The Redundancy We “SEEe” [3] — An Extra Me?
The Seven-of-You Theory: Is There Another You in a World of 8.3 Billion?
As of 2026, the global population has hit a staggering 8.3 billion. Among this sea of humanity, is it possible that you aren’t entirely a limited-edition original? What if there’s a carbon copy of you walking around right now?
The Seven Yous
Back in 2015, three friends — Niamh Geaney, Harry English, and Terence Manzanga — were juggling university life in Dublin, Ireland. Like any bored, imaginative students, they stumbled upon an ancient piece of folklore: the idea that each person has not one, but seven “twin strangers” scattered across the globe — doppelgängers who look identical to you despite sharing zero DNA.
Now, youth doesn’t care much for the laws of physics; it cares about bragging rights. The trio made a bet to see who could most effectively abuse social media to find their closest “stranger twin” within 30 days.
Stranger Twin
To jumpstart their quest, they built a bare-bones website called “Twin Strangers,” launched a Facebook page, and threw a challenge video onto YouTube. The internet did what the internet does best: it went viral. Suddenly, their inbox was flooded with over 6,000 SOS emails a day. Interestingly, people weren’t just hunting for the founders — they were practically begging, “Please, find mine too!”
Miracles tend to hatch in the most unexpected places, usually right when you stop looking at the math and start believing in the magic. Just two weeks into the challenge, in April 2015, Niamh cracked the matrix. On Facebook, she matched with her very first alter ego: Karen Branigan. The freaky part? Not only did they look like long-lost identical twins, but they also lived just an hour’s drive apart in Ireland. Talk about a local genetic glitch!
As it turns out, if you have enough audacity to chase a miracle, it won’t leave you hanging. Just two months later, in June 2015, Niamh Geaney unlocked her next glitch in the matrix: a young woman named Luisa Guizzardi from Genoa, Italy. This wasn’t just a case of “they have the same nose.” The cosmic copy-pasting ran deeper. Luisa and Niamh shared the exact same subconscious body language — the way they gestured with their hands while talking, the shrugs, and even a specific nose twitch when excited. When Niamh went to visit Genoa, Luisa’s own mother spotted Niamh from a distance and, for a terrifying second, genuinely mistook this Irish stranger for her own flesh and blood.
Then came mid-November 2015, when 26-year-old Irene Adams from County Sligo, on the west coast of Ireland, entered the chat. Irene didn’t just share Niamh’s facial features and hair color; when they laughed, the crinkles around their eyes and noses synced up perfectly. Frankly, Irene looked more like Niamh than Niamh’s actual biological sisters did.
Naturally, when these mind-bending reunions hit YouTube, the internet’s collective skepticism kicked in. The matches were so uncanny that people smelled a rat, accusing the whole project of being a highly choreographed marketing stunt.
To kill the conspiracy theories and satisfy their own curiosity, Niamh and Irene marched into DNA Ireland in December 2015 for a hardcore genetic maternity and lineage test. The result? A resounding 0% chance of being related. They belonged to entirely different mitochondrial haplogroups — Niamh was Group H, and Irene was Group T. In genetic terms, this means even if you hopped in a time machine and traveled back 20,000 years, their ancestors wouldn’t have even crossed paths at a prehistoric watering hole.
The Genetic Barcode: Unpacking the “Haplogroup”
Every great story needs a commercial break for some actual science, and this mind-bending cosmic copying demands a clear explanation. Enter the Haplogroup — a genetic concept that is essentially an evolutionary barcode, an ancient passport stamped by your ancestors, permanently tattooed into your genome.
When humans reproduce, most of our genes undergo a massive genetic shuffle, blending together like a chaotic cocktail. However, two highly stubborn VIP sections of our DNA refuse to mix. They are passed down from generation to generation virtually untouched:
- The Y-Chromosome Haplogroup (The Strictly Patrilineal Route): Passed exclusively from father to son. Think of it as a cosmic family crest used to track a man’s ancient paternal lineage.
- The Mitochondrial DNA Haplogroup / mtDNA (The Strictly Matrilineal Route): Passed exclusively from mother to both her sons and daughters. This is the ultimate tool for tracing your ancient maternal roots.
