By Danika Koo - South Korea
Introduction
A typical response to this time-worn philosophical question engages thought experiments such as Elon Musk’s suggestion that we download digitised versions of our brains into robots. My argument, however, explores the problem of a persistent identity through adolescence's universal and mundane experience. I narrowed my focus to adolescence due to the confined parameters of ages ten to fifteen, which preclude discussing memory loss, brain transplants, or the seven years required for complete cell regrowth. Moreover, this bridge to adulthood overwhelms the experience for those in this given timeframe, in addition to its pertinence regarding the question at hand, given its association with an identity crisis.
A common recollection of adolescence would resemble what Katharine Isabelle once stated: “Going through puberty as a young girl is so confusing. This monster invades your body, changes things, and makes things grow, and no one tells you what's going on.” In this metaphor, the foreign fiend that takes over the teenage girl’s body is hijacking her autonomous will and replacing her self-constituting goals, roles, traits, and hobbies with its own until the girl’s original identity is completely subsumed. The metaphor speaks to the sense of disorientation resulting from natural changes that feel abnormal and the popular understanding that adolescence disrupts one’s continued sense of self. In this paper, however, I will advance arguments contrary to this common belief by proposing a more nuanced understanding of personal identity.
Physical Argument: Biological and Bodily Continuity
Puberty refers to the period during which humans reach sexual maturity. Society’s coming-of-age ceremonies, however, suggest that “reaching” puberty marks a complete rupture from childhood, as individuals are “reborn” and recast into new social roles. The bodily transformation that calls for such ceremonial pomp and social significance is the female's newfound reproductive abilities, as increasing oestrogen levels initiate menstrual periods. Puberty comes with many other conspicuous and disruptive physical transformations. We grow body hair. Acne spots our faces. We grow taller practically overnight. Yet, does this constitute a shift in one’s identity?
Theorists who argue for a person’s diachronic persistence in terms of physical continuity suggest the thought experiment of a brain transplant. In this futuristic example, a person’s brain is removed from the original body and placed in a stranger’s skull. For the pubescent individual, the onset of puberty may certainly feel like a brain transplant, as they experience alienation from a body that rapidly changes beyond recognition. However, the conspicuous, sometimes disconcerting changes belie the fundamental continuity that preserves personal identity philosophically.
Perhaps the most change erupts on our skin. With an upsurge in hormones, many individuals suffer from the hallmark adolescent feature – acne. Not only is acne a conspicuous physical deformation, but the “damage” it wreaks on our faces has far-reaching implications regarding self-identity. I can easily identify myself in a distant memory immortalised in a photograph, as I recognise the slight unbalanced tilt of an eyebrow and the crook of my nose in the much plumper baby face. After all, the unique features of a person’s face typically enable us to distinguish them from numerous others.
But does acne’s considerable deformation of a pubescent face signify an alteration of personal identity? This acne has no bearing on the persistence of one’s biological self. First, acne is the consequence of puberty’s hormonal imbalances, so it is better understood as a temporary disruption that recedes with time rather than a consequential transformation that redefines oneself. Second, acne occurs on one’s body, but the relevant bodily organ remains largely unchanged by this side effect regarding functional continuity. Regardless of acne, one’s skin protects against external harm, regulates body temperature, and performs as a sensory organ. Third, the skin separates the individual from the external environment using its self-enclosing feature. I am divisible and discrete because my skin functions as a barrier, and the persistence of this barrier ensures that I remain fundamentally unchanged..
Furthermore, pubescent girls become “women” as the onset of their monthly menstrual cycle heralds newfound child-bearing capacities and physical transformations like larger breasts and wider hips. Unlike acne, menstruation persists for decades until menopause. It involves a significant functional difference in the ovaries, which merely store eggs in prepubescent years, but then begin to release eggs during monthly ovulation that await conception upon fertilisation. Furthermore, achieving “womanhood” is significant since biological sex and related gender-associated roles are often important for one’s self-understanding and self-concept. From an evolutionary perspective, gaining reproductive capacity would also make one a completely different entity.
However, even this fails to constitute a change in personal identity since essential physical continuity remains. There is still a continuous biological function as one is born with ovaries and eggs. Hence, menstruation is better understood as a natural consequence of the biological mechanisms intrinsic to one’s body. Moreover, sexual maturity is a natural extension of biological gender upon birth. Hence, the specific puberty experience one undergoes is predetermined by the XY sex-determination system even before birth. Thus, the popular understanding that sexual maturity constitutes a transformation of self, a break from childhood, is rather misleading. A better understanding of the transformations occurring to adolescents as physical bodies or biological organisms (the brute-physical account, which is the idea that we are identical to our minds) would suggest that I am the same person I was when I was ten.
