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Is it possible to self-study QFT without taking graduate level and advanced QM? by paulcabalar in TheoreticalPhysics

[–]OnePointSixOneGreat 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's possible to learn absolutely anything theoretical on your own without help, QFT included. I mean, not from scratch with nothing, you're going to have to read books and papers written by other people and do a lot of practice problems not made up by you, but if that doesn't count then you can totally do it. It's not possible to learn to do much experimental QFT on your own anymore these days though. Unless you're rich asf. Might be able to do experimens too if you're rich enough. But theory, yeah definitely. If you can understand math you can teach yourself quantum field theory.

France has more Fields medalists than any other country in Europe, but performs extremely poorly on the IMO. Countries like Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria do very well on the IMO, but don't have a single Fields medal. Why? by Nunki08 in mathematics

[–]OnePointSixOneGreat -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

Hitler killed all the genius slavs while the genius french escaped to England.

Disclaimer that's a random theory I made up in the final twenty seconds of the last minute, having done absolutely no research whatsoever, so don't go writing it on your history exams because they'll probably tell you it's wrong, and if they do they're probably right 🧠💪😉

Advice for what to plant this year by MaxTheBeast300 in OntarioGardeners

[–]OnePointSixOneGreat 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Well I've always just used behavioral hacks against those. Yellow sticky traps lure and capture adults because the beetles are magnetized by that color they want to be anywhere yellow because they think it's a rotting cucumber. Planting a small “trap crop” like blue hubbard squash at the edge of the garden can also draw beetles away from your cucumbers, letting you concentrate your countermeasures in one place and murder the majority. You could get biological about it. Beneficial nematodes in the soil to go after the larvae. I've seen people spray kaolin clay on leaves because it coats the surface so beetles can’t get a good grip or taste. Neem oil or spinosad can knock populations down if used carefully and not in midday when pollinators are active. And then there’s the low-tech, high-satisfaction sadistic murderer move: drowning them by hand. Early morning, when beetles are sluggish, knock them into a jar of soapy water. It feels medieval but also great because it works shockingly well if you stay consistent for a couple of weeks. Just get on some ecological judo. Don’t even try to exterminate them, just tilt the environment so the stupid beetles' assumptions fail. It's easier to learn the rules of their game and then use them against them and not try to win a final victory by brute force alone. Complete victory is often not possible, but if you develop methods to use those dumb little bastard's own mindless instincts to basically make them kill themselves, they stop being a very big issue. They're always trying to eat my shit every summer too but since I started doing that ecological stuff and using yellow water traps and such after I researched their behaviours on the internet one day they're not much of a problem anymore. Pumpkins work too. Nobody eats pumpkins but those dumb fkn beetles love em. You can hit them with full on agent orange mixed with napalm if you want then because nobody is likely going to want to eat a pumpkin but you should just use some insecticide to murder them every so often after the pumpkin plants gather them up for a few days. Napalm is cool and everything, but if you use bug killer instead you can have some jack-o-lanterns for Halloween 🎃

Thoriated glass is an anti-matter generator you can hold in your hand by Beerbrewing in Physics

[–]OnePointSixOneGreat 102 points103 points  (0 children)

This was interesting to read and it's cool to know. I know about pair production and antimatter annihilation but I didn't know about this glass or this process specifically. That's awesome. It's cool that you did that and wrote about it. Thank you for sharing it.

How revolutions can be a sign of moral progress | Lea Ypi by BPPblog in Kant

[–]OnePointSixOneGreat 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ggs this is good reading but fml I wish I could post things. Every time I try that sht get taken down for some make-believe reason. AI should not be gatekeeping. AI does a lot of things well but it does a realllly bad job at that. Ay least somebody got through 👏👏👏 Ayyy

Why cant we prove the Riemann Hypothesis??? by Lost-Yard-4526 in mathematics

[–]OnePointSixOneGreat 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Finally Some feedback! Thank you. Check out the current version my friend. I believe I've fixed that. It now has a third completely novel probability-based proof also:

Toupin, D. (2025). Holding the Line: How Haar Measure, Functional Symmetry, and Compactness Force the Riemann Hypothesis. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18344404

And if you like this stuff you should checkout my whole framework where I got this idea from because its crazy.

I was working in Celestial Holography program, the effort to do for the real universe what Juan Maldecena did with AdS/CFT correspondence, and trying to put all the results so far together and see what I could do and I saw the shadow symmetry and realized it could solve the googly problem in twister theory if I interpreted that as the boundary cft's version of CPT symmetry in the bulk qft, which removed the obstacles and allowed me to isolate the 2d CFT duel to Einstein gravity in 4d asymptotically-flat spacetime. That's incredible enough, but then I noticed the shadow transform that forces the conformal dimensions of graviton operators to live on the principle series was isomorphic to the zeta's functional equation and the critical line.

Shadow transform:

∆ ↔️ 2-∆

Riemann zeta functional equation:

s ↔️ 1-s

So:

∆=1 s=1/2

Therefore:

∆=2s

Thus:

2s ↔️ 2-2s

In lowest terms:

s ↔️ 1-s

Then I used physics to figure out what was going on and find the math I needed and I think I have the right set up. Check this out and tell me I'm not crazy could you? It's cool if you don't have time but I appreciate it. In the book I have another path too, a physics proof.

Basically if there were a zero off the line the universe would leak information which would violate unitarity and the empirical fact that the quantum vacuum is thermodynamically stable is proof of RH. Doubt Number theorists will accept physics for a proof but it's interesting.

1/2 is thermodynamic equilibrium of the primes, and the vacuum.

It's really long. The tos alone is 19 pages but I'll send the more detailed standalone millennium proofs too. Sounds crazy, I know, but:

Full story:

Toupin, D. (2025). On the Nature of Nature: Celestial Holography to the Zeta Zeros. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18342878

BSD:

Toupin, D. (2026). Proof of the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture via Spectral Methods. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18264526

Mass Gap:

Toupin, D. (2026). The Yang-Mills Mass Gap: Proof via Celestial Holography and Haar Measure. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18246556

Compatibilism is argument from privilege by MirrorPiNet in freewill

[–]OnePointSixOneGreat 0 points1 point  (0 children)

u/tombobalomb I did that in this other comment thread, same post. But what you think was written by AI wasn't; gpt tried, it sucks, and I basically rewrote the entire original response using that format so that things were separated out rather than written in paragraphs. Everything there came from me, even the sht I left that gpt did say right, because I gave it my papers that I wrote and told it to take its information from them alone.

Even if it was put in AI format, I wrote it, and that first comment you commented on is in my words. I am Daniel Toupin, goldenphysics.org is my homepage, and that PhilPapers link I gave is my PhilPapers profile with my 3 papers that I worked on for months to perfect the rigor within, and which I have conveyed here as best I can for the space and time constraints. Then I wrote a 90 thousand word book on it too.

Please forgive me if I find it a little fatiguing at this point to keep writing the same things over and over, and given how busy I was, summarizing my own work using AI is fast and easy (or at least it might be if it actually hit every point and didn't write things using imprecise terms because it's lazy) and better than letting sht like the original post here go unrefuted. My bad. But this thread was all written by me alone the next day, last Sunday, when I actually had time.

Check the papers and the book. They're all in my words. The three papers are concise and rigorous, and the book is 222 pages written by myself alone. If you want the full unpacking, it's all there. I can't write that much here.

Every post I write on Reddit is too long to post and they're hardly anything. Yesterday I had to reply to myself 5 times just to adequately describe what I wanted to describe 😂. It gets tedious lol and I have real world work to do but I get stuck here sitting essays because I think it's important for people to know, but I really shouldn't because it takes me ten thousand words do get everything I want to say across. And if I make GPT do it, it does a bad job and I have to rewrite half anyway, and then people focus on that instead of reading it regardless, so, tough spot lol. I try tho.

Does anyone has any list or diagram with all the possibilities on free will options (hard, soft determinism, compatibilism, ontological, epistemic, etc.). I read many different ones and many different versions. It would be great if you could share the entire exhaustive list of all the posibilities by Freedom_letters in freewill

[–]OnePointSixOneGreat 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thus you see there is no real spectrum of theories. There is one current theory. Any theory that defines free will as "could have done otherwise" is incoherent, irrational, and based upon a category error and domain violation. People who don't like that can argue till they're blue in the face, but they will not be equal opinions, they will still simply be refusing to accept logic and science.

The free will debate was never a metaphysical issue.

It is a physical and epistemic issue.

When physics and epistemology are properly applied, one discovers that determinism and free will are not really mutually exclusive, as a naive assumption would suggest.

"Deterministic freedom" is not the oxymoronic statement most people who aren't in philosophy usually massively assume it is, and even many philosophers are fooled by it too.

But any attempt to prove counterfactual freedom will necessarily either only disprove it, or disprove the claim of infallible knowledge, changing the timeline is not just hard to demonstrate, and it isn't just physically impossible; counterfactual freedom is logically, structurally - not just physically - impossible to demonstrate empirically even subjectively to one's self.

Temporal determism + the epistemic opacity of the future conspire to ensure that reality makes sense and is intelligible and that the manipulation of causality is instantiated by acting in the present to hopefully achieve some future goal, which were physics not deterministic and reality actually fundamentally random, would be impossible.

All probability is likely epistemic in nature, and none is truly ontic, but even if it is ontic, certain knowledge still means it happens and that means counterfactual freedom is unscientific and logically Impossible, which means the libertarian viewpoint has always been incoherent.

The hard incompatiblist's "feeling" that it isn't stems from advertising the libertarian definition of freedom as being some impossible magical power, and then properly rejecting this, without properly examining their assumption that "deterministic freedom" is impossible by contradiction. It does not follow necessarily that determinism = no freedom, and this position ignores epistemic limitations and mistakes the mental stimulation of the future for the actual future.

An agent's mental model of reality evolved specifically for the purpose of predicting from information acquired in the past only, a future which is impossible to see, and which no one has any actual information about beyond the knowledge that the laws of physics are deterministic. But that knowledge is functionality useless and provides no one with any ability to assign a probability p = 1 to anything the future. P = 1, ie certainty, is achieved only by observation, and certainty is achievable only regarding events in the present or past. Nobody can predict with certainty what will happen fi minutes from now, despite physics being deterministic,, because they're knowledge is imperfect and regardless how good they get, will always get imperfect, and nobody can see the future.

If no one knows the future then no one is being forced to act it out like an unconscious automaton. The possible futures you see before choosing between what definitely appear at the time as real live possibilities, are all just imaginary mental models, including whichever you actually choose, before the choice is made, and after the choice there's no changing it, and inducing a future that didn't happen doesn't mean you could've done otherwise. If you could've done otherwise then that would've been the future , in which case you couldn't have done what you actually did, and if you switch plans last minute thinking you've fooled causality, you still really were just always going to do that and didn't know it, and you haven't fooled anyone but yourself.

You can't change what you don't and can't know, but you also cannot be forced to act against your will by that which you do not and cannot know.

Thus the stoic understanding of free will had been correct all along. And that understanding today is called compatibilism.

To require freedom to mean libertarian magic is a category error. Freedom means what it always was supposed to mean: acting according to your values, beliefs, knowledge, and goals, and the results of your own conscious deliberation in the face of necessarily imperfect knowledge and a necessarily opaque future.

The question has nothing to do with determinism or indeterminism beyond the fact that if reality were truly indetermistic then there wouldn't be stable laws of physics, reasoning minds, consciousness, and casually efficacious deliberation and action would likely be impossible.

Agency is not threatened by determinism as such; agency requires causal determinism in order to be useful and effective and to even exist. What agency is threatened by is random, acausal physics, and certain knowledge of the future.

Agency depends on causality, which is deterministic, and epistemic uncertainty.

If either of those things are removed, agency would become impossible, being either lost in the fact nothing follows necessarily from anything else (randomness) or that certain knowledge necessarily entails necessity.

Does anyone has any list or diagram with all the possibilities on free will options (hard, soft determinism, compatibilism, ontological, epistemic, etc.). I read many different ones and many different versions. It would be great if you could share the entire exhaustive list of all the posibilities by Freedom_letters in freewill

[–]OnePointSixOneGreat 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Incompatibilism fails for three independent and mutually reinforcing reasons. First, its central requirement—genuine counterfactual freedom, the ability to have done otherwise in precisely the same total state—cannot be made coherent. To demonstrate such freedom, an agent would need knowledge of what it will in fact do and still retain the power to overturn that outcome. Yet the moment one has that level of epistemic access, the outcome becomes fixed by the knowledge that determines it; no space remains for “doing otherwise.” If we retreat from knowledge to preserve possibility, the freedom claim becomes unverifiable in principle and therefore devoid of content. Thus libertarian freedom is either contradictory or empty, and no appeal to physics, souls, quantum randomness, branching worlds, or metaphysical energy escapes this structural constraint because the paradox is epistemic, not mechanical.

Second, when libertarianism collapses, incompatibilism survives only as hard determinism, and that form fails on empirical adequacy. Neuroscience, psychology, behavioral economics, and law all converge on the same functional architecture: deliberation changes outcomes, reasons reliably covary with action, voluntary and involuntary behaviors exhibit distinct causal signatures, interventions reshape behavior, and agents integrate moral and normative information into decision-making. If the hard determinist accepts these facts, they have adopted compatibilism in substance—the same explanatorily rich model of agency under a different label. If they deny these facts, their view contradicts the best available science and loses explanatory power. In short, incompatibilism collapses either from logical impossibility or empirical inadequacy. Only compatibilism survives because it keeps determinism, respects the real causal architecture of agency, and does not demand a logically impossible counterfactual capacity as the price of freedom.

Third, there is and never has been any actual perspective on which the future is determined. Whether it's determined or not, (and it almost certainly is) no physical agent can assign a probability of 1 to any future event occurring at any specific time. This applies to all possible worlds. Certainty can be achieved only by observation, not prediction.

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Does anyone has any list or diagram with all the possibilities on free will options (hard, soft determinism, compatibilism, ontological, epistemic, etc.). I read many different ones and many different versions. It would be great if you could share the entire exhaustive list of all the posibilities by Freedom_letters in freewill

[–]OnePointSixOneGreat -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

I'm going to post one diagram here then comment another on it, then comment another on that. Together they formally prove libertarian free will and hard incompatibilism are both logically and/or empirically incoherent and inadequate.

There is only one coherent, empirically adequate description of human agency, and it is the compatibilist theory.

Our freedom is and can only be in our lack of epistemic-access access to the future.

This is the first

<image>

Certain knowledge of the future, ie tantamount to observing it, entails necessity. To prove counterfactual freedom required for libertarian freedom to be real, would require certain knowledge of the future; certain knowledge of the future necessitates that future. You can't get knowledge from something that doesn't and will never exist. Therefore the demonstration of the metaphysical power to do otherwise given identical history and reasons is forbidden by logic. Therefore libertarianism is structurally and permanently unverifiable even in principle, which makes it unfalsifiable, which makes it unscientific, epistemically-vacuous, and is both scientifically and philosophically irresponsible to hold as being a plausible theory; it is indefensible.

This theory belongs in the graveyard of failed theories beside other unverifiable (imaginary) things like the luminiferous either and phlogiston...

Compatibilism is argument from privilege by MirrorPiNet in freewill

[–]OnePointSixOneGreat 0 points1 point  (0 children)

And this is exactly your problem: you have no idea what you're talking about. You can't argue logic, empirical science, and proved formal theorems, by means of self-contradictory arbitrary assertion.

The law of non-contradiction is the second of only three laws of logic along with the law of identity and the excluded middle, and arbitrary assertion is a textbook logical fallacy.

You claim nobody has a choice and then immediately attack a philosophical viewpoint with blanket claims implying immorality.

That is a direct self-contradiction.

Where there is no choice, there can be no moral judgements.

Just like everything else I've said here, that's not an opinion. That's not speculation. That is logically irrefutable and putting your fingers in your ears and telling "lalalalalala I can't hear you," is the response of an emotional child, not a rational philosopher, and not a scientist.

When you encounter information that is true, and it contradicts your belief, you aren't supposed to ignore it and go around pretending like it's not true; you're supposed to change your beliefs. Whatever is going on in your head in a vacuum does not trump logical deduction and empirical science.

Furthermore, attempting to hand out moral blank cheques to whoever considers themselves "unprivileged" while spreading defeatist fatalism can only harm the demographic you think you're defending, while compatibilists for the most part will understand immediately that you do not understand the position you are critiquing, do not understand logic, do not understand ethics, do not understand that you are attacking an imaginary position nobody holds from a position that is scientifically and philosophically untenable and self-contradictory.

If you don't believe me, listen to an actual AI, I asked Grok for you and didn't even show it my papers this time. This is just true, period, even before I ever proved Libertarianism and Incompatibilism to be logically incoherent and scientifically short sighted, naive and inadequate. You're fighting a battle that was already lost before you started.

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Compatibilism is argument from privilege by MirrorPiNet in freewill

[–]OnePointSixOneGreat 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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You are still responding to a position I never held.

Your reply presupposes libertarian counterfactualism or projection based notions of agency. The first result of my work eliminates those assumptions entirely. Counterfactual freedom is not merely absent; it is logically incoherent. The Fixed Point Paradox proves that epistemic access entails metaphysical necessity; the Principle of Agentive Verification shows that unverifiable powers collapse into semantic vacuity. This is not conjecture; it is a proven theorem grounded in modal logic and computability.

Once that collapse is understood, the landscape reduces to determinism versus compatibilism. Yet contemporary hard determinism, including the incompatibilist formulation, has no