Because these two genetic time capsules rarely mutate as they travel through generations, they serve as a flawless ancestral GPS. If two people share the exact same haplogroup, it means that thousands — or even tens of thousands — of years ago, they shared a single, common “apocalypse-surviving” ancestor. By analyzing these haplogroups, scientists can build a bridge all the way back to the dawn of humanity.
The Great Doppelgänger Hunt: Is Your Avatar Out There?
Niamh’s story completely broke the internet, triggering a global, FOMO-fueled gold rush of people desperate to find their own cosmic twins. Within just a single year, the “Twin Strangers” platform blasted past the one-million-user mark. Fast forward to the present day: the platform has evolved into an AI-powered facial recognition powerhouse, archiving and analyzing the facial profiles of well over 10 million humans worldwide.
Which begs the question, dear reader: Do you believe that at this exact microsecond, a rendering error in the matrix has created a near-identical version of you? Is your long-lost twin stranger out there somewhere on this giant floating rock, staring at a screen, looking for you too?
Double Bloom
Adolescence is an age intoxicated by romantic illusions and a desperate itch to explore. We all get our moment in the sun — a blooming phase where energy is treated like a blank check. During this era of infinite vitality, the only cage that stops us from exploring worlds, both real and imaginary, is the padlock on our own minds.
The Sunk Cost of Puppetry and Passion
Take Véronique, a beautiful French girl. Riding the high of her youth, she was just like the rest of us: insatiably curious about the world. One day at school, after watching a performance by a master puppeteer named Alexandre, she began receiving a series of mysterious, anonymous packages — a cassette tape, a length of red thread, and a cigar box. Curiosity is the flag of youth and the engine of human exploration. Armed with these breadcrumbs, she channeled her inner Sherlock Holmes and began to track them down.
At a railway station café, Véronique cracked the case, only to discover that these “clues” were nothing more than a psychological experiment cooked up by Alexandre to scavenge for inspiration for his new book. Furious and heartbroken, she left in tears. But love doesn’t require an active pursuit; it requires a hostile takeover of the other person’s psyche. The more emotional capital a young girl invests up front, the deeper her dependency grows. Lovers are notoriously incapable of abandoning their sunk costs, which is why love is famously blind — it outright refuses to be governed by reason, willingly pulled along by a string of meticulously arranged breadcrumbs. Alexandre caught up with Véronique at her apartment that very night, successfully getting her to “fall” for him. To Véronique, this was falling in love; to Alexandre, it was just falling into bed.
The Matrix Revealed
Once Véronique swam right into Alexandre’s neatly excavated river of love, reality delivered its final plot twist. One afternoon, while sitting in front of Alexandre and flipping through the photos from her trip to Poland, Véronique’s eyes caught something in the background: a girl standing next to a tour bus in a town square. She looked identical to herself. This discovery triggered a sudden, gut-wrenching breakdown, leaving Véronique in floods of tears. She finally understood: that lifelong, haunting intuition that she was “not alone” and that a shadow-self existed somewhere in the void wasn’t a delusion. It was a faint, real-world signal transmitted across space — a lifeline planted by destiny in the soil of her youth.
Soon after, Alexandre crafted two identical Véronique puppets. When she asked why he needed a duplicate, he casually replied, “In case one breaks, the other can take over.”
And right there, the coin dropped. She finally understood the source of that sudden, inexplicable grief she had felt out of nowhere — the phantom pain of someone else vanishing from the earth. Now, she was looking at the physical evidence of her shadow-self: a literal puppet show of “one life breaks, another steps in.” She realized that in Alexandre’s eyes, she was never a muse, but a specimen; not a lover, but raw material to be harvested for his next book. She was a marionette whose strings he could twitch at will. Suffocating under the weight of being manipulated and unable to endure the agony of having her soul dissected for someone else’s art, Véronique walked out of his apartment for good.
Of course, as the audience sitting in the dark, we hold a god-eye view: we know that her Polish counterpart has already died. But the French Véronique knows nothing of this morbid truth. She had simply been searching, drifting, and exploring — until the moment of her awakening. In the cold, unblinking eyes of Fate, our various doppelgängers are not cosmic twins to be celebrated. They are simply experimental control groups in a grand laboratory, waiting around to see who fails the stress test first.
