Is there just one you?

The plan was to dedicate this thing to flying and system administration.  I lost my inspiration and let it just linger for a while.

Anyhow, I recently re-read some letters from my college years, and particularly from a female friend who had no trouble being smarter than just about every guy around her and was also interested in exploring some of life's mysteries.

It was interesting how I have a lot of ancillary thoughts about these questions, while the central mystery remains.

One was the simple, wide-open question if I thought I was unique in all of history, with the warning to avoid getting into stereotypes.

I think just to be clear, we have to dispense with the obvious physical interpretations.  First, from a organic perspective, every wooden toothpick is unique.  If you start looking at the subatomic level, even plastic toothpicks are unique.  While on a practical level, the reverse is the rule.  Although I haven't met one, google tells me there are a number of people with my name out there, and my sister (years ago) met someone who looked enough like me, that it was seriously creepy when he hit on her.  Also assuming other things are the same, another me who was born elsewhere or elsewhen, would almost certainly have a different vocabulary and express himself differently.

All that aside, a good actor could play a recognizable impression of me as I would be in Elizabethan times.  Which is to say that I (and other people) have specific combinations of traits, ticks and habits which -- when displayed -- are strongly associated with 'who' we are to others.  This is pretty close to certainly being non-unique and strongly possible that many others would really make my friends think of me almost immediately upon meeting an 'impression double'.

However, as writers and poets (and psychologists) have pointed out, a man is not one person, but a different person for everyone he interacts with and still different for each group of people that he meets.  I think while a coworker or biographer might be fooled by a double, that person's close friends and family would never be in a one-on-one situation because that sense of recognition is more like a unique interference pattern between two personalities.  That's why I frequently recognize friends in my dreams even when they look like someone else, are a different gender or even different species.