What is the essence of a person and how is it built

Human beings have common characteristics of our species, but in turn, we also have other singular ones that identify us as unique biological entities and constitute our identity personal. The traits of a person can change, however, there is something that remains: the identity or the personal essential. In this Psychology-Online article, we will see what is the essence of a person and how is it built.

Index

1. What is the essence of a person
2. Can the essence of a person be changed?
3. The psychobiological approach to personal identity
4. How the essence of a person is built
5. How to get to the essence of a person
6. The organization of identity structures

The identity or personal essence can be defined as: "Set of traits or characteristics of a person that allow distinguishing it from others in a set".

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 himself.

Limiting identity to a set of traits poses a problem: traits can change. The morphological can be modified by changing an organ or body structure through transplantation (kidney, heart, arm, hand, etc.), or alter the external appearance through surgery, but despite these changes, we perceive that we are still the themselves.

Likewise, psychological traits are shown to also change by virtue of our daily experiences, knowledge and experiences. With the passing of time, 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 continue being the same ”, forces to consider the idea that there must be something that does not change, that is immutable. The question then arises: what is the nature of this "something" other than the components physical-psychological that identifies us as a unique person and remains unchanged throughout our life?

That "something" is what we define as the essence of personal identity: “That which persists regardless of the superficial changes that a person goes through”. Attributing identity to a series of features that are manifested abroad can serve, from a practical point of view, to individualize a person and distinguish him from others, but they do not constitute his essence since they can change with the weather. Without prejudice to the different possible approaches to address this question (psychosocial, philosophical, biologist, anthropological ...), a way of facing the search for that something that can accepted as the essence of the identity of the person is the psychobiological approach, which considers the human being as a complex, dynamic, open and adaptive system to changes in the environment.

According to this approach, every human being has a stable psychobiological structure and, based on it, channels the possible transformations that he undergoes throughout his life. Starting from this idea, he proposes to focus on this structure and search there for the essence of identity.

The psychobiological approach considers that, based on the biological structures that intervene in the construction and functioning of each system human, emerges, as an emergent property, the sense of an I that transcends such structures and is aware of itself as an autonomous entity. On this point, the British philosopher Derek Parfit points out his perspective on identity in a thought experiment that relies 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 the 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, when waking up on Mars one would feel like oneself, would remember having entered the teleporter to travel loving You.

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 continuous, that is, it maintains an intimate connection between the past, the present and the future.

In this same sense, the neuroscientist A. Damasio affirms that the biological foundation of the sense of the I is in the cerebral mechanisms that represent, moment by moment, the continuity of the same organism. This hypothesis suggests that the brain uses its representational 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 an I in the act of knowing that characterizes the mind aware.

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 they point out that we can only have temporary identities in which some aspects change and remain unchanged others.

From this perspective, it is clear that physical and psychological traits are not immutable or persistent, are subject to changes induced by the human biological system itself in their development and by the environment in which it operates, so they cannot be considered as part of the essence of the identity.

Even the individual perception that a person has about himself, which we have defined as a characteristic of personal identity, it can vary or disappear and, nevertheless, maintain its identity, which shows that it does not depend on the personal conscience about one same. A person may lose self-awareness, as occurs in patients with alzheimer and that does not mean that he ceases to be who he is and, furthermore, continues to be recognized by other people (if the person was alone on an island and lost consciousness, it would remain the same, it is something that does not depend on is).

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 does the essence of identity reside 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 in a specific way for each person, which gives them an identity only.

To build any mechanism, you need to have the necessary information about its structure and some instructions that facilitate its construction, so that it can perform the function to which it is destined. In the same way, to build a human system you also need both factors.

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 brain's neural networks that make up the connectome.

• The genome It is the first link that makes up our individuality. The type and order in which the nucleotides are arranged in the DNA strand is specific to each person (only identical twins share it).
• The connectome It is the complex network of interconnected neurons that stores information from knowledge, experiences and personal experiences (the so-called biographical memory).

Both structures form the two dimensions of the person involved in her identity: biology and biography, since 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 means and the necessary technology, to build a biological system that would be identical to that of the original person (as in the experiment of Parfit).

