Erotapokriseis XII
EN:
Hello, my dear readers,
I’ve responded to most of your emails, but I thought I would answer a few of your questions here as well. And first, thank you so much for reading and for all your thoughtful feedback. It really means a lot to me! :) I have news!
As some of you wanted, I migrated the blog to Substack a few weeks ago. Some of you kept telling me, “Filiz, we check your page from time to time to see if you posted something. Is there some way to know when you publish?” Apparently, yes! :D If you leave your email address on Substack, I think it lets you know whenever I publish something. So this is our third migration now. :) First Medium, then GitHub, and now Substack.
But! We are not actually leaving GitHub. I will still post everything here, and it will also appear on Substack. Substack is basically just there to tell you, “Hey, Filiz posted something.” :D Also, Substack is not really a good place for my science posts anyway because it cannot properly render equations, so for those posts, I will probably just put a small paragraph there and direct you here for the actual article. Ay, I wrote so much just to explain this. :D
Basically: WE ARE STILL ON GITHUB! And, and, aaaand… this took some courage, but I opened the anonymous question box again. :D You can now write to me anonymously under every post. I just hope we do not return to the same gossip-y, absurd questions from before. Please behave. :D For now, the anonymous box will stay open under each post, and you can ask me whatever you would like there.
And really, thank you so much.:)
TR:
Merhaba sevgili okurlarım :)
Çoğunuzun maillerine cevap verdim ama birkaç şeyi buradan da söyleyeyim istedim. Öncelikle okuduğunuz, yazdığınız ve güzel geri dönüşleriniz için çok teşekkür ederim! Küçük bir haberim de var: Birkaç hafta önce, isteyenler olduğu için blogu Substack’e de taşıdım. Ama merak etmeyin, hâlâ GitHub’dayız! :) Yazılarımı yine burada yayınlayacağım; Substack daha çok yeni bir şey yazdığımda size haber versin diye var. Zaten bilim yazıları için pek uygun değil, denklemleri düzgün render edemiyor. Bir de biraz cesaretimi toplayıp anonim soru kutusunu yeniden açtım; şimdilik her yazının altında bana anonim olarak yazabilirsiniz. Umarım bu kez önceki gibi magazinsel ve absürt sorular gelmez. :) Ve tekrar, gerçekten çok teşekkür ederim. :)
1) Q: Does the apparent fine-tuning of the universe (The Fine-Tuned Universe) fill you with wonder, or with suspicion? And, If the constants of the universe could have been otherwise, does that weaken our idea of reality?
A: Suspicion, mostly. In physics, whenever a number looks suspiciously tuned, it often means we are missing the deeper theory that makes it inevitable, not that someone set a dial. Wonder at the universe always; but “fine-tuned” is usually nature telling me my equations aren’t finished yet. :)
And for the second question: Not really, because we don’t actually know they could have been otherwise. We have no complete theory of where the constants come from, and ignorance isn’t the same as contingency. Reality isn’t weakened by our not reaching the bottom; it’s just still holding something back.
2) Q: If we are constantly changing (The Problem of the Self), in what sense are we still the same person?
A: In no fixed sense, and I’ve made peace with that. There’s no little core “me” sitting untouched beneath the changes, only a continuity, a thread of memory and pattern that keeps re-tying itself. I’m not the same person. I’m the same story, still being told.
I don’t think being the same person requires remaining the same thing. The child I was, the person I was ten years ago, and the person writing this now would disagree about an astonishing number of things. Some of my fears disappeared, some convictions became stronger, others I abandoned completely. Even many of my memories have probably changed in the remembering. If identity depended on preserving some fixed set of traits, I would have stopped being “me” many times already. What persists is not a substance but a relationship between these different versions. I remember being her. I inherited consequences from her decisions. Some of her loves, wounds, habits, questions, and promises reached me, even when their form changed along the way. And whatever I do now will become part of the person I am later, even if she eventually looks back at me with the same mixture of affection and disbelief with which I look at my younger selves.
