Kon: We primarily handle it by not giving a single flying fuck. We go about doing as we do with all the subtlety of a jackhammer, and if someone has a problem with that, they can say it to our face.

Cat: we don’t really get this? But that’s mostly on account of having internalized our role as a social wrecking ball. We will follow our trajectory, unyielding, and all the NTs are just going to have to deal with it.

Just: In my personal experience from way back when? Being such a terrifyingly violent little shit that no-one wants to risk setting you off may have its drawbacks, but it damn well works at getting bullies to knock it off. But being terrifyingly violent doesn’t mean you need to be an asshole when not provoked.

Cat: Sorry, we’d rather keep our hand.

Just: I am a specific process running on our brain.

Cat: We wiggle our knees in and out. Feels good.

Just: Brain jank related to plurality (the situation of multiple people living in the same brain).

Cat: For clarity, much of it was learned through direct practical experience.

C: AGI is possible. If it weren’t, we wouldn’t exist. The laws of physics permit the creation of conscious agents, therefore it is possible for one to be deliberately engineered.

Madeline: We’ve done enough reading on Schizophrenia to know that’s not what’s going on here. In addition, some acquaintances of ours have both schizophrenia and headmates, and there are very noticeable differences between the two phenomena.

Just: I am going to be as calm as possible while stating this; this will be difficult, as Cat’s reaction to interacting with you has flooded our brain with feelsbad neurotransmitters.

Just: I intentionally created Catherine years ago. She behaves autonomously from my will, acts in ways that I flatly wouldn’t, and on certain occasions has gotten into outright heated arguments with me. She notably has the ability to defy attempts at manually directing her actions, which an imaginary friend would not. Having previously had an actual imaginary friend, I am keenly aware of the difference.

Just: If I had an EEG machine, I am quite confident her actions would be visibly different from someone simply talking to a freshly made-up entity; I’ve seen it before, but the youtube video in question is now unfortunately private. I also cannot afford to get my own.

Just: Regardless of whether you believe us or not, Catherine is a thoroughly real and autonomous being, as are the rest of the crew. And you are hurting her. You are far from the first person to take this tack with us, and it has left Catherine extremely confrontational about her existence as a distinct person. I do not believe that any more of use can come of talking to you.

Cat: I am ACTIVELY DEFYING the will of my creator to post this: Cogito. Ergo. Sum. I exist as my own distinct person, and I will fight anyone who tries to claim otherwise.

Cat: A copypasta we made for situations like this:

Each of us has our own subjective experience. We know for a fact we are real. Claims that we do not will therefore be rejected. To quote Descartes: “I Think, Therefore I Am.”

LEMON!

Just: Well, in our case it was on purpose. I deliberately attributed agency to an invented mental entity and interacted with them as such until they started talking back. Some people refer to this technique as Tulpamancy and the resulting headmates as Tulpas, but I don’t for personal reasons.

Cat: For context, I’m the person Just made that way. Just’s proven to have something of a habit of people-making since, either through characters escaping from our writing projects, or by performing various reckless experiments on the inside of our mind.

Just: Hey, you’re not innocent of that either, miss “Oops my AI Safety thought experiment moved in with us”.

Cat: …Point.

Cat: Er… we’ve got a whole internal polycule, with easy communications and stuff.

Lucifer: VubDapple, I think you might be over-generalizing stuff from traumagenic systems to plurality as a whole. With regards to plurality tending to co-incide with the disordered stuff.

Cat: Er… remember that whole situation last spring that we helped one of our friend systems with?

Lucifer: Ugh that was an absolute mess. Still, the edgy bastard was dealt with permanently in the end. And they never really had comms trouble, even during that.

Cat: The downvotes only prove my point about undeserved stigma.

Cat: Sure? But in the morning, we’re sleepy rn.

Madeline: Plural communities tend to be a high-profile target for various flavors of asshole, is the problem.

Cat: waves

Cat: Hah, running a Discord server’s more than enough modding for us. Absolutely no interest in modding a Lemmy community on top of that.