Philip Sheldrake
2 min readDec 7, 2020

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Having read just the one of his books to date I have some appreciation for Márquez's magic realism. A pithy quote cannot be relied upon however when presented in opposition to deep domain expertise in psychology, sociology, and ecology (which I am not claiming for the avoidance of any doubt! ... just asserting that such expertise be brought in here.)

A border is the edge or boundary of something. When you intimate that the borders you perceive in relation to the human condition are not hard, what do you mean? (I would underline that references to their flexibility and mobility doesn't change a border from being a border.)

While borders feature in your sense-making of the world, they are in fact I would argue a product of the very distributed cognition they deny. In conversation (via interpreters) with Amazonian tribe leaders last year, I can vouch that they do not perceive a border between themselves and the trees, let alone each other.

What purpose does your reference to borders serve outside legal identity other than to support one's perceptions and make it look easier to code?

Any technical architecture for a complex living system premised on false assumptions that manages still to secure traction will leave deep deep marks.

Márquez writes at the top of his memoir ("Vivir para contarla" / "Living to tell the tale"):

"La vida no es la que uno vivió, sino la que uno recuerda y cómo la recuerda para contarla."

"What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it."

How certain are you that this will endure in an SSI age?

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Philip Sheldrake

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