So I think sameness is closer to continuity than identity. A river is still called by the same name even though none of its water stays put. Maybe we are something like that. Not because there is an invisible essence holding everything together, but because one state flows into another without a clean break. This is also why I don’t feel particularly threatened by the idea that there is no permanent self. I actually find it comforting. It means I don’t owe lifelong loyalty to every version of myself I have ever been. I can outgrow beliefs, revise myself, become softer in some places and harder in others, and none of that is a betrayal of some “true” Filiz hidden underneath. There may be no final version underneath. So again: I’m not the same person. I’m the same story, still being told. And perhaps even “the same story” is slightly too neat. Stories get edited too. :)
3) Q: When scale changes (The Renormalization Group), do only the equations change, or does the language of reality change too?
A: Both, and that is the deep part. The couplings run with scale, yes, but so does the vocabulary of what we are willing to call fundamental. Quarks and gluons give way to protons, protons to nuclei, and yesterday’s ontology quietly becomes today’s microscopic detail. Renormalization is not merely the statement that our equations depend on scale. It is the rather inconvenient fact that nature seems under no obligation to preserve our favorite description of it. Reality speaks a different dialect at every scale, and reductionism does not get to declare one of them the only honest one!
4) Q: Do you find Faust understandable? At what point does the desire to know more become something tragic?
A: Completely understandable; the wanting-to-know is the least alien thing in the world to me. It turns tragic the moment knowing becomes a way of not living, when you would trade every actual morning for one more secret. Faust’s sin isn’t curiosity. It’s contempt for the ordinary hours.
He wants the universe to reveal itself to him, but he has no patience for the life already happening in front of him. At some point, the hunger to know everything becomes an inability to love anything that is merely finite.
Aren’t we all a little Faustian, though?
I recognize that impulse more than I would like to admit. I spent a long part of my life like a racehorse, and sometimes I still become one. There are moments when I have to stop and ask myself very simple questions: Why am I rushing? What am I actually feeling? What is already good here? Sometimes you can still be hungry for more and say, quite deliberately, enough for now.
Perhaps this is also why I have grown suspicious of the modern obsession with “leaving your comfort zone.” Apparently every quiet corner of life must now be escaped, optimized, or turned into personal growth. I don’t believe that. Temperance matters. Knowing when to pursue more is important, but knowing when to tell your own appetite to be quiet is a kind of wisdom too. A little grandmotherly, perhaps, but grandmothers have occasionally been right about things.
5) Q: As someone who plays Go, do you think the game reveals a person’s intelligence more, or their character?
A: Character, without question!
Intelligence may get you through the opening, but the middlegame tells me much more about you: how you behave when you are losing, whether you become greedy when you are ahead, whether you panic inside a messy position, whether you can stay patient when the board refuses to go the way you planned. Over a full game, it becomes very difficult to hide yourself. The stones keep a surprisingly honest record.
There is also one quality I have noticed in almost every Go player I consider truly good: temperance. They are usually humble, patient, and very difficult to provoke. And you can learn quite a lot about a person simply from how much space they are willing to leave you. Some players want everything. Every corner, every side, every little point. Others seem to understand instinctively that a good game needs room for two people.
And this may sound strange, but after playing people from many different places, I sometimes feel as though I can glimpse little cultural habits on the board too. Please read this as cultural codes, not stereotypes! These are only my own impressions from the people I have happened to play.
When I play Americans, for example, I often feel as if we are not exactly playing together. It feels more like two people independently building their own games on the same board.
Turkish players feel much more emotional to me. Even when you attack them, they sometimes hesitate before attacking back, almost as if they are thinking, “Maybe she does not really mean it as an attack.” :D There is a strange amount of emotional interpretation happening between the stones.
With French players, I always feel as if we are flirting with the game. One move forward, one move back, approach, retreat, approach again… and for some reason nobody wants to finish anything. Ahahah.
Japanese players, at least the ones I have played, tend to approach the board very harmoniously. There is almost an aesthetic responsibility attached to every stone. The game should not only work, it should somehow look right. Very reserved, almost as if winning is not terribly important to them, while every tiny move is, of course, quietly helping them win.
Chinese players have usually been the hardest for me. They can be incredibly calm. Quiet, patient, almost unreadable. Nothing dramatic happens, nothing looks particularly threatening, and meanwhile they are absolutely trying to kill you. :D Playing them sometimes gives me the feeling of saman altından su yürütmek: everything looks peaceful on the surface while something very serious is happening underneath.
And since I am happily analyzing everyone else, I should probably say how I play too.
