What I Believe In

2025-10-22 · reflection

I've been reading a bit about the history of Western philosophy.

One interesting realization is that every individual, whether intentionally or not, engages—at least to some capacity—with elements studied in philosophy. For example:

• Deciding whether something is true — Epistemology

• Deciding whether something is just or fair — Ethics

• Experiencing awe, art, music, and beauty — Aesthetics

This realization led me to prepare an inventory of where my own beliefs currently stand. I don't mean to be pretentious or claim that I follow these without fault, but these are the core values I agree with and espouse:

• The Scientific Method — the best available tool for understanding and predicting natural phenomena, while keeping us from fooling ourselves.

• Growth Mindset — the most useful belief to hold for self-improvement, personal growth, and self-actualization.

• Curiosity — understanding “why,” questioning explanations, seeking out evidence, asking “what if I'm wrong?” and changing one's mind are all signs of intellectual honesty.

• Continuity — gratitude toward those who have shown us the way, while leaving things better than we found them for those yet to come.

Having written these down, I can now hold a “dialogue” between my own beliefs and those held by past philosophers.

Finally, it will be interesting to see how these beliefs prove themselves fruitful—or perhaps evolve—over the course of one's own life.

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Hi, I'm Victor -- a Brazilian computer engineer at Microsoft with 7+ years of industry experience architecting and building highly polished software. I enjoy deep technical dives, hard problems, and working across all layers of the stack. My work centers on robust, cloud-based, distributed systems and web-based applications that serve millions of users.