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 human body concrete. The person is a biological system that thinks, feels and acts; who suffers and enjoys in their relationships with the environment, so, both the biological and psychological dimensions complement each other. There can be two people with the same genomes, as in identical twins, but there cannot be two people who have the same genomes. 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 "appropriates it." A) Yes, each human being creates his "own", a functional psychic instance that contains the information referring to himself and that gives meaning to his actions and existence in the world and with which he sees himself as a person embedded in the past and in 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. Also to. Damasio points out that the mind rearranges itself over time, the autobiographical memory goes changing and stored events take on new emotional connotations throughout the weather. 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, as it has been proven that it can be maintained despite some structural modifications in the genome and connectome that can occur during lifetime. But they do lead us to think that not all the information contained in these two structures at any given time is necessary to constitute the essence of identity, but rather there is a fraction of the information that underlies them (genes and autobiographical memory) that persists unchanged over time and it would be in it where the essence would reside.

The problem is therefore to determine what is the minimum information that constitutes the unique identity of the person so that, if it changes, it would cease to be that person and would be a different person. This question comes to be an update of the paradox that the Greek Stoic philosopher Zeno (300 a. C.) to his disciples:

If we have a heap of sand grains forming a heap and we are removing them grain by grain from it, when will it stop being a heap? What grain of sand turns the heap into a non-heap?

In a hypothetical plane and following the approach of Zeno, It would be about eliminating parts of the information from our psychobiological system until a moment came when it no longer recognized me as I, that is, we were aware that I was no longer Me.

The information that the genome and the connectome give us about the unique identity depends on how their component elements (nucleotides and neuronal connections) are organized. As Damasio points out: "The organization is the invariant of the dynamics of biological systems, the unitary complex of relationships that constitutes the identity of any living being."

Organization is the answer to questions such as: why does a specific trait require the expression of specific related genes and not others? Why is the memory of an experience stored through the contact of specific neurons that form a specific neural network and not in other? Genes are shown to be expressed in a certain order, and neural transmissions at synapses also occur between specific neurons and not at random. It is evident that this very efficient organization of genetic structures and

neuronal requires, like any active system, the necessary instructions to perform its function. Instructions that organize and order the structures in such a way that the information that emerges from them constitutes the essence of identity. The question that arises then is: Where do these instructions reside? Do they arise from the organization of the structures themselves as emergent properties?

The biologist H. Maturana indicates that: "living beings are autopoietic systems, that is, every living being is within a closed system that is constantly growing and creating itself. It is an organization that is maintained over time based on the components that make it up. We produce ourselves, and the realization of that production of ourselves as molecular systems constitutes living. "

The instructions for the formation and expression of DNA molecules are incorporated into the structure itself that organizes itself to perform their function ('non-coding' or 'regulatory' DNA sequences determine how, when and where genes are on and off, giving the option for the same set of pieces of the genetic puzzle to fit together into thousands of different settings).

For its part, the organization of information in neural networks is done through cognitive operators that detail, order, quantify and value perceptions, giving coherence to the accumulation of information received (according to E. d’Aquilli these operators are: the holistic, the reductionist, the abstractive, the quantitative, the causal, the binary, the existential and the emotional). Furthermore, it is known that the brain in action is a non-linear system that organizes itself and in which there is no obvious relationship between the causes and consequences of a given state: subtle changes in a stimulus can generate radically different cortical patterns.

All this leads us to the conclusion that knowing the essence of a person's identity is a complex task and, although deciphering the information from the genome is now accessible, the structure of the connectome in which our biography is stored is not so much, and both are intimately related. The only thing you can hope for is decide what portion of this information is manifested abroad, that is, that can be detected and measured (such as physical and psychological characteristics) is valid to establish an identity and allows distinguishing one person from another only for organizational functions within the group Social.

This article is merely informative, in Psychology-Online we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.

If you want to read more articles similar to What is the essence of a person and how is it built, we recommend that you enter our category of Cognitive psychology.

• Bertalanffy, L. (1982) General systems theory. Madrid. Editorial Alliance.
• Damasio, A. (2001) The feeling of what happens. Destination Editorial
• Maturana, H., & Varela, F. (1998) Of machines and living beings. University.
• Parfit, D. (1984) Reasons and persons. OUP Oxford.