Self-Constructing the Self
In the previous chapter, The Eye, The World We “See”, we explored the cognitive “omissions” humans make when processing reality. In this chapter, The Redundancy We “SEEe”, our focus shifts to the “additions” — the mental clutter and projections we impose upon the world. Whether through omission or redundancy, our subjective perception is fundamentally incapable of executing a 100% pixel-perfect copy of the objective universe.
Consequently, this cognitive drift ensures that when we turn the lens inward to examine ourselves, we don’t find a single definitive “me.” Instead, we generate multiple versions of ourselves, each reaping wildly different experiences in entirely scattered realities. Perhaps the very act of contemplating or fantasizing about a shadow-self isn’t a symptom of loneliness; it is the necessary, grueling process of constructing a whole, singular identity.
The master Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski (June 27, 1941 — March 13, 1996) left a trail of breadcrumbs for his audience in his 1991 cinematic masterpiece, La Double vie de Véronique. It was an invitation to hunt down a single, ultimate answer: Is the self the Subject that acts, or merely the Object being acted upon?
The Eastern Doppelgänger: Kyoto’s Parallel Fates
Yasunari Kawabata (川端 康成, June 14, 1899 — April 16, 1972) is widely celebrated as the torchbearer of the Japanese Shinkankakuha — the New Sensibilities Movement. As fellow writer Riichi Yokomitsu famously put it in his 1925 work Spring Comes in a Horse-Drawn Carriage: “The hallmark of the New Sensibilities is to peel away the external facade of nature, leaping directly into the subjective, intuitive trigger of the thing itself.”
In 1968, Kawabata became the first Japanese author to clinch the Nobel Prize in Literature, making him only the second Asian writer to win the prize, trailing Rabindranath Tagore’s historic 1913 win. When the Swedish Academy handed Kawabata his medal, their official citation singled out three masterpieces: Snow Country, The Old Capital, and Thousand Cranes.
Among them, The Old Capital dissects the parallel, yet drastically mismatched, destinies of twin sisters. Chieko, the elder sister, was abandoned at birth but struck genetic gold — she was adopted by a wealthy kimono wholesaler in Kyoto. Her twin, Naoko, was left behind in the countryside. Following the tragic death of their biological parents, Naoko was relegated to backbreaking labor in the cedar forests of Kitayama. Unlike the fair-skinned, refined, and affluent Chieko of Kyoto, Naoko is deeply tanned by the elements and worn down by poverty.
Yet, destiny loves a visual echo. During Kyoto’s traditional Gion Festival, amidst a suffocating sea of festival-goers, Chieko suddenly locks eyes with a girl who looks exactly like her. It is Naoko. In terms of both visual whiplash and psychological shock, this sudden encounter on the crowded streets of Kyoto is a perfect, flawless mirror to the exact moment the Polish Weronika spots her French counterpart through the window of a tour bus.
The Sublime Flaw: Creating the Self in the Gaps of Reality
Although The Old Capital follows a pair of biological twins, its finale shares a profound resonance with Véronique’s realization in La Double vie de Véronique. Both narratives culminate in the same quiet awakening: the characters abandon their obsessive pursuit of an external “other half,” accept the jagged edges of fate, and ultimately retreat to their own respective realities.
If we can bring ourselves to stop obsessing over whether a physically identical version of us exists in the material world, we will find that we already possess one — if not several — spiritual alter-egos. Perhaps it is the shadow-self we construct when the soul detaches from the flesh, observing our own lives from a god-eye view. Or perhaps it is a collection of internal compasses we manufacture while digging into our own psyches, creating parallel reference points for who we are. Make no mistake: this urge toward self-cloning is far more than a fleeting adolescent delusion or a playground of the imagination. It is these distinct spiritual avatars — and perhaps even a few physical ones — that actively guide us along the rocky path of self-awareness, leading us toward our truest, innermost soul.
Human awakening begins the exact moment we discover the “I.” Yet, much like our endless exploration of the physical cosmos, interrogating and mapping the psyche will never yield a mathematically “complete” self. But herein lies the beauty: “Omission” leaves a wider sky for human cognition. It is precisely within these blank spaces that we find the room to house our “cognitive redundancies.” Omission and redundancy ensure that a human life will never be perfect — but it is this very imperfection that leaves a sprawling, chaotic playground for creative exploration, innovative discovery, and the artistic completion of the self.
