Comparative Analysis of Psychological and Biological Approaches to Personal Identity PSY3041

Topic: What is the psychological approach to personal identity? What is the biological approach? Which approach do you think is better? Give reasons for your answer.

Psychological and Biological Approaches to Personal Identity: A Comparative Analysis

Personality identity is basically what defines a certain person at a certain time in their life despite the characteristics they undergo with time. In philosophy and psychology, two dominant theories attempt to explain personal identity, one is the psychological approach and the other one is the biological one. Both of these frameworks provide different approaches where one focuses on the mind and the other on the body being persistent. This essay will compare and contrast these approaches and conclude that the psychological approach offers a more meaningful account of personal identity. However, it will also acknowledge that there is value at times in the biological perspective especially where medical and neurological issues are concerned (Cervone & Pervin, 2022).

The Psychological Approach to Personal Identity

According to one of the most significant psychological theories about personal identity, identity is shaped mostly by psychological connection. This theory, derived from John Lockes philosophy, considers those aspects that are mental and temporal, including memory, consciousness, personality, and purpose. From this perspective, a person remains a continuous being due to the persistence of mental conditions rather than physical characteristics. This means that Lockes famous notion of the "personal identity consists, not in the identity of substance, but in the identity of consciousness" (Locke, 1948).

In modern psychology, this approach can be observed in theories that affirm the continuity of cognition and emotion, for example, the memory theory. According to memory theory, the self is continuous because memories link the past, present and future self. For instance, when people remember something that occurred in childhood or their first employment, such memories bring together the two mental states of the person.

The psychological approach also allows for alterations in physical or biological states when the altered state is not a threat to identity. For example, a person who may go through a physical change like ageing, getting a disease or having an operation, has not become a different person if their psychological continuity remains the same. Additionally, it can help explain various subtypes, for example, amnesia or dementia where memory loss complicates questions of identity. Despite the possibility of forgetting important events, certain components of personal identity, including temperament and beliefs, may not change (Haslam et al. 2021).

The key advantage of applying the psychological approach is that it entails individual self-observation burdened by the personal standpoint. It claims that people are conscious that they are the same person at different times since they are aware of their existence. This view is similar to the frequency with which people apprehend their self-identity. The ability to think about past events, think of the future and provide a way in which one is connected to ones actions and choices also enhances the perceived self, as a coherent self which exists.

The Biological Approach to Personal Identity

The biological conception of personal identity is mainly concerned only with the continuation of the physical form or biological substance. This view as put forward by Eric Olson (1997) holds that personal identity is determined by the biological continuity, the very body that continues to live. From this perspective, the essence of personal identity is rooted in the continuance of the same bodily or neural substratum.

The biological approach relies on the belief that all mental and psychological processes have physiological roots. It postulated that consciousness, memory and other states are simply downstream of the brain and can never in any world be apart from the body. Thus, this view becomes quite important, especially, when considering such issues as brain damage resulting in the change of personality or cases of identity crisis. In such cases, people are informed that it is possible not to become a different person and maintain the biological purity of the brain (Henrich & Muthukrishna, 2021).

This also does very well in addressing the biological relatedness complications, like a man who has no memory of his family yet has both his arms and legs. For example, consider a patient in a permanent vegetative state, this patient lacks psychological connectedness but is biologically alive. According to the biological view of personal identity, this individual cannot change because their biological organism is still intact even if the client has a damaged or non-existent mind as per the Disputed Case (Lerner & Foch, 2021).
One cannot question the simplicity and clearness of the biological approach as its major advantage. This criterion therefore offers a real and impartial representation of personal Entity in terms of the continuity of the body, it is quantitative/dimensional and amenable to being looked at through the lens of instruments. This is different from the psychological approach where the factors including the mental state are used to identify the individual.

Comparative Analysis: Which Approach is Better?

Although both methods are important to understanding personal identity, the psychological approach is more reasonable in general. It explains the phenomenology of identity, which is crucial to understanding the ways that people feel about themselves. Instead of biological continuity, most people still associate identity with its memories, consciousness, and psychological characteristics. The psychological approach fits in better with the reality of being a subject and a living person, with identity being connected intimately with thinking, feeling, and choosing in the course of the persons life.

The psychological approach has the advantage of dealing with complicated issues such as memory loss, personality transformation, or even receiving a new brain. Suppose there is a fictional situation where the brain has been transferred to a different body. In the psychological approach, if memories, consciousness and personality are intact and the same biography is used aloud then the individual is the same even though the physical body is different. This scenario, on the other hand, presents a challenge to the biological approach since the concept of identity relies on the continuity of the same organism (Rose, 2021).

Moreover, the psychological approach fits well as a method of explaining gradual psychological changes. Individuals become wiser and different in their thoughts and feelings throughout their lifetime, but they always stay the same person. These changes are not necessarily anatomical but are psychological growths that an individual undergoes throughout their life. The psychological continuity theory states that a person feels as if they are the same person if they have a psychological connection between their past and present selves.

Nonetheless, the biological approach has its advantages, especially from the medical and legal perspectives. For example, knowing that individuals with severe brain damage or neurodegenerative diseases lose their identity, the biological approach can shed light on how the identity disappears with the physical damage to the respective part of the brain. Additionally, in legal and ethical considerations, the biological approach is a definitive way of defining the end of life owing to the stoppage of body functions. These practical applications show that more than psychological factors, the continuity of an organisms life is relevant to identity (Allen, 2020).

Conclusion

As the psychological and biological views of personal identity are conflicting, one can conclusively claim that the very notion of personal sameness might be entirely illusory. The idea of memory, consciousness and accessibility of the self gives the metaphysical approach a feel or reality that the other two lack. It gives a more general framework that attends to issues of modification of the body while affirming that an individual continues to exist so long as there is psychological continuity. Notably, this approach comes in handy when trying to understand how individuals can maintain the same identity despite some factors such as ageing or an ailment.

The biological approach, on the other hand, considers the physical body or the organism as the root of the identification. There is no dignity when identity is gone, on one hand, this criterion is very valuable in the context of medicine and law when there is no identity and it has to be stated clearly, black and white. On the other hand, it does not do a very good job in accounting for the creation of a new identity, where there is a change of personality when we speak about psychological change, or about the case of brain transplants where the area of application that has been most related to the biological aspect of life and death is the consequential erasure of a persons individuality and their biological personness in adverse circumstances such as severe cases of head injury or other forms of biological decay.

Therefore, based on the analyses made, the psychological approach appears to be both more reasonable and credible for the embodiment of personal identity as a subject since it draws upon how people perceive their identity subjectively. It explains how meaningful characters like memories and personality make a proper explanation of how an entity comes into existence even when the bodies and conditions change. Thus, in practical and empirical terms, the biological approach to the analysis of personal identity is a helpful one, although the strength and the continuous development of personal identity are likely best understood by a psychological idea of personhood that is at the core of the self of the person in question in terms of agency and temporal continuity.

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