Psychological Argument: Persistence in Psychological Relation
While commonly conflated, puberty and adolescence are distinct in that the latter also includes transformations in one’s psychological, cognitive, and social abilities prompted by the onset of puberty. Popular culture typically equates adolescence with the crawling caterpillar’s metamorphosis into the ethereal and iridescent butterfly. This analogy reflects the common understanding that a child’s maturation into an adult is like the dramatic transformation from a grotesque critter to a universal symbol of beauty. This analogy equates adolescence with the cocoon stage, largely transitional and gruelling, significant only as a stepping stone en route to adulthood.
Nevertheless, analogies can be misleading. The gruelling coming-of-age ordeal reshapes you, but it does not remake you into an unidentifiable other. Even the butterfly of the suggestive metaphor retains memories that ensure fundamental psychological continuity despite the radical changes in morphology, diet, and behaviour. Previous scholars assumed that caterpillar brains experienced neural rewiring when body parts became liquified in the cocoon’s “caterpillar soup.” One groundbreaking experiment demonstrated that previous memories remain as caterpillars survived the physical disintegration of the “adolescent” cocoon stage so that treatment group caterpillars that learned to avoid certain chemicals continued to evade the same chemicals as fully grown winged creatures.
Similarly, the persistence of identity can be argued on account of psychological continuity despite manifest changes that support the analogy of metamorphosis. Entering adulthood is associated with a juvenile and egocentric view of life-changing expansion to accommodate other people and their needs. Growing up also requires controlling one's emotions, assuming responsibility for one's actions, and reining in impulsive desires. Altogether, the successful transition to adulthood is associated with significant psychological change. Nonetheless, these psychological changes do not necessarily mean a break in personal identity if the latter is understood in light of narrative identity. This concept breaks away from the notion of an essentialized, unchanging core of “who I am” and instead makes room for an extended, negotiated, multi-staged conception of identity.
Surprisingly enough, accounts of psychological discontinuity that echo traditional understandings of metamorphosis find proponents among psychology experts. For instance, a common concept within adolescent psychology literature is a crisis, which connotes abnormal confusion and conflict. The most famous psychologist on the subject, Erik Erikson, argued that an “identity crisis” is a definitive experience of the adolescent developmental stage. According to Erikson (1970), the adolescent suffers a disorienting collision between “irreversibly given” conditions and the “open choices”, which become available with the onset of puberty and self-conscious sexual and role development that follow. For example, even the most sensitive boys fight off tears to live up to the masculine ideal of stoicism that comes with their newfound role as men. Broughton also continues the theme of discontinuity in his concept of the “divided self” in adolescence – “ a dualism of true, inner self and false, outer appearance” (Broughton, 13).
Alternatively, I argue for continuity by suggesting that one’s identity is not some monolithic, fixed essence but a dynamically constructed and diachronically extended product of negotiation. In line with the concept of narrative identity, I believe identity to be “the internalised and evolving story of the self that a person constructs to make sense and meaning out of his or her life” (McAdams and McLean, 233). This “story” that provides individual identity with structural coherence combines a selectively reconstructed past with an imagined future, anticipated in light of a continuing narrative, explaining a person’s past life trajectory and future direction.
Narrative identity is the cognitive and affective foundation for perceiving and organising life experiences (Hammack, 222). At the confluence of three personality layers, the foundational stratum comprises enduring traits like openness or agreeableness. These traits resist change despite adverse experiences, even in the tumultuous phase of adolescence. In addition to these traits, individuals establish life stage-specific, self-determined goals, constituting a motivational agenda that guides the realisation of values and life projects. Unlike fixed traits, goals gain prominence in later life stages.
Narrative identity acts as the apex layer, harmonising an individual's disparate dispositions, motivations, and values into a coherent account of their identity. This narrative, shaping personal development, influences how one interprets and engages with the world within the framework set by their narrative account.
Conclusion
I am still the same person I was when I was ten, although my defining goal from five years ago may seem worlds apart from my current aspirations. At ten, my greatest goal was to make vibrant friendship bracelets and necklaces to don as friendship totems. At fifteen, my goal is to gain the respect of my peers so I can lead them in collective efforts for the better. The value of social validation has made way for the larger goals of equality and social justice. Still, how my goals are pursued is fundamentally identical if the execution has changed. Moreover, I understand this fundamental change is not a negation of my past self; instead, it is an important stage in my personal growth. Ultimately, the continuity of the human self persists through temporal changes, whether physical or mental and each iteration of ourselves as we grow still remains authentic to us.
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