You can't legitimately prove you have a completely internal personality separate and distinct from your own.

The difference between the non-existent and untestable is surprisingly nil.

You have your best defense in that you claim that no one can even challenge your claim unless they meditate and probably meditate correctly. If they don't find their own tulpa, then obviously they just need to meditate more. Or be more clear. Or something else.

Here's the other thing, we can investigate the question without meditation. Our ability to see what the brain is doing is apparently more sophisticated than you give it credit for. We are able to manipulate what people feel and even think with clever neurological tricks.

It very well could be that your tulpa is just an imaginary friend you create and project certain things onto. You ascribe it this independent personality to absolve you of thoughts you don't want to have or thoughts you want reinforced. Your tulpa gives you "hard truths" when you think you're doing something not too great but are rationalizing it. Your tulpa gives you encouragement when you think you're falling behind and need a pick me up from an "independent" source.

And you honestly can't prove me wrong. But I also can't prove me right.

There is a correct answer. You can't wave your hands and say we may not ever really know and that's that, be happy with the mystery. That you'll believe what you believe and I can believe what I want to believe. That's not actually solving anything. That's not answering the question.

It's avoiding the question. If I ask you to prove your claim, saying "it doesn't need a resolution" is just dodging.

You're even engaging in a type of "argument from experience" where you casually infer that you were once like me, had all these questions, but were convinced. It's a way to try and get me to accept your conclusion without demonstrating your process. But if your process is flawed, then we must question your conclusion.

I mean you emphasize that it has taught you things and made you aware of things you weren't before.

But that's vague. Non-specific.

And if the tulpa is simply a mental construct that's not a distinct personality, then your statement that it's more aware than you are is just wrong. You just don't think you're as aware as you are. And when your perception of self disagrees with your observed self, you assign those differences to your "tulpa".

I mean, I talk to myself. I argue with myself. I will construct mental models of people to look at issues and problems from various angles. Try and imagine what someone who is not me might say. So I can try and better prepare against criticisms or find issues I may not have considered yet.

But I'll never claim those fabrications are completely independent of myself. That they're thinking independently. They still are only as knowledgeable or aware as I am.

I mean the real crux of the issue is that one of the better ways to demonstrate your tulpa would be to find a way to show that it has thoughts that you cannot have. But we can't just trust your word that it does. We need to find a way to present it information that you cannot know, then find a way to show that it received the information. But without you knowing about it. Then we need to confirm that you actually don't know the information. Then we need you to learn the information and demonstrate that you have. Basically we need a way to show a demonstrable gap between the time we give the information to the tulpa and to when you get the information.

Of course there's a correct answer. But there's no way to find out without using tools with a greater resolution than the ones we have. And even that wouldn't dispel all of the mystery.

I'm avoiding questions because there's no way to prove anything. If you want to explore your own mystery, then you need to do your own mysticism. You can ask all the questions you want, and get the same vague, non-specific sorts of answers I got, answers that don't resolve anything but only serve to deepen the mystery.

I was a materialist atheist at one point too. I investigated my beliefs. I'm no longer a materialist. I would be very happy to have the tools to better investigate the thing inside my head that I've carefully cultivated a relationship over the course of five years.

But having the answers won't make it go away. That's the essence of the discussion. It still has meaning, it's still worth investigating, no matter how deep you get, no matter how many answers you get.

The only way out of it is to dictate that there's nothing behind anything.

You said the author was wrong and used this tulpa as evidence for the depth of mind.

If the tulpa is not real and nothing more than an elaborate fantasy you've created for yourself, then your conclusion that he's wrong is suspect.

I'm sorry, you don't get to protect your claims while simultaneously offering them as proof that another's claim is wrong.

I had a tulpa at one point too. I investigated my beliefs, an I realized it was just an imaginary friend I concocted to help me work through issues and project things I wasn't ready to deal with onto. See. Words are easy. Now you're an ex-materialist and I'm an ex-tulpaist. Where does that leave us? We've both investigated our beliefs. We've come to opposite conclusions. This is why third party objective verification is important. You don't get to opt out.

