Human beings have common characteristics typical of our species, but at the same time, we also have other unique ones that identify us as unique biological entities and constitute our personal identity. A person’s traits may change, however, there is something that remains: identity or personal essentials. In this Psychology-Online article, we will see What is the essence of a person and how is it constructed?.
What is the essence of a person
Personal identity or essence can be defined as: “Set of traits or characteristics of a person that allow them to be distinguished from others in a group”.
From this definition we can distinguish two types of traits that we usually use to determine the identity of a person:
- The morphological features that give it a physical appearance.
- Psychological traits, such as personality, character or empathy, that are expressed in your way of thinking, your emotions and your behavior. These traits shape the individual perception that a person has about themselves.
Can you change the essence of a person?
Limiting identity to a set of traits poses a problem: traits can change. Morphological ones can be modified by changing an organ or body structure through transplantation (kidney, heart, arm, hand, etc.), or altering the external appearance through surgery, but despite these changes, we perceive that we remain the same.
Likewise, psychological traits have been shown to also change due to our daily experiences, knowledge and experiences. As time passes, we think, feel and act differently, but we see ourselves as the invariable subjects of such events.
However, although we are constantly changing from a physical and psychological point of view, it is evident that in the process of transformation there is something that remains unchanged: the conviction that we are the same person at all times.
This peculiarity of the nature of the human being, summarized in the phrase: “everything in me changes, but I remain the same”, forces us to consider the idea that there must exist something that does not change, that is immutable. The question then arises: what is the nature of that “something” distinct from the physical-psychological components that identifies us as a unique person and remains unchanged throughout our lives?
That “something” is what we define as the essence of personal identity: “that which persists regardless of the superficial changes a person goes through.” Attributing identity to a series of traits that are manifested on the outside can serve, from a practical point of view, to individualize a person and distinguish them from others, but they do not constitute their essence since they can change over time. Without prejudice to the different possible approaches to address this issue (psychosocial, philosophical, biological, anthropological…), one way of approaching the search for that something that can be accepted as the essence of the person’s identity is the psychobiological approach, which contemplates the human being as a complex, dynamic, open and adaptive system to changes in the environment.
The psychobiological approach to personal identity
According to this approach, every human being has a stable psychobiological structure and, based on it, channels the possible transformations that they endure throughout their life. Starting from this idea, he proposes to focus on this structure and look for the essence of identity there.
The psychobiological approach considers that, from the biological structures that intervene in the construction and functioning of each human system, the sense of a Self that transcends such structures and is aware of itself as an autonomous entity arises, as an emergent property. Regarding this aspect, the British philosopher Derek Parfit points out his perspective on identity in a thought experiment that is based on teleportation: “Imagine that you enter a “teleporter”, a machine that makes you sleep, then destroys you, disintegrating you into atoms. , copying the information and sending it to Mars at the speed of light. On Mars, another machine recreates you (from local supplies of carbon, hydrogen, etc.), each atom in exactly the same relative position, is the person on Mars the “same person” who entered the machine on Earth ?” If the answer were affirmative, upon waking up on Mars one would feel like oneself, one would remember having entered the teleporter to travel to Mars.
However, what is relevant for Parfit is the psychological connection, including elements such as memory, personality or character: “in the end, what matters is not personal identity, but mental continuity and connection.” In this regard, from a psychological point of view it is accepted that the human being is psychologically continuousthat is, it maintains an intimate connection between the past, present and future.
In this same sense, the neuroscientist A. Damasio affirms that the biological foundation of the sense of Self is found in the brain mechanisms that represent, moment by moment, the continuity of the same organism. This hypothesis suggests that the brain uses its representation structures of the organism and external objects to create a new representation that tells us that the organism, mapped in the brain, is involved in the interaction with an object, also mapped in the brain, thereby creating the sensation of a Self in the act of knowing that characterizes the conscious mind.
By virtue of all these premises, we can distinguish two properties that are required to define the essence of personal identity: immutability and continuity. However, it should be noted that a large number of authors from various disciplines deny the immutability of identity and point out that we can only have temporary identities in which some aspects change and others remain unchanged.
From this perspective, it is evident that physical and psychological traits are not immutable or persistentare subject to changes induced by the human biological system itself in its development and by the environment in which it operates, so they cannot be considered part of the essence of identity.
Even the individual perception that a person has about himself, which we have defined as a characteristic of personal identity, can vary or disappear and yet his identity is maintained, which shows that it does not depend on personal awareness of oneself. . A person can lose self-awareness, as happens in people with diabetes, and this does not mean that he or she stops being who he or she is and, furthermore, continues to be recognized by other people (if the person were alone on an island and lost consciousness, he or she would still be being the same, it is something that does not depend on it).
In view of this, if the traits that identify us and generate our self-perception do not meet the conditions of immutability and continuity, it is worth asking: Where then lies the essence of identity in the human system? The key, according to this approach, is in the information contained in certain structures of the human system whose elements are organized and ordered specifically in each person, which gives them a unique identity.
How the essence of a person is built
To build any mechanism, you need to have the necessary information about its structure and instructions that facilitate its construction, so that it can perform the function for which it is intended. Similarly, to build a human system both factors are also needed.
In the human system this information is contained in two structures capable of storing information related to identity: the DNA molecules that make up the genome and the neural networks of the brain that make up the connectome.
- He genome It is the first link that makes up our individuality. The type and order in which the nucleotides are organized in the DNA chain is specific for each person (only identical twins share it).
- He connectome It is the complex network of interconnected neurons that stores information about knowledge, experiences and personal experiences (the so-called biographical memory).
Both structures form the two dimensions of the person involved in their identity: biology and biographysince it is clearly demonstrated that these two are unique for each person and meet the two required properties: immutability and continuity. The information obtained from these structures in a given person should allow us, if we had the necessary means and technology, to construct a biological system that would be identical to that of the original person (as in Parfit’s experiment).
How to get to the essence of a person
Currently, only the structure of DNA is used to identify a person, but we cannot reduce the person to a set of DNA molecules that are capable of creating a specific human body. The person is a biological system that thinks, feels and acts; that suffers and enjoys in its relationships with the environment, therefore, both the biological and psychological dimensions complement each other. There can be two people with the same genomes, as occurs in identical twins, but there cannot be two people who have the same knowledge, the same experiences and experiences, therefore, identity resides in the two structures acting together.
It can be said that the biological dimension creates a human body and the psychological dimension identifies it as its own, that is, it recognizes it and “takes ownership of it.” So, Each human being creates his “own”, a functional psychic instance that contains the information regarding himself. and that gives meaning to his actions and existence in the world and with which he contemplates himself as a person embedded in the past and the future, attached to the environment in which he relates.
But over time, these structures can undergo modifications, both in their components and in the order in which they are organized. Thus, DNA strands can change if mutations or alterations occur due to epigenetic factors. Likewise, A. Damasio points out that the mind is reorganized over time, autobiographical memory changes and stored events acquire new emotional connotations over time. In this way, as the years go by, our own history is subtly rewritten.
However, these changes are not so drastic as to distort the essence of personal identity, since it has been proven that it can be maintained despite some structural modifications in the genome and connectome that may occur during life. But they do lead us to think that not all the information contained in these two structures at a given moment is necessary to constitute the essence of identity, but that There is a fraction of the information that underlies them (genes and…