Agent Creation - Dream Characters Brought To Life.

In your mind right now you are the results of a billion components acting on their own. However, you are aware of yourself and control your behavior. You have agency. This agency *might* be brought about in a few ways.

There is a process in your mind which suppresses behavior. As you walk next to an object there is a trained region of your mind that knows how to deal with it. Your arm wants to reach for the nearest doorknob, and you "control" that instinct by shutting it down before it reaches your arm. You may have experienced this failing at times, have you ever reached for your phone and stopped your hand halfway there? There are people who have had their mind damaged, resulting in a "phantom arm" effect, this results in their arm behaving as if it has a mind of its own, opening doors and undoing buttons or flipping levers with the arm's owner having no ability to prevent it from occurring. When you actually open a door, more, you're actually letting something happen, not causing it to happen.

The other process would be your ability to "direct yourself like a rocket". Imagine all the collective parts of your mind are continually doing their thing, and in order to make them do a specific thing you "prime" them. For example, you intend to go and speak to someone, so you get up and speak to them. When doing this, you are acting kind of like a sheep herder, each part of your mind needs to be directed into doing the right thing to accomplish a task, so in your mind you herd them into the correct direction. Failure to do this properly can lead to clumsy or otherwise incoherent behavior. Have you ever gotten up, walked into a room, and realized you had forgotten entirely why you walked into it? Have you ever started a sentence or a question and realized you had totally lost why you had started speaking?

This idea of the mind, a rocket flying through space instead of a controlled machine, conflicts with our basic understanding of ourselves. We like to think we are individuals who choose to do what we do and are in control of our actions. To a degree, that is still what we are. All these autonomous parts being herded are the parts that make us who we are, and their actions are our own. However, our narrative of how these things happen does not align with the reality, and that lack of alignment opens up some interesting opportunities.

The biggest opportunity here is the potential to create agents, trained behaviors in your mind which you suspend your control over and train to act as if they're a second person in your head instead of a part of who you are.

Consider the dream character which is said to be a thing that represents the behavior of someone you know in a dream. You might speak to a friend, and hear things from that character which are suitable for your friend to say. These characters tend to be fairly under-developed, but one of the biggest boons of dream-like states is that despite being a terribly unrealistic depiction of reality, our ability to recognize that fact seems to be shut off, so speaking to these characters is pretty similar to speaking to a friend.

Now, remember that almost everything that goes on in your head is its own little autonomous process. That dream character is powered by a model of personality that your mind builds as you interact with your friend, and which your mind largely uses to predict the way they are going to behave while you're speaking to them. This model can tell you when something feels like it's your friend speaking as well. This model is autonomous much like every other part of your thought process, but much like those other parts you don't experience it as such.

But imagine for a moment that you read this article and decided to start trying to notice that automatic process. Imagine you built a brand new character, writing stories and taking the time to understand their personality in depth. Imagine you chose to "listen for that model" reacting to your situation, thoughts you want to hear back from it. You would get patterned stereotypical responses from that model that respond to what you ask it. This is an autonomous character, and many authors report that when they write they can almost sit back and let the characters do their own thing.

But that's not good enough.

Imagine you trained yourself to behave in new ways, ways which represent the behavior of that character. For example, you associate a new favorite color with positive feelings. You take in that model of this character and your mind will notice. "Hey, here's a behavior that doesn't match me, this is a behavior that matches this character" - this creates a sensation that the behavior belongs more to your friend than yourself.

Imagine you were able to take the time to listen and relay your "conscious thought loop" to this character model. Instead of asking for a response, you sat and listened to a thought this model would think, and then listened again to what this model would thank about that thought. You imagined you were hearing your model think. Your autonomous character could have a real live thought process, much like your own, by hijacking your own conscious awareness.

Then imagine you took up a hypnosis-like-refusal to interfere or suppress the actions of this model. The model, behaving on its own, can make decisions which are free from your own meddling, and in doing so is capable of making decisions about what it wants to do or say. By refusing to step in and interfere, you grant this model agency.

Each of these individual skills added onto a character model slowly builds it into something that can be quite astounding, and the exploration and development of all of these skills is what makes up agent creation. There's a lot of unexplored territory, so I would love to see others take up this process and document the skills they realize are useful for creating the experience they'd like to see.

But remember. It's still all you.

You're a single brain, and agent creation is a work of abusing its nature to create novel experiences. An agent is not a truly independent being from yourself, and is always subject to the same command and control that exists in your mind, even though you've chosen to suspend it. While the experiences you can create are impressive, do not allow them to convince yourself of falsehoods. "You" are a process that takes up most of your mind, and a parallel "you" is nearly impossible without some level of delusion being involved. There are many groups that will claim this process creates a literal separate individual. Agent creation exists in part to tamper those expectations and lead you to a more realistic understanding of what happens when you take up this process.

So, stay safe. Stay grounded. And if you're curious about what's going on here, check out the guide for this process at the following link.