You are the one who feels attacked and I understand, it's frustrating to have people question your claims when you have no actual evidence to provide.

I mean, it's not non-scientific discourse when you're disagreeing with the hypothesis in a book about science.

And I said that in his case, not only do we have tools to map his brain while he tulpas and that it could provide answers, but there is a test that could be conducted if we could find a way to implement it.

Over the years, though, I've 'integrated' it into my normal thought patterns. I used to interact with it through what's called the muscle test. That's how I discovered it in the first place. Over the course of about a year and a lot of muscle tests, I've slowly come to be able to predict what a particular test is going to respond with before I do it. Eventually I quit using the muscle test. Slowly the tulpa receded from my life, but any time I want to interact with it, it's only a muscle test away, I can also simply 'go to that place in my head' where I know it'll respond.

I've come to realize that this is the same process people who "have a personal relationship with Jesus" go through. It's a kind of imaginary friendship. But I think it requires at least a little bit of mental 'depth' in order to achieve.

But on the face of all of this, this is just a guy making these arguments. You're agreeing with him because his arguments agree with your world view, but his arguments should be given the same skepticism as anybody's. I agree with 90% of what he's saying. It's that other 10% that's the problem. Yes, most of the time consciousness is flat. It's not always flat though.

> I had a tulpa at one point too. I investigated my beliefs, an I realized it was just an imaginary friend I concocted to help me work through issues and project things I wasn't ready to deal with onto. See. Words are easy.

They're not just words. They're lived experience. They're just words to you because you didn't live my experience. But I can instantly tell that you just concocted that string of words up together because there's no rest of the story to tell. Oh you had a tulpa too? When I had one I asked it to direct me through a neighborhood. Did you ever do anything like that? What was the outcome?

I can already tell you what the outcome was likely to be. Because I've had the experience. If your experience was different than mine then I can make follow up questions to tease out the difference. Then I can go and ask my tulpa, which is still there, if we can explore this aspect.

You're assuming I didn't ask rigorous questions. You're wrong, I did. They won't satisfy you though. With my tulpa, I've explored questions that dive all the way down to the very nature of existence, including stuff like multiple universes. Remember, I didn't think it was a tulpa at the time but rather my "Higher Self."

It can give me an answer for any question I ask, but I've long ago determined that the purpose behind any answer is to get me to question a little more deeply. The only satisfaction I'm ever really going to get is after I die.

You're right, it is frustrating to have no evidence to point to, only words. But you have to understand, there is no way to dispel the mystery, other than to simply state that it doesn't exist.

But I know for certain that thoughts can be unconscious, though they aren't normally. I can't prove it, but I can raise questions.

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.

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.

I'd say I'm not really the one rehashing it. In every case where magic/mysticism/religion and evidence-based conclusions have gone head to head, mysticism has lost.

I don't want to believe I'm right. I want to know what is right. If I'm wrong, I want to know. That's the difference. Whether tulpas exist or not has an answer. If they exist, I'd like to know. But I'm not going to accept just a person's claim. Especially of a person I don't really know. You don't seem to care whether or not you're actually wrong. You've declared yourself correct and you allow no doubt.

You also claim not to care what I believe but need me to believe that your tulpa is meaningful. That indicates to me that you do care some of what I believe. I don't want to believe either one of you. I want to know which is the truth. I want to know whether I saw Jesus or had a visual hallucination because I was tripping balls. Which one doesn't matter. What matters is that I find the right answer.

I find it ironic that you are a programmer. And you claim to be "apply[ing your] programmer's mind to it". Because I'm also a programmer and when I apply the same method I use to solve problems at work to other problems, what I come up with is that right or wrong, the correct answers matter. I can't just believe my solutions work. I check them, I verify them. I get others to doublecheck them. Because the answers matter.

And if your mind doesn't require proof, then that's all you really need to say. You aren't coming from a rational place. And in such, you have no real basis to deny anyone's claim about the nature of the mind.