I usually begin with very good composure. Calm, patient, sensible Filiz. :D But I am also affected by the person across from me, so at some point I tend to become emotionally involved in the game. Then I have to catch myself, put the emotion aside, and return to what I actually enjoy most, which is not simply defeating the other person but building something interesting with them on the board.
My calmness and patience are often misunderstood, though. Apparently this is not limited to real life; I am misunderstood in Go too. Eh, I am used to it by now. :)
What I find funny is that by the end of the game, my opponent is often annoyed with me, sometimes even a little upset. They tend to underestimate the small things I build on the board. They look too minor, too local, too insignificant to have any real effect, so they do not take them very seriously.
I never really mind being underestimated. :)
Because sometimes that little thing they dismissed for half the game turns out to be the stone that kills them!
6) Q: Does symmetry breaking feel to you like the loss of order, or like the emergence of reality? And if perfect symmetry is only an unseen possibility, is the world we live in real precisely because it is imperfect?
A: Emergence, every time. The symmetry is still there in the laws; the world simply has to pick one concrete solution in order to exist, and in the picking, structure appears: direction, mass, a magnet’s north. Order is not lost when symmetry breaks. That is the exact moment a featureless possibility becomes a real thing.
And to answer your second question, yes, and I find that almost tender. Perfect symmetry is sameness in every direction, which is another way of saying nothing has happened yet. It is potential, not existence! Ah! :) The world we live in is the broken one, and the breaking is precisely what allowed anything to take shape at all. Perhaps imperfection is not what went wrong with reality. Perhaps it is what made reality possible in the first place!
7) Q: Did the idea that gravity is not a force but the geometry of spacetime (General Relativity) change your intuition about reality? What moves you most about it: its mathematical beauty, or the way it almost turns the world inside out?
A: Profoundly! The turning-inside-out, though the beauty is how it does it. Once you absorb that a planet orbiting the sun is just following the straightest line it can through curved spacetime, “force” stops being fundamental and becomes a story we told before we saw the shape of things. Nothing pulls the Earth; it goes straight, and the straight is bent.
That is what moves me most about general relativity: Einstein didn’t add a force; he changed what space and time are. The radical move was not to complicate reality, but to see it differently. It’s the rare case where the more radical idea is also the more elegant one, and reality sided with the radical.
This question came in Turkish.
8) Q: Sizi uzaktan okuyan birinin hakkınızda yanılacağı en tehlikeli şey ne olurdu?
A: Beni yalnızca aklımdan ibaret sanması.
Blogda daha çok düşünen tarafım görünüyor tabii. Fizik, felsefe, kitaplar, kavramlar, biraz itiraz, biraz merak, biraz da “bir dakika ama burada bir sorun var” hali. :) O yüzden beni sadece ciddi, soğuk, fazla entelektüel ya da ulaşılması zor biri gibi hayal etmek kolay olabilir.
Ama ben yalnızca düşünen biri değilim. Çok gülen, çok seven, sevdiği insanlara karşı fazlasıyla yumuşayan, bazen çocuk gibi heyecanlanan, bazen de çok basit şeylerle mutlu olan biriyim. Güzel bir yemek, deniz kenarı, sevdiğim birinin sesi, iyi yazan bir kalem, beklenmedik bir nezaket, küçük bir şaka… Bunlar beni sandığınızdan daha kolay yakalar.
Belki de hakkımda en yanlış anlaşılabilecek şey şu: Derinlik ile sertliği aynı şey sanmak. Ben derinliği severim, ama sertliği sevmem. Zekâyı severim, ama gösterişini değil. Gücü severim, ama kabalığını değil.
Beni gerçekten tanımak isteyen biri, ne düşündüğüme baktığı kadar, neye inceldiğime de bakmalı bence. İnsan kendini yalnızca fikirlerinde değil, yumuşadığı yerlerde de ele verir.
This question came in Turkish.
9) Q: MR yazınız kalbime çok dokundu. Kendimize mutluluk borcumuz var hakikaten. Şimdi nasılsınız? İyileştiniz mi?
A: Ah, ne mutlu bana duygularim yaziyi okuyana gecebildiyse… Tesekkur ederim. Daha iyiyim. Her gun iyi olmaya calisiyorum. Calisiyorum, yeni seyler ogreniyorum, geziyorum, haftasonlarimi dolu dolu geciriyorum. Sevdigim yemekleri yiyorum. Daha da iyi olacagim. Daha mutlu olmak istiyorum. Vucudumu iyilestirmeye calisiyorum. Iyilesecegim. :)
This question came in Turkish.