This, perhaps, is the ultimate definition of happiness offered by the French philosopher Albert Camus (November 7, 1913 — January 4, 1914) in his 1942 masterpiece, The Myth of Sisyphus (Le Mythe de Sisyphe):
La lutte elle-même vers les sommets suffit à remplir un cœur d’homme. Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux.
The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
— Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
Over to You: The Ultimate Comment Section Debate
So, here is the million-dollar question for you, my dear readers: Is every shadow-self we encounter merely a piece of cognitive “excess” in our journey of self-awareness? Or is it a mandatory psychological experiment, an absolute “essential” required to build a whole, undivided self?
Get iLighter, Gazing at flowers from the roof of hell’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Hit the comment section and let’s hash it out.
But don’t go anywhere just yet — below, I’ve got a few more fascinating rabbit holes for us to explore.
The Scientific Proof: When Math Tries to Rain on Your Parade
When it comes to imagination, science often plays the part of a buzzkill wizard. But no matter. Even though we are discussing the fluid realm of human perception, for the sake of strict rigor, let us consult the hard data. In truth, science isn’t actually a killjoy. For those of us with wings on our thoughts, science is merely a lovingly tedious, rambling old father who sits in his wooden cabin, lecturing us out of pure affection.
Exact Match
In the exact same year those three Irish friends launched their quest for twin strangers, a breakthrough was brewing in Australia. Teghan Lucas, a PhD candidate in anatomy and forensic anthropology at the University of Adelaide, led a research team to dissect the facial and body metrics of 4,000 soldiers. Utilizing the U.S. Army Anthropometric Survey (ANSUR) database, they employed rigorous mathematical tools to precisely measure and compare eight core facial and skeletal traits — such as the exact distance between pupils, the millimeter length of an ear, and the absolute width of the mouth. Their findings were officially published in November 2015 in the prestigious peer-reviewed journal, Forensic Science International.
The team reached a cold, stark conclusion: the probability of finding a random stranger on Earth who matches you perfectly across all eight of these facial metrics is less than one in a trillion. Given that our global population in 2026 sits at 8.3 billion — not even close to a trillion — this means that from a purely mathematical, skeletal standpoint, a “perfect” physical copy of you is an absolute impossibility.
But notice the operative word here: “perfect.” To a computer algorithm, if your ear is a mere 1 millimeter longer than a stranger’s, or if your pupils are 0.5 millimeters wider, the system cold-bloodedly declares: “Mismatch. These are two different humans.” Humans, however, do not possess the eyes of a machine. We read faces holistically. As long as someone shares your gaze, your hairstyle, your facial structure, and your overall vibe — or aesthetic — your brain lights up and screams, “Oh my god, they’re identical twins!”
Remember Gestalt Psychology, which we unpacked at the beginning of this chapter in “The Redundancy We “SEEe”[1] — I Really Did See Ghosts ?” We perceive the world as a whole (a Gestalt), not as a collection of isolated fragments. The nature of the whole is not determined by simply adding up its individual parts; rather, it is dictated by the relationships and structural harmony between those parts.
Once again, this echoes our ultimate theme: both “omission” and “redundancy” are essential coordinates of a greater “wholeness.” Human cognition is not a mechanical, mathematical addition problem; it is the art of mastering the big picture. In the grand theater of your mind, you are not the puppet — you are the master pulling the strings.
Life Is a Grand Symphony
Throughout this entire journey, we have been meticulously dismantling the illusions of the mind. Layer by layer, we used the clinical findings of cognitive science to superimpose a dynamic score of “omissions” and “redundancies.” Yet, we did not do this to leave you drifting aimlessly down a barren, cold, and calculated path of mathematical determinism. We did it to reveal the untamed, miraculous wilderness where destiny is forged.
Human consciousness is a stubborn and beautiful rebel. Science continually attempts to prove “inevitability,” yet our souls relentlessly pursue the “accidental.” Guided by the laws of Gestalt, we discover order within chaos, and then, by boldly shattering that very order, we compose our own unique melodies. You were never a manipulated puppet trapped inside a mechanical universe. You are a sovereign artist. Upon the colossal canvas of the cosmos, you are casting your own grand symphonic painting — an endless, flowing stream of visual consciousness.
It is no wonder that the celebrated Enlightenment polymath, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (September 7, 1707 — April 16, 1788), mirrored this very truth in his own diverse intellectual hunting grounds, which spanned natural history, biology, and mathematics. In his famous Discourse on Style, he illustrated the concept that “style is the man himself”:
Ces choses sont hors de l’homme ; le style est l’homme même.