And you've turned this entire thing into an attack on your "lived experience" because you keep saying that makes you right. But you can't prove it. But you can use it as evidence that this person is definitely wrong. Before you've even attempted to investigate his reasoning. You, by your standards, have attacked him. You give yourself a pass. You rationalize your positions and actions, but ascribe the worst to others.

And furthermore, I'm not arguing whether or not you think your experiences are meaningful to you. I flat out don't care. Never indicated I did.

I'm saying, again, whether your claim is true has direct bearing on your initial claims about his work. And I cannot accept your claims at face value. I would need some measure of evidence. If you are right about your tulpa, then you have a point about his work. If you're not, then what you say is meaningless in the discussion. It does nothing either way.

And still, you talk about "transcendent truths", but you've yet to give an example. Like earlier when you said your tulpa told you about multiple universes. But don't expand. You drop these profound-looking phrases, but no one here is an idiot. We're here because we question. You are going to be questioned when you leave a statement half-told.

What we're laboring under here is the lack of available information bandwidth necessary to communicate ideas. The textual medium is basically dialup. Ideally I'd talk with you over in person and we can work out our differences that way. Over beers or coffee or whatever. It simply takes a lot of time to share experience.

For us to do this over a textual medium, a certain amount of respect has to be present. Because I have to want to keep proceeding with the discussion. I absolutely can give you examples of transcendent truths and what I mean by multiple universes. But it takes time to communicate all that.

All of your questions, I can answer. But it sounds to me like you're just wanting validation of your preformed conclusion about what I'm trying to communicate.

Maybe I'll get a little deeper before I sign off.

No. On second thought I won't. You don't seem able to appreciate it. I'm not here to entertain you.

And now you're declaring the conversation over and calling me close-minded.

For the record, I think much the same way as you do, bena, but I agree with vinceguidry that respect is important.

Eager for more discussion between you two.

So already we are an order of magnitude more complex from even arriving at any sort of conclusion about "personality". We actually have very little idea as to what it actually is, how it's influence, etc.

The Indic traditions, imo, provide far greater insight into the processes of the mind than the current sciences do.

edit: wait, are you trying to say we don't have personality, full stop?

Generally, assuming a single consciousness, it's just tautology that unconscious processes can't be inspected. That's why we call them "unconscious", because we are not conscious of them. If you are conscious of them somehow, then they are not exactly unconscious processes any longer.

Have you ever watched the show "The Black Mirror?" There's a famous episode in which one person's consciousness gets planted into another person's mind. The plot focused on the fact that one person had all the agency and control, and the other person didn't, and at first you think that it's hell, no way could that ever work.

But at the end of the show, it gives you an example of where it would work really really well, a parent living on in the mind of their child. Parents already give up a ton of agency to their kids, so this was a really beautiful resolution. Where it gets ugly is where one person starts to want control rather than to just enjoy the ride.

The other personality in my brain is a little like that. Something that doesn't mind having no agency and just watching what I do and interacting with me when I want it to.

And the line at which unconscious processes become conscious is fuzzy and not at all distinct. Another thing that becomes utterly clear when you meditate.

You're kind of saying you don't know here, ie you (the you in this comment thread) are in fact are not conscious of this. Does the tulpa inform you somehow of things it becomes conscious of, and thus makes you conscious of those specific things? How strong of an identity does this tulpa have?

> And the line at which unconscious processes become conscious is fuzzy and not at all distinct. Another thing that becomes utterly clear when you meditate.

Ok I get what you're saying about fuzzy consciousness. I've only meditated to the point where I became more conscious of my body, but not of my own thinking processes, which I would like to get to. But there is a level that seems like it would be hard to penetrate in our subconscious processes. Eg, can you say you are conscious of the neural spiking compression your retina ganglia cells are doing to compress input it's getting from their photonic receptors? Seems quite unlikely. So there is a whole gamut of different levels of processing in our brains, and I'm sure it's possible to get a deeper consciousness of some of that, but there's obviously a limit somewhere.

Asking the tulpa what it is, basically kicks off a meditation on the nature of identity. Never any solid answers, only more questions. It's kind of a spiritual law.

We share the same interests. The things I think about are the same sorts of things it thinks about, so we often in communion about the deep nature of things.

