Philip Sheldrake
2 min readDec 4, 2020

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To your point about Allen's 2016 principles, you will note that the most recent SSI critique makes no mention. But my 2019 critique does because such 'laws' get ingrained in minds and encoded in software and endure longer than you might otherwise think appropriate, and remain then worthy of criticism.

I wonder if you agree ... I really do think there's not much that distinguishes our perspectives / models. We really do see things very similarly indeed. Reassuringly.

To paraphrase the concluding sentence to your first paragraph here, if only to underline that alignment but also to signal the very subtle difference ...

Alice's identities are the co-emergent consequence of her relationships, perceived imperfectly and only in parts by each person (including herself). In fact, Georg Simmel put it far more eloquently than either of us more than a century ago.

"We are all fragments, not only of humanity in general but also of ourselves. We are amalgamations not only of the human type in general, not only of types of good and evil and the like, but we are also amalgamations of our own individuality and uniqueness — no longer distinguishable in principle — which envelops our visible reality as if drawn with ideal lines. However, the view of the other broadens these fragments into what we never actually are purely and wholly. The fragments that are actually there can scarcely not be seen only juxtaposed, but as we fill in the blind spot in our field of vision, completely unconsciously of course, we construct the fullness of individuality from these fragments.

"... the procedures play out in the individual soul as well. In every moment these processes are of so complex a kind, harboring such an abundance of manifold and contradictory vicissitudes, that identifying them with one of our psychological concepts is always incomplete and actually falsifying: even the life moments of the individual soul are never connected by just one thread."

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Philip Sheldrake
Philip Sheldrake

Written by Philip Sheldrake

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