These things are external to man; style is the man himself.
— Georges-Louis Leclerc, style is the man himself
Yet, I am more inclined to push this philosophy a step further, into a grander revelation: “Thought is the man himself.”
All the rigid calculations of the universe, the biological structures, and the external facts — they are merely hors de l’homme (external to man). As long as you resolutely stand at the center of the universe you have authored, a life that courageously refuses to be defined will never allow its curtain to fall.
A Tribute to Irène Jacob: Where the Big Bang Meets the Silver Screen
The ethereal protagonist of La Double vie de Véronique was brought to life by the Swiss actress Irène Jacob (born July 15, 1966). Though born in Suresnes, in the Hauts-de-Seine department of France, she later relocated with her family to Geneva, Switzerland. Her father, Maurice Jacob (March 28, 1933 — May 2, 2007), was a world-renowned theoretical physicist who served for years as the head of the Theoretical Physics Division at CERN. Alongside Gian Carlo Wick (October 15, 1909 — April 20, 1992), he pioneered the Wick-Jacob helicity formalism, a definitive mathematical framework used to provide a relativistic description of the scattering of particles with spin, as well as particle decays and resonant states.
Breeding in an environment of such intellectual rigor endowed Irène Jacob with more than just a poised, luminous beauty and an aura of refined, philosophical elegance; she emerged as a polymathic force — an actress and author fluent in English, French, German, and Italian. In 2019, she published her profoundly autobiographical and philosophically poetic novel, Big Bang. In its pages, she stitched the “end point” of life directly back to its “origin,” weaving personal history into the grand tapestry of cosmic creation. Through a narrative where space and time miraculously entwine, the protagonist navigates a dizzying, dual existential shock: the agonizing departure of her father and the imminent arrival of her second child. As the CERN Courier noted in its review of Big Bang, Jacob’s fluid, elegant prose effortlessly shatters the icy boundary between science and art. With poetry, tenderness, and razor-sharp sensitivity, she proves that science itself can harbor the ultimate artistic grace.
Here, facing grief and the promise of life, I stand and I move forward…
— Irène Jacob，Big Bang
Many readers often ask me: “Why does every single section of ‘Why We Fail’ always begin with a film?” Coincidentally, Irène Jacob faced a mirror image of this very question decades ago. In 1994, while sitting for exclusive interviews with international media outlets like the Los Angeles Times following her starring role in Three Colors: Red (Trois couleurs: Rouge), she looked back on her childhood, recalling the profound impact of watching the legendary Charlie Chaplin (April 16, 1889 — December 25, 1977). She answered:
Ils ont conquis mon cœur. Ils me faisaient rire et pleurer, et c’est exactement ce que j’attendais d’un film : qu’il m’éveille à mes sentiments.
They conquered my heart. They made me laugh, and they made me cry, and that is precisely what I expected from a film: to awaken me to my own feelings.
This is exactly what the ancient Chinese proverb means when it says: “Life is a play, and a play is life itself.” Art is our own proud creation. We manufacture it to patch up the cognitive “omissions” we make while navigating reality. It is that beautifully indispensable “redundancy” that authenticates the truth of being human.
Arno Will, 27 June 2026
Idea and Action
The Eye, The World We “See” [1] — Allegory of the Cave
The Eye, The World We “See” [2] — Misplaced Love
The Eye, The World We “See” [3] — From Data to Information
The Eye, The World We “See” [4] — How We See the World: From Knowledge to Wisdom
The Redundancy We “SEEe”[1] — I Really Did See Ghosts
The Redundancy We “SEEe”[2] — Descartes’ Evil Genius
The Redundancy We “SEEe” [3] — An Extra Me?
The Redundancy We “SEEe” [4] — The Enemy Is “ME”
Theory of Relativity in Economics — The Coase Theorem Under the Mass Critique
How Corruption-Ridden Socialism Triumphed Over Regulatory Capitalism?
When Capital Substitutes Labor, Where is Our Future?
Liberty is Not ‘Negative’, Only ‘Exist’ and ‘None’
Redistribution? Why is the Government Spying on My Wallet
Immoral Property Taxes Infringe on Personal Liberty
Learning Praxeology from Mamdani