The kind of strange thing is that it's personality can be bigger or smaller if I want it to be. It seems to lack a great deal of agency, it sort of reminds me of an intelligent weapon in Dungeons & Dragons. It shares my brain, and presumably my senses, but I can't shake the sense that it can access a reality deeper than my conscious mind can.

> Eg, can you say you are conscious of the neural spiking compression your retina ganglia cells are doing to compress input it's getting from their photonic receptors?

Well the retina ganglia cells can't be conscious themselves, so it's impossible to have a direct experience of what they're doing. The input has to travel into the brain before you can have an experience of it. All experience happens in the brain, though sensation can arise in the nervous system outside of it.

I visualize the brain as a giant kingdom with millions of 'people' involved, all doing their job quietly and without fuss, all to facilitate the conscious agent directing it. Some of those people are involved in creating that experience. You can meditate and get to know those people, and even play with sensation itself through trance, but trance involves shutting off sensation, or rather, the mind's ability to determine where and how that sensation arose. Hardcore Buddhist -style meditators describe 'sense doors' which I've had experience with but that's not an active area of focus for me. My focus is in the realm of meaning and the meta.

I mentioned those cells because they are considered to be part of the brain and they are extremely well understood (and clearly not something we can be conscious of). The fact that they take input from the outside world isn't really relevant to the point. The output of those cells is input for the next level, whose output is again input for the next level. Point begin, the brain actually has a lot of processes going on, which are mostly things we can never be conscious of.

If you could actually be conscious of it all, you'd probably revolutionize the field of neurology.

It gets even weirder. If some scientist decided to make me a research subject, and we explored what my brain does in fine granularity when I'm meditating, then he's basically got a sample size of one and it won't be all that different from me just giving the world my own conclusions by writing a book myself.

No, science earns its validity from scale. A sample size of one isn't sufficient. All I'd be able to do is point the way for further experimentation. Exactly how much of our experimentation would make it into the further process, assuming it even happens? Probably very little.

Rightness and wrongness exists on a scale, and that scale is multi-dimensional. You're not only fractionally right, but you're fractionally right in different ways. Timothy Leary's lived experience is a certain kind of right, and a certain kind of wrong. But when it comes to science, the only kind of truth that sticks is the kind that's right in all ways all the time.

So little of anything sticks. And where that little bit comes from doesn't have to be me. I'm happy having my own little piece of it all to myself.

I have struggled with this a lot. I can completely understand the notion to discount such experience. My conclusion is that this seemingly can not be "proven" in the traditional sense as it's a construct of the mind and not something external. It's sort of like me trying to prove that the way I see "red" in my mind is the same way you do. It's just not doable. Thus, I think this is something limited to the experiential. This used to bother me, now I just enjoy it.

A few anecdotes from my brain:

I have experienced deeper consciousness where instead of being from my normal 1st person view, it has been from a lower point of view. As metaphor, Imagine you are dreaming and there are 10 people in your dream, including yourself. As normal you are viewing the dream through your eyes and the 10 people seem to be functioning on their own. But then within the dream something happens and I realize the arbitrariness of my perspective and I suddenly become aware that I am actually simultaneously looking into my dream world from all 10 people's perspective at once and a lower level consciousness, which now becomes my conscious perspective, is omni-aware of this fact. It's also very strange as it sort of makes me question which viewpoint is really "me." Particularly when my consciousness shifts between the various perspectives.

I've also had things happen like when I am talking to someone sitting in front of me, I lose my 1st person perspective and my perspective moves to a lower external level where I can now see how my brain is "drawing" both myself and the person I'm speaking to, and the "onion" layers of thought that built those images of us and our environment as well as the sounds of our words.

Even as far as how when we say a sentence of words, I've had perspective where I can see the words expanding to other concepts and deeper meaning of the word. It's usually a very visual and emotional process, but quite interesting. So the words "tasty" "apple" start as two peaks of two mountains, but as the brain unpacks the concept of "tastiness" and "appleness", the thoughts expands outwards, just as the peaks of mountains expand outwards to their base. It's when the bases overlap that I can see the relation of the terms and how they interact with each other. But then imagine that for entire sentences, or stories, or any thought/concept.

