Summary

The identity of a person is thought of as the sum of the person's distinctive characteristics, experiences, memories and ideas. Each human being has a unique identity gained by personal development and continuing in one's future. Genetics and its intensive interaction with environmental factors impacts identity enormously, but also chance plays an important role; added to this, the reflective faculty allows us to actively reflect on our identity, depending on the cultural, social and personal situation. This interaction is broadened by mental processes ranging from illusions over creativity to profound insights into one's world. Thus a person's identity is not static but continually developing under the influence of many factors.

A primary feature of a person is its embodied subject, its necessary union of subjective self-awareness and systemic biology. Conscious experience is a dynamic interaction process between the brain, the body and the environment.

Special case studies of adopted children coming from foreign cultures, identical twins reared apart, feral or socially isolated children or children with severe physical disabilities, e.g. infantile deafblindness, who receive the best possible support show how differently the personality development can play out in different  conditions in which a person grows up.

The same case studies may also suggest, however, that a human being can feel connected to somebody else on the basis of complete familiarity with the other person's living conditions. Identical twins that were raised apart immediately feel a strong connection: Either of them could just as well be the other one.

Thought experiments can support this idea of connectedness:  Assuming that a person had been born a few centuries earlier - how enormously different would that person's personality have developed? Or a person who suffered memory loss in an accident and knows that there must have been a life before the accident but knows absolutely nothing about it anymore. If the accident had occurred abroad and if there was no identification available for the person, it would be impossible for the person to create a reference to that prior life. This idea also supports the fact that it is not any specific matter which makes up our body and thus also our conscious mind but only matter structured in a specific way, as many of the cells in our body are continually replaced. Identical matter structured in that way could be present in the universe somewhere or sometime. One way or another, not as we understand it, as the same living organism but mentally, this "You" would then also be "I" myself. And because the personal identity changes continually, no identical double is required for refinding oneself in another identity.

Our consciousness and hence our experience is a continual flow in the here and now; it invariably takes place in the  present and cannot be allocated to a specific place. No limits of space and time apply. Depending on whether our "I" is made up of sustainable (true and/or reasonable) contents or of ephemeral contents (illusions and unreasonable), a distinction is made between an autonomous "I" and a heteronomous "I", the idea being that only autonomous identities that are alike can refind themselves, irrespective of space and time. This refinding additionally requires love in order to go beyond human limitations.