What is the Essence of a Person and How is it Constructed?

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 PsychologyFor article, we will see What is the essence of a person and how is it constructed?

The essence of a person is a concept that transcends mere physical characteristics and behaviors. It embodies the core attributes that define who we are at a fundamental level. Understanding the essence of a person involves exploring the complex interplay between identity, personality, and experiences. This article delves into what constitutes the essence of a person and how it is constructed, providing a comprehensive look at the factors that shape our individual identities.

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.

The Concept of Essence

Defining Personal Essence

The essence of a person refers to the unique blend of characteristics, values, and experiences that define their core self. It’s what makes an individual distinct and provides a sense of continuity and identity over time.

• Core Attributes: Essence encompasses fundamental traits and values that remain consistent despite external changes.
• Identity: It is deeply tied to how individuals perceive themselves and their place in the world.

Philosophical Perspectives

Philosophically, the essence of a person has been explored through various lenses, including existentialism and essentialism.

• Existentialism: This perspective suggests that essence is not predetermined but rather constructed through individual choices and actions.
• Essentialism: Contrasts existentialism by positing that essence is inherent and defines an individual’s true nature.

Factors Influencing Personal Essence

Genetic Influences

Our genetic makeup plays a significant role in shaping aspects of our essence, such as temperament and predispositions.

• Inherited Traits: Genetics influence personality traits, intelligence, and emotional responses.
• Biological Basis: Understanding the biological foundations of behavior helps explain why certain characteristics are consistent throughout life.

Early Life Experiences

Early experiences and upbringing have a profound impact on the development of personal essence.

• Family Dynamics: Relationships with family members and early caregivers shape our values, beliefs, and emotional patterns.
• Critical Experiences: Significant life events and formative experiences contribute to our self-concept and personal growth.

Social and Cultural Influences

The social and cultural environment in which we are raised also influences our essence.

• Cultural Norms: Cultural values and societal expectations shape our beliefs, behaviors, and identity.
• Social Interactions: Relationships with peers, mentors, and community members contribute to our self-understanding and personal development.

The Role of Self-Perception

Self-Concept

Self-concept refers to the way individuals perceive themselves and their place in the world. It includes self-esteem, self-image, and self-identity.

• Self-Esteem: The value we place on ourselves and our abilities.
• Self-Image: How we see ourselves in relation to others and our environment.

Self-Identity

Self-identity involves the aspects of self that individuals consider central to their being.

• Personal Values: Core beliefs and values that guide behavior and decision-making.
• Life Roles: The various roles we assume (e.g., parent, professional) that contribute to our sense of self.

Constructing and Evolving Essence

Personal Growth and Change

While the essence of a person remains constant in some ways, it is also subject to change and growth.

• Life Experiences: Personal experiences and learning contribute to the evolution of essence.
• Self-Development: Continuous personal development and self-reflection help shape and refine our essence over time.

The Impact of Choices

The choices we make play a crucial role in constructing and redefining our essence.

• Decision-Making: Choices reflect and shape our values, priorities, and identity.
• Self-Expression: Engaging in activities that align with our true self helps reinforce and express our essence.

Understanding and Embracing Your Essence

Self-Awareness

Developing self-awareness is key to understanding and embracing your essence.

• Reflective Practices: Engage in practices like journaling, meditation, and self-reflection to gain insights into your core self.
• Feedback from Others: Seek feedback from trusted individuals to understand how others perceive your essence.

Authenticity

Living authentically involves aligning your actions with your true self and values.

• Authentic Living: Strive to make choices and engage in activities that reflect your true self.
• Personal Integrity: Maintain consistency between your values and actions to foster a sense of authenticity.

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 continuous that 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 persistent are 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 Alzheimer’s patients, 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, would remain 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 in a specific way 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 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 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 autobiographical memory) that persists unchanged over time and it would be there where the essence would reside

The problem therefore lies in determining what is the minimum information that constitutes the unique identity of the person so that, if it changes, they would no longer be that person and would be a different person. This question is an update of the paradox that the Greek Stoic philosopher Zeno (300 BC) explained to his disciples:

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

On a hypothetical level and following Zeno’s approach, It would be a matter of eliminating parts of the information from our psychobiological system until a time came in which I no longer recognized myself as Me that is, we were aware that I was no longer I.

The organization of identity structures

The information that the genome and the connectome provide us about the unique identity depends on how its component elements (nucleotides and neuronal connections) are organized. As Damasio points out: “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 neural network? concrete and not in others? It has been shown that genes are expressed in a certain order, and neuronal 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 neurons require, like any active system, the necessary instructions to perform their function. Instructions that organize and order the structures so that the information that arises 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 in the 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 self-organizes to perform its function (“non-coding” or “regulatory” DNA sequences determine the way, when and where genes They are turned on and off, allowing the same set of genetic puzzle pieces to fit together in thousands of different configurations.)

For its part, the organization of information in neural networks is carried out 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, self-organizing system 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 of this leads us to the conclusion that knowing the essence of a person’s identity is a complex task and, although deciphering the information in the genome is nowadays affordable, the structure of the connectome in which our biography is stored is not so easy. , and both are closely related. The only thing you can aspire to is decide which part of this information is manifested to the outside that is, what can be detected and measured (such as physical and psychological characteristics) is valid to establish an identity and allows one person to be distinguished from another only for organizational functions within the social group.

The essence of a person is a multifaceted concept that encompasses the core attributes, values, and experiences that define who we are. It is shaped by a combination of genetic, environmental, and personal factors and evolves through personal growth and life experiences. By understanding and embracing your essence, you can live more authentically and align your actions with your true self.

FAQs

What is the difference between essence and identity?

Essence refers to the core attributes and values that define an individual, while identity encompasses the overall self-concept, including roles, relationships, and personal beliefs.

How do early life experiences impact personal essence?

Early life experiences shape our values, beliefs, and emotional patterns, influencing the development of our personal essence.

Can personal essence change over time?

Yes, personal essence can evolve through personal growth, life experiences, and changes in self-perception.

How can I better understand my own essence?

Engage in self-reflection, seek feedback from others, and align your actions with your core values to gain a deeper understanding of your essence.

Why is authenticity important in understanding personal essence?

Authenticity involves living in alignment with your true self and values, which helps you fully embrace and express your essence.

This article is merely informative, at PsychologyFor 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 constructed? we recommend that you enter our Cognitive Psychology category.

Bibliography

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