The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian) / quote 88 of 254
Multiplicity is a spectrum
Could it not rather be the case that the extent to which we perceive ourselves as one or many is in fact highly variable? That’s what the science writer Rita Carter came to believe after researching her book Multiplicity. ‘Multiplicity is a spectrum,’ she told me when I caught up with one of her selves near their home in Oxfordshire. ‘At the very extreme you have people with multiple-personality disorder who jump totally from one discrete personality to another. At the other end you have people who are almost entirely integrated, so that you can cut, slice them at any time, meet them in any context, and you will see the same recognisable things. I think both of those extremes are rare and most of us cluster in the middle.’