me.

i believe the question of "who am i?" is one of the hardest in human history.

here is the logic i follow: to fully know the “self", they need to observe the "self" in all different environments (yes i see “self” in empirical way), and we know that is impossible. one can say they know "who they are" in certain environments, but then also these environments depend on the time they were in. a person's response to the exact same event can alter at different times in life. more mathematically, self is a function of space and time. having a clean definition of self which is differentiable, is almost impossible. (i recently added derek parfit’s "reasons and persons" on my “want to read” list.)

so, in the following i will focus on “who i want to be” more than “who am i”.

but yes there is a self and there are facts. facts are more traceable.

facts:

i was born on a sunny winter day of the year 1994 in istanbul, turkey. i was a big city kid and the only child of my parents. my parents do not hold any higher education. they were turkish high middle class family from the epoch where middle class was strong. i have followed a private elementary school then a private french high school. something that was affordable at the time.
i was based in istanbul until my 25. i always wanted to be an engineer and build stuff. when i became engineer i lost my passion, it mostly related to rover project we did in the university. it was a challenging engineering project. i understood that i have more interests in the fundamentals. read george gamow, first impressed by his determinism, then understood that he is physicst. he uses the math to explain world. loved it.
i left istanbul to go to paris to study physics. first i did one year of erasmus, then 2 years of master’s. i developed interests in both ends of the spectrum, particle physics and cosmology. tiny things and huge things ↗. later i grew a little uneasy about the colorness, flavorness of particles.
i found a phd position to work on cosmology at ufes where i am at the moment.

the facts are done. now, what i want to be:

i want to be a lot of things. i want to learn how to play guitar, i want to write a book, act in a piece of theatre. and much more. i very well know that my time is limited. i want to use it well. this doesnt mean that i dont have time for bullshit. i (aparently) do. i value experiences, any kind. i dont want to spend my whole life trying to be perfect in a single thing. it reminds me of a quote by djakovic about discipline:

“How much discipline? In January 2012 I beat Nadal in the Australian Open final... I wanted one thing: to taste a little chocolate. I hadn’t tasted it since the summer of 2010. Miljan brought me a candy bar. I broke off one square - one tiny square - and let it melt in my mouth. That was all I would allow myself. That is what it has taken to get to number one.” — Novak Djokovic

not eating chocolate for 2 and half years to be the best tennis player of the planet. where i stand is: tennis is great yes but a good chocolate is nice too. the word i am tryin to describe is “balance".

i love to think (a lot), to solve problems, and explain things. i like the joy when you debug a code or a thought, draw your first conclusion (maybe a pk) and it exactly as you expect. good feelings. i like the free intellectual environments. i want to be in research/education life (where we call academia). i want it to be equally free to all human beings. space for free speeches, free thoughts, free expression. we need to kill the academic ego.

maybe "who i want to be" is the only honest answer to "who am i." maybe “wanting", a direction, not a content, is itself a cross-situational constant. not where you want to go, but where you want to arrive. maybe it's the one thing that persists across environments and times.

and "who am i" is just the data. the self function is a fit over it. that fit is not differentiable and the extrapolation degrades the further out you go. maybe we should stop trying to perfect the fit. explore more, gather more data from each environment, each patch of time, and update. not toward a final answer but toward a better local model.

and that is enough.