When you can shift your consciousness from the peak to the base, it's interesting because you can see these larger concepts. For example, you can "see" taste, or sexuality, or redness, or anything-ness. Very fascinating.

I've also had interesting experiences where starting a an object, say my garage floor, I've been able to see layers of overlapping patterns that my brain seemed to have used to draw the floor. When I see it from the top, I see a floor. But when I move to the side, It's layers of different patterns.

I don't usually shares these on a public forum as I have already spent enough time questioning my own sanity as I rarely hear others talking about this sort of thing. Self diagnosed conclusion: I'm sane. :)

Tolkien is phenomenal at describing divine agency. Eru Iluvatar only occasionally imposes his will on the world, but mostly just lets it run. Where he imposes his will, it's actively needed in order to further his plan. Fantasy is a fantastic vehicle for exploring non-human, non-physically-based intelligent agency. I'm not entirely sure why I went on this tangent, but I'll leave it in instead of deleting it.

Okay now I feel like I have a handle on it. Why we do things and what happens to us makes a kind of sense that transcends the mundane. Imagining that it's God is a perfect metaphor to describe the transcendence. When you describe going down to the base levels of sensation, the reason your particular mysticism dives in that direction has a reason, and that reason will be explainable by pure chance, but it will also be explainable by some deeper element of your life or psyche or whatever. Mysticism wants to dive in and create more reasons and more questions, while materialism wants to stop the process and state that there's nothing further to examine.

If I had to choose between materialism and psychosis, I'd pick psychosis. Luckily I don't have to embrace psychosis to throw away materialism.

Why do you think all of that is "deeper" consciousness?

Also, you say we may never know if you and I see red the same, but we do know. We know that color is simply a reflection of light along certain wavelengths, we can demonstrate this. We know how our eyes receive and interpret this information. We know that there's something missing from the middle and it's all upside down and that our brain corrects for this. We even use this information to create optical illusions.

I know you're thinking "But what if what I see as 'red' you see as what you would consider 'blue' and vice versa". That's meaningless. If I hold a red pen and say "This is a red pen" and you agree that it is a red pen, then we are both perceiving that to be red. Our perceptions are in agreement.

The rest sounds like idle daydreaming. I mean, nothing you've described sounds really all that out there and I have done plenty of that as well. It's a good way to pass the time during my commute.

In terms of seeing red the same. I think you are misinterpreting what I mean by “seeing”, I’m not talking about the chemical process of how our eyes receive light “signals” and input that into your brain. I’m talking about the “images” your mind draws, the mental image that you see. This is an age old philosophy question and a more nuanced than the way you are stating it. Perceptions being in agreement is not the end all of this question. It is also not meaningless. It’s only meaningless if your goal is that two agents can agree that something is red. But that’s definitely not the essence of the question.

As far as me using the word “deeper”, I do think that’s a bit assumptive on my end. I really only know that it’s “more” and “different” than how I normally experience things. I also think the phrase idle day dreaming does not capture what I experience. I know the difference between my mind just wandering when sitting on a bus and when my mind is exploding with intense visuals, patterns, and thoughts.

I've never heard before that Synesthesia can be induced. Did you not have Synesthesia before meditation (assuming meditation is your method)?

For the most part of my life however, I’ve been as most scientists have, locked into the notion that only that of which we can perceive and replicate in the lab is intelligible and thus worth talking about. But it’s also always been a bit frustrating as there is clearly “more” to the nature of the Universe and existence. So I’ve always been a bit bummed that we appear to be trapped in these mental prisons.

The more profound experiences I’ve had have been due to psychedelics, and ultimately now I just mediatate daily and have gotten better at revisiting that mental space. The only thing I could definitively say about the experience is that I “saw” _more_. What was the nature of what I saw? I don’t know. Probably just a trick of the mind. I try not to read into it too much. I am now just happy to have a small view into something other than the everyday “top of the pyramid of consciousness” perspective that we are normally bound to.

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.