User:MWMoiceanu
There are two sides to me which have played a significant role in who I am as a person: On one hand, from a very young age, I’ve greatly gravitated towards the creative and artistic. More pertinent to the contents of this website, however, on the other side of things, I’ve likewise from a very young age found myself enthralled by the wonders of life and existence with a keen interest in understanding as much of it as I can—engendering my lifelong affinities toward the sciences as well as toward systematic philosophical thought.
I was about five when neuroscience first captivated me. I was watching a documentary on the subject which at one point explained through the help of visualizations how each thought we have is a product of innumerable neurons within our brains firing electrical impulses between themselves. I couldn’t then help but envision the brain—be it of a human’s or otherwise—as a place where very tiny bolts of lightning are perpetually sent, this through what was called neuronal axons, as a means of communication between an unquantifiably massive assembly of very tiny, individual lifeforms (the very neurons from which the brain is constituted)—such that, with each thought we experience, new lightning within the brain takes place. The intrigue of neuroscience was from there on out established for me.
From about eight years of age, I started laying down outdoors (such as on an unfolded lounge chair), typically listening to music on a headset, and would gaze upward at the night’s starts, this sometimes for hours on end, all the while willfully indulging in contemplations of whatever philosophical matter crossed my mind—for example, such as what the nature of time in fact is. (I can still remember that I naively came to devise the following theory as an eight-year-old regarding the issue: time, I then concluded, must be like an existentially fixed motion picture film reel whose fixed frames we travel through, this, I so then reasoned, thereby making time travel an impossibility. While I still agree with my younger self on the metaphysical impossibility of time travel, I’ve long since outgrown the by and large causally deterministic worldviews of my childhood and early adult years.) Throughout a good portion of my late childhood, so occasionally stargazing while contemplating the nature of existence was, to me, a pleasant escape from life’s troubles.
As I grew older, these various interests only increased. Instead of reading comic books for fun, in addition to fictions of all sorts, I in high school eagerly read through Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, through Einstein’s own assessments of the Theory of Relativity, and through related subjects—this as though receiving insights from mentors. Contemplating life’s wonders was a personal pastime. As one example, I’d spend significant time pondering the processes by which the infinite energy of a literally volumeless (hence, space-devoid) and timeless, infinite mass—this being the gravitational singularity prior to the Big Bang’s occurrence—could transform itself into the volume-endowed, disparate, spatiotemporal masses of individual quantum particles at the initial stage of the Big Bang’s occurrence. It was, at the time, for me, one of the many puzzles that yet awaited to be solved, and as a teenager I relished contemplating this and related issues just as much as one might relish working on various jigsaw puzzles (all of which, to me, were ultimately part of the very same big picture, so to speak).
It was a difficult decision for me to make, but I ended up choosing a higher education in the sciences rather than one in the humanities and arts. I attended the University of California at Irvine, where I mostly sturdied topics of biology, cognitive science, and anthropology (with the latter including the fields of anthro-primatology and of comparative religions)—with underlying interests in the evolution of behavior (from that of bacterial behavior to behavior’s eventual evolutionary development into the extreme complexities to be found within humanity). In later years, I was proud to engage in a number of independent research projects as an undergraduate, all of which pivoted on the issue of the human smile’s evolutionary history.
As a brief background to this, at least back then, a little before the turn of the century, the prevailing view in both ethology and psychology was that the human smile evolved from the primate fear grimace—as the theory had it, innately communicating to others that one is afraid of them, thereby reducing animosity and encouraging friendship. My gut instinct sharply disagreed, though others with which I discussed this matter found no grounds for my disagreement. I however believed that the human smile had instead evolved from the primate play face (interpersonal play being, to me, in essence mostly fun via mock-forms of aggression or conflict). In so construing, I deemed that the human smile physiologically conveys an exposure of canines—of what for our ancestors were potentially lethal weapons—in such a specific manner so as to basically convey, “hey, I’ve got your back,” thereby communicating friendship, happiness, and related states of being.
While the many details of this background are far more intricate and diverse, the results of my independent experiments confirmed the foundational hypothesis I upheld—maybe most noticeably so, with one experiment evidencing (this with a probability of being wrong of 0.000, the highest standard reported) that the eyes by far excel mouths in communicating emotive states of being via facial expressions, very much including in the smile. This was of significance because, in short, while mouth physiology is quite similar in respect to an intense fear grimace and a sincere smile, eye physiologies drastically differ between the two facial expressions—with the eye physiology of a sincere smile strongly resembling that found in the primate play face, but in no way resembling that found in the fear grimace, be the latter human or lesser-primate.
And, alongside my great affinity and respect for the sciences, I’ve for the longest time likewise retained avid interests in studying philosophies of various types—from ancient philosophies to the modern—for, among my many other reasons for these interests, the scientific method itself is after all structured upon principles which are ultimately strictly philosophical in their nature.
As might by now show, I then found—as I still very much find—a great aesthetic in properly devised scientific experiments; an aesthetic for those procedures in science that result in decisive conclusions which are thereby impervious to mere opinions to the contrary, and this despite always remaining open to falsification via public scrutiny.
It is this very same aesthetic for scientific conclusiveness which yet remains perpetually falsifiable in principle, and thereby fallible, that I’ve greatly endeavored over the years to imbue into the domains of philosophical enquiry. I now believe that I’ve more or less realized this one ambition—this via the standard of what this website’s philosophy terms unfalsified certainties: subjective certainties which are epistemic in their nature and yet still open to falsification in principle, this simply via the provision of any justifiable alternative to that which they assert.
How I’ve worked my way over the last few decades into the philosophical treatise I’m currently aspiring to finalize is not easy to account for. But, suffice it to say, it at many times has been a grueling process.
All in all, my ideal scenario is that this proposed philosophy of metaphysics and epistemology stands or falls on its own merits, both rational and experiential. I doubt that any sincere philosopher has ever become monetarily wealthy from the philosophy they’ve espoused—and, so, money for me is not an issue in these endeavors. Instead, I would like for nothing more than that this philosophy someday gets its fair chance to compete in the, here informally stated, marketplace of ideas.
I do not know when I will be able to finalize the rewriting of this philosophical work. Life has its way of imposing the unexpected, sometimes in positive ways, other times not. It’s in large part for this reason that I’m currently freely uploading first-edit chapters of the rewrite as they become completed: Just in case my hopes of finalizing this project are not realized, then, at the very least, this philosophy’s means of obtaining decisive yet falsifiable conclusions, as well as something of its culminating worldview, have the opportunity to become publicly shared.
There’s of course much more that could be expressed. For the time being, though, I hope this general background suffices.
If interested, you can find out more about me and some of my other works at www.MichaelWMoiceanu.com.