10) Q: Sizi seven insanların sizde gördüğü ama sizin kendinizde görmekte zorlandığınız şey ne?
A: Belki de ne kadar sevilebilir olduğumu.
Bunu yazmak bile biraz garip hissettiriyor. :) Ama sanırım doğru cevap bu. Beni seven insanlar bende sıcaklık, sadakat, komiklik, inatçılık, zeka, bazen de çocuk gibi bir heyecan gördüklerini söylüyorlar. Ben ise çoğu zaman kendimi eksiklerimden, yetişemediklerimden, yapamadıklarımdan ibaret görmeye daha yakınım. Hatta bazen hakettiğimden fazla sevildiğimi bile düşünüyorum.
Sevildiğinizde insan biraz şaşırıyor. Çünkü siz kendinizi içeriden biliyorsunuz; dağınıklığınızı, korkularınızı, beceremediğiniz şeyleri, geç kaldığınız yerleri. Ama başkaları bazen sizin kendinizden sakladığınız iyi tarafları daha net görüyor.
Sanırım bu yüzden sevilmek benim için aynaya bakmak gibi değil. Bir yerde öyle olması gerektiğini okumuştum. Benim için daha çok, benim göremediğim bir pencerenin açılması gibi sevilmek.
This is not a question.
11) C: I loved your piece on Wittgenstein—absolutely loved it. Though actually, “loved” might not be quite the right word. I was so triggered by it that I stopped reading two or three times. But I kept going back to it, thinking, okay, what the hell is she actually getting at? Eventually I made it to the end, and then, more or less at random, read your “I Do Not Want to Be Silent” section. And you reminded me exactly why I have such a visceral dislike of academic philosophy. I remember thinking, damn, this woman’s got balls. There’s such clarity in the way you think. I’m really glad I stumbled across your blog.
A: Thank you, this made me laugh. :) Honestly, the fact that you stopped reading two or three times, got annoyed, and still came back to ask yourself what the hell I was trying to say might be one of the nicest compliments you could give me!
And “damn, this woman’s got balls” absolutely made my day. Ahahah. :)
I think part of my problem with academic philosophy is that it can become so dry, sterile, and insulated that it starts to feel like a comfortable little world for people who do not particularly want to be disturbed.
I am really glad you found the blog. And even more glad you kept reading after wanting to throw Wittgenstein at the wall. :))
Also, since you wrote anonymously, I have no way of reaching you. If you are ever in Dallas or somewhere nearby, please write to me. I would genuinely love to have coffee with you.
Much love, Filiz
12) Q: If I could step inside your mind like a private museum, what would be waiting for me in the very first room?
A: That’s such an interesting question. Thank you for asking!
I don’t know. Probably not a very tidy place. :)
There would probably be half-finished books on the table, papers with notes on them, fountain pens, silly little objects, maybe one or two pieces of origami. And somewhere, definitely, there would be the sea. Because no matter how much I live in Dallas now, a part of my mind still feels like it stayed in İzmir, maybe even a little in Urla.
I don’t think there would be any grand answers in the first room. More like small things. A feeling left from the books I read as a child, the smell of the sea, the sounds of my grandmother moving around in the kitchen, and sometimes, the smell of freshly baked cake waiting for me when I came home tired from playing outside. Things I have tried to understand but still haven’t fully understood, underlined sentences I was probably too young to understand but somehow refused to leave behind, unfinished notebooks, questions I sometimes take too seriously, and maybe a little embarrassment about how intensely I have always cared about things that other people seemed able to pass by so easily.
My mind keeps evidence of attempts, not only achievements. There would probably be some physics in one corner too. I won’t say a blackboard, that would be too dramatic, but yes, some equations, some concepts, some “wait, but why is it like this?” moments. :)
I think the person leaving that room would understand this about me: I am not someone who has finished most things. I am more someone who keeps returning to certain things. Some things are not there because they were left unfinished. Some things are there because they are still alive in me.
I am always in metaxy. As long as I live, I think I will remain somewhere in that in-between. I made peace with that feeling a long time ago.
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