I haven't tried much forcing in earnest, but I've talked to voices in my head that didn't feel like part of me, and I've lurked in r/Tuples for years. It seems pretty common to have "parallel" consciousness among tulpamancers, though I think it depends on how you define and measure that.
Our sense of "continuous consciousness" is already an illusion, built from a series of moments. There are a lot of things about the brain/mind like that that I think make tulpas less unbelievable the more you think about it. Another is that there is a lot of diversity among "normal" brains. If someone can rotate a 3D shape in their head and you can't, you could say one of you has a "real mental issue," or just acknowledge the diversity. Also, a lot of our "thinking" is not conscious; it seems like we experience certain thoughts as "our thoughts that we are consciously thinking" because some process picks out a thought here and there and presents it that way. If another process were to come along and pick out a different 1% of our ongoing thoughts and present it as a coherent stream of consciousness, conforming to a certain personality, it could be another consciousness.
I don't think the brain/mind has one CPU and one program counter and that's that, and anything else is an illusion; I think it's got lots of cores and lots of threads, and if anything the idea that there's one hardcoded main thread is the illusion.
Our sense of "continuous consciousness" is already an illusion, built from a series of moments. There are a lot of things about the brain/mind like that that I think make tulpas less unbelievable the more you think about it. Another is that there is a lot of diversity among "normal" brains. If someone can rotate a 3D shape in their head and you can't, you could say one of you has a "real mental issue," or just acknowledge the diversity. Also, a lot of our "thinking" is not conscious; it seems like we experience certain thoughts as "our thoughts that we are consciously thinking" because some process picks out a thought here and there and presents it that way. If another process were to come along and pick out a different 1% of our ongoing thoughts and present it as a coherent stream of consciousness, conforming to a certain personality, it could be another consciousness.
I don't think the brain/mind has one CPU and one program counter and that's that, and anything else is an illusion; I think it's got lots of cores and lots of threads, and if anything the idea that there's one hardcoded main thread is the illusion.