Anon: I got to thinking, as I pinched up a word and moved it to another place in the sentence: was it the same token? If I cut an apostrophe and paste it somewhere else, is there ANY coherent sense in which it is the same apostrophe? Heck, if I insert a few words in a document, so that all the succeeding ones have to “shift” down, are the “shifted” ones in any sense the same? If I do nothing at all but watch as the computer continually redraws the words in front of me, isn’t there something really, really Heraclitean about visibles on a computer screen? Of course just about everything like that, on a much slower scale; but this is unnerving.
I’m not sure whether you are wondering about recurrence in general, or just about token-identity vs type-identity.
It seems to me that epistemically (for Borges Funes-the-Memorious reasons), and ontically (for thermodynamic reasons), no two real-time events — hence, a fortiori, no two objects figuring in those events — are identical: (“are identical” is already a misnomer: a thing can only be identical with itself, and even that only instantaneously). If there is a delta-T– change in time — then there is, a fortiori, a change, and hence non-identity. (At time T I am me-at-time-T and at time T+1 I am me-at-time-T+1: One could make the same argument about the “same” object at different points in space, but time has already done the trick, as the same object cannot be simultaneously at two different points in space — only different parts of the same object can be…)