real possibility of a fictional entity without the use of intensional operators—without pretending to believe, yet without sealing it away? One could imagine instead a strategy of removing intensional operators by overusing them: saturating discourse with “according to…” and “in light of…” even when there is no original source or when the source is distorted. A notorious and venerable method.

Systematic Irrationality

When it comes to predicting the future, predictions revealed in dreams or divined by a shaman are generally considered irrational. Even if a prophetic dream is almost always correct or an oracle yields high rates of post hoc confirmation, such predictions are still dismissed—precisely because they cannot persuade others and thus are treated as superstition. If we distinguish kinds of rationality, a highly accurate prophetic dream or oracle may constitute subjective rationality for the believer but would fail to meet the conditions of objective rationality. Yet modern machine learning is said to operate not on objective probability but on subjective probability. If so, the feedback loop of probabilized subjectivity guaranteeing the individuality of the tulpa may indeed be the realization of its very purpose.

For this reason, if the real issue is a genuinely self-fulfilling belief, the question arises: how does one persuade others to accept something that makes no sense? Especially when the future can only be accessed as a tentative expectation or subjective prior probability, we turn to the past. Yet the problem is that even the past may not be objectively observable. I came to this realization recently while thinking about testimony. Here, “testimony” does not refer to courtroom statements or religious confession, but to the event of knowledge in which one hears something from another and forms a belief.

We tend to think that when choosing whether to believe a fact, we converge on either believing or disbelieving. But in practice, most states are mixed: half-believing, half-doubting. Looking into the use of tulpas in Alexandra David-Néel’s Magic and Mystery in Tibet, I found many testimonial accounts. I learned, for example, that the tulpa differs from the rolang—a corpse animated and raised to its feet—or the trong jug, in which one projects one’s soul into a distant corpse to create a double. The book is filled with narratives of corpses that move, thoughts that inhabit objects, and thoughts that materialize. In many cases, these unbelievable stories are not the author’s direct experiences but her re-testification of what others told her during her travels. One example: the rite of producing a rolang requires a monk to lock himself in a room and place his mouth over the corpse’s mouth while chanting; when the corpse revives, the monk must immediately bite off its tongue to control it. David-Néel writes that she could not believe what the monk had claimed, so she asked whether he still had the bitten-off tongue. He opened a drawer and produced a severed tongue. But it looked only like a black, dried, shriveled fragment—hardly identifiable as a tongue.

We generally assume that the decision to believe or not believe a strange story depends on the listener’s introspective judgment. I could have simply shelved the book and shaken off the ominous feeling, or I could have believed the accounts literally. Yet in truth, one cannot believe something merely by choosing to. Conversely, deciding not to believe something does not guarantee that disbelief follows as intended. Belief is usually thought to be volitional while impulse or desire is non-volitional, but belief itself may reside in a domain as difficult to control as desire. One can pretend to believe, of course. I often heard your remarks on impulses as also being remarks about belief.

Enduring Conspiracy

If what contributes to truth is less the knowledge of whether a witness is honest or deceitful—that is, less the witness’s past—than the relation between witness and hearer, then examining the witness’s past may be of little help in determining the veracity of a testimony. But this view has a problem: if truth is confirmed only intersubjectively, the struggle for knowledge becomes futile. On the other hand, if one reinstates introspectively judged rationality as the criterion for truth, intersubjectivity becomes a redundant condition contributing nothing to ultimate truth. In either case, both positions feel like products of anthropocentric rationalism—already bankrupt for failing to account adequately for other beings in the world. I think, however, that perhaps this is exactly where one must begin.

I am increasingly convinced that the epistemic problems generated by believing testimony resemble those generated by believing fiction. Empirically, truth is sustained probabilistically not by trust or doubt alone, but by both together. Yet if we push extreme doubt toward the facts of the past—that is, toward beliefs we can form only by relying on others’ testimony—we would eventually be unable to believe even the date and hour of our own birth reported by our parents. Perhaps Martians used a radio-frequency weapon to alter our memories. This line of skeptical reasoning easily turns into conspiracy theory and is strongly avoided, yet the counterfactual thought experiments that animate skepticism are useful tools for rejecting determinism.

If the mechanism by which ancient peoples transformed imagination into reality remains unknowable or untranslatable to us, perhaps this is because skepticism has not been sufficiently tested. Even if something appears to have ended, it may in fact continue infinitesimally toward zero; and we may need to describe in detail the precise kinds of decay or transmutation that occur in this process. The statement “No standard exists by which to judge the higher or lower capacity for thought, because any capacity derives from the environment and information available at the time” seems to me a profoundly skeptical approach—one that treats the past itself as a kind of “unreliable community of reporters.” / Oct 2021