Friday, October 3, 2008

build some character

I've heard it said that there are only so many faces in the world. The ramifications, carried to their logical extreme, are unsettling to say the least: given sufficient time and travel - and a healthy dose of luck, good or bad - one might encounter not only duplicates of one's acquaintances but even of oneself. The idea of visiting some out of the way flea market in Egypt and bumping into myself is terrifying (a case of the bizarre in the bazaar, you might say), as much for its potential for crushing disappointment as for the fact that one of my face is more than enough for this beleaguered world. I mean that if I ran into myself I'd probably be inclined to chalk it up to at least one of the following causes: a dimensional crossover; a rip in the space-time continuum; the advent of homunculi; sophisticated disguise technology by a sinister organization; a magic mirror that shows the inner darkness and makes me battle it before I can cast off my Dark Knight trappings and don the holy garb of a Paladin; a strange dream world where anything can happen (and probably will). All of these explanations necessitate the immediate acquisition of weapons and armor that may or may not be of a medieval nature, a miraculous discovery of hitherto-unsuspected magical abilities, the gathering together of a 'party' of quirky - but lovable - and distinctive fellow travelers who all have complicated back stories that must be unraveled over time, the repetitive slaying of deadly monsters for the Level Up, and the general engaging in nifty adventures all over this world and probably others.

This being the case, it's going to be a bit of letdown when I find out it's just statistics at work.

Fortunately the odds are pretty low I'll ever meet my double, and even lower that he'd match me in every way rather than just facially. Still, the more places I go and the more people I meet, the more I believe the truth of the claim. Not that I've ever seen someone who looks identical to another acquaintance, but strong similarities that cannot help but conjure up associations are in abundance. It makes sense - there are, after all, only so many configurations that have structural integrity, so to speak. Of course there are a lot of configurations, but the number is finite, and gets smaller the more fundamentally one looks at structure, which is why there are those ever-perplexing similarities.

What really gets me is that the same thing applies to personalities, or character. This is annoying because, when you see a familiar-looking actor and can't remember what else you saw him in, you can look it up, and there's no such luxury with character no matter who the person in question is. But it's especially provocative because of what it says about the self, or at least the self that other people see. Certainly it lends highly-unscientific credence to the idea of everything being physically-based, because there are only so many ways the brain can be shaped, and if that's what determines who people are and how they behave, then of course no one is going to act entirely uniquely.

Still, when I meet someone who seems like the same person whom I knew elsewhere, just in another body (as happened recently), it's strange. Are they really that similar? Am I picking up on foundational traits and extrapolating (or perhaps generalizing) to make a claim about the whole that isn't justified? Do certain behavioral traits necessitate others such that, if two people act similarly with regard to one trait, they will grow to act the same in most or all others as well? Should I be disturbed that I can sit down with a new group of people and quickly label them all with names of other people I've known? The differences are perceptible, and yet the similarities are so compelling. And what about the people who feel like hybrids of two or more others? It makes me think either that there is a lot more to people's characters than we usually suspect (which, if gotten at, would prevent any such matching-up in the future) or that no one is as unique as we'd like to think. Neither of these is particularly satisfying.

Of course there's another possibility, which is that it's an entirely psychological phenomenon, a bit of self-deception intended to fill a void. I mean that when away from those we know and care about, perhaps we wish unconsciously to fill the spaces left by their absence, and so we fix on the tiniest similarities of those around us and use those similarities to transform those people into temporary (or not...) replacements for our familiar circle. Creepy AND sad. But perhaps necessary, and certainly only human.

I'm not sure it's any better, but I find what little I know about the theories of a physical basis for our behavior and nature to be very compelling, and as such I'd be inclined towards assuming there is simply a limited number of personalities. And I don't mean the generalized personalities, such as 'moody,' 'artistic,' 'insular,' etc., but rather the whole shebang. I don't find this philosophically or theologically satisfying, but perhaps this means that there is a finite number of what we would call 'souls' as well. That would certainly fit in with a theory of reincarnation, and might even blend well with Plato's ideas about the afterlife and the process of what for lack of a better term I deem 'recycling' the souls, at least the good ones. Not that I'm all that well qualified to lecture on the topic, thanks more to decidedly-UNphotographic memory than to insufficient education.

That's what I've got on today's challenging philosophical quandary. On an unrelated note, any time I worry that I'm not really supposed to be a writer, even a bad one, I have only to look at how the simplest attempt to write a few words on an interesting topic inevitably balloons like a Macy's Day float...

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