A Treatise on Personality Theory

Personality, its constructs and origins have baffled neuroscientists for the last century. Personality is of great annoyance to the scientific community and has of yet defied their attempts to deconstruct its mechanics, refusing to concede to empiricism (Lewis, 2009). Personality falls under the umbrella of consciousness; it is by definition observable, but to measure personality is difficult save for its most rudimentary characteristics. Indeed, much of what we know or think we know comes from inferential data.
When studying personality there are two ideological factions; the nomothetic approach – the belief that personality is immutable, the result of environmental and genetic coalescence, a manifestation of determinism (Mullins, 2011) - the idiographic approach favouring individualism and ratifying (to some extent) free will. I tend to side with the idiographic approach, the notion of neurological fluidity is not only an uplifting one but scientifically sound. Of course, free will cannot exist without chance. In Quantum Physics the uncertainty principle necessitates microscopic a...