Is identity a mental construct? Is it real?

Question

Is the "me" an idea shaped by past experiences and memory, or is it something greater and unchanging.. What is the essence of a "person"?

Answer 1

There are several questions in your post. Identity and essence are broad terms. They are not uniquely defined in a standard way.

1. In general, when waking up in the morning each person experiences themselves as the same person as yesterday evening. That’s the self-experience of identity and unity. It is a continuous phenomenon, shaped by past biographic experience and interpretation.
2. Self-experience is conceptualized by neuroscience as the mental process of a self-model, embedded into a world-model. Hence you may call the self-model a mental construct. Neuroscience attempts to find out the neural correlate of these two models.
3. During phases of mental disorder the self-model and the world-model may break down or get mixed up. Psychology discriminates and classifies different forms of mental disorder.

Answer 2

There are at least two or three very distinct clusters of questions here which need to be disentangled:

1. What makes a particular person that kind of person? Here "that kind" refers to some common way we may have of talking about individual persons (or even individual animals), such as "a curious person", "a narcissist", "a gullible person easily conned by charismatic politicians", "someone who volunteers for a suicide mission", "someone who becomes a Buddhist monk".
2. What (if anything) constitutes personhood? More in particular, what constitutues the sense of "self" that persons have? What are the essential components of that "self"? Can we say that this "self" developed or should we say it 'sprang into being' at some point (or perhaps that it's timeless)?
3. What (if anything) constitues the sense of unity that a conscious, normal person has when they use the word "I" and speak of "my" experiences, "my" beliefs, "my" body? Is this unity the same as continuity (across time) of "me being me"?

If I bend question (1) towards myself, then it becomes "What made me me (in the sense of the type of person I am)?" This is a question as to any decisions I may have made in the past ("what were you reasons for starting to study philosophy? taking up carpentry?"), and to the general conditions that allowed me (or constrained me, or even caused me) to become like a particular type (or stereotype, if you will). If there is any explanation, it will either be part of general genetics ("the type of person that has brown eyes" or "a person with a melancholic temperament") or part of my history (which is part of the history of society). In other words, I don't think there is any mystery here -- this is generally accepted, and not directly relevant philosophically. History (perhaps autobiography) and psychological development tell the story here.

Question (2) is a general question about the concept of "being a person" or "having a (sense of) self".

In the most general sense, "a sense of self" does not require personhood. The immune system will fight anything that is not-self on its level. Cats and dogs most definitely have a "sense of self", but are not persons. But when we talk about "personal self" our ideas about what may be essential may be largely shaped by the culture and society in which we have grown up. For instance, we generally take it as obvious that individuals (rather than groups) are morally responsible for their actions. (That is, those individuals who we recognize as adult, human persons.) This goes together with the idea that individual persons have certain basic moral rights. Those ideas are -- at least to me -- mostly self-evident intuitions -- and they are part of what constitutes a "human person". However, I suspect that the way people in early cultures (early Greek or early Chinese culture for instance) saw "personhood" may have been quite different. (Also, the strongly, almost pathologically individualist attitude that is pushed in certain societies, e.g. in the US, I think, further colors those ideas, even though this may be imperceptible to some people, and imperceptible when different parties express those ideas. It may become visible however, in disputes about concrete cases.)

As to (3) - I don't know if we have more than metaphors to hold on to (for now). Personally, I like to think of "my" continuity as similar to the continuity of a rope, strung together from different shorter fibers, each clinging to and entangled with their locally surrounding fibers, but without one "essential" fiber running from beginning (my birth) to the end (now). (This metaphor comes from Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons.) My memories are not things that I possess and that I can look at as something 'external' to me -- they are me. The "me" is bound up in them -- even though I know that false memories are possible and that some of mine are dubious (at least incomplete, sketchy, smoothed out as it were).

Also, "my body", the unity of "me" and "my body" is rather difficult to clearly conceptualize. It turns out to be extremely simple to give someone the illusionary apperception of being touched, being stroked with a feather over one's hand. See for instance The Phantom Hand experiment. In this experiment, one hand of the subject is hidden behind a towel or screen and a rubber replica of the hand is located at the place where the hand would normally be (so the link between underarm and hand is hidden from view by a towel). The subject is fully aware of all this. The experimenter than starts stroking the rubber hand with a small object, a pencil or feather. After a very short while, the subject will start having the immediate "spooky" feeling that their actual hand is being stroked. As conclusion the authors write:

Consider what these illusions imply. All of us go through life making certain assumptions about our existence. “My name has always been Joe,” someone might think. “I was born in San Diego,” and so on. All such beliefs can be called into question at one time or another for various reasons. But one premise that seems to be beyond question is that you are anchored in your body. Yet given a few seconds of the right kind of stimulation, even this axiomatic foundation of your being is temporarily forsaken, as the table next to you seems to become part of you. As Shakespeare aptly put it, we are truly “such stuff as dreams are made on.”

Answer 3

OP: “What is the essence of a "person"?”

For Heidegger the essence of a person is their existence.

Being & Time ¶ 9. The Theme of the Analytic of Dasein

We are ourselves the entities to be analysed. …

I . The 'essence' ["Wesen"] of this entity lies in its "to be" [Zu-sein] . Its Being-what-it-is [Was-sein] (essentia) must, so far as we can speak of it at all, be conceived in terms of its Being (existentia). …

The essence of Dasein lies in its existence. …

In this case existence precedes essence. This is a unique case because usually—with 'things' objectively beheld—essence precedes existence, in that the notion of the thing precedes its perception or actualisation.

Sartre popularised the phrase, and here Wikipedia there is some critical vagueness regarding whether it applies to people (as Dasein) or to things objectively present-at-hand (in disregard to Dasein).

The proposition that existence precedes essence (French: l'existence précède l'essence) is a central claim of existentialism, which reverses the traditional philosophical view that the essence (the nature) of a thing is more fundamental and immutable than its existence (the mere fact of its being).

Note 7 remarks

Sartre, in Being and Nothingness (1943), credits a slightly longer version of the claim to Heidegger.

As regards the essence and existence of things "present-at-hand" [vorhanden] (in Heidegger's parlance) there is a post here:

Surely in order for something to be “actual” and to be able to be “actual,” it must first be possible.

In which case, ie. for 'things', essence precedes existence.

Answer 4

The idea of "me" is easily correlated with the ego, whereas another form of self is the "I". The "I" can be understood as the Ego, pronounced Eigo, with reverence to Greek and even initial tongue. Taking this into account, identity associated with ego could be faux, or at the very least improper. If improper, then the experiences of the me could be nothing but fiction. In regard to memory, we do not suggest that "me recall", rather it is "I recall". Thusly, proper recollection is in regard to Eigo, not ego. Past experience as well is best understood in regard to "I", especially if we are to suggest that "I did this" or "I did that". "Me did that" or "Me did this" is not necessarily linguistically proper. In reference to "I know what happened to me" or "I know what happened to I", we see that the former is referencing two selves, whereas the latter is referencing oneself. This is when you take into account the understanding that the ego is the me, whereas the Eigo is the I. Thusly, any recollection of events pertaining to two selves for one individual, is potentially dissociating from the actual experience itself. In fact, oneself can indeed accumulate many experiences through a vast majority of "selves". This is best understood through past lives and even the present life.

Thusly, the essence of an individual is best understood via the "I", whereas the "me" is lower or not necessary. Regardless, the "me" can indeed be exercised via the "I" as a fictitious expression. This fictitious expression obviously requires the "I" to be understood prior. This prior understanding is necessary to ensure that the "me" does not retain full control.

Regardless, I would argue that the "I" is the greater self, whereas the "me" is the lesser self. Thusly, one must attend to the "I" in order to understand the self, which is not necessarily requiring of identity.

Answer 5

Words like "me" "self" "identity" "person" etc. look to me like conventional designators, words for things without essences. I'm not just referring to the arbitrary nature of those signifiers, but how everything is moving/changing and while there is continuity between the person that started this answer and whoever hits submit, that reduces to how the former brought about the latter, rather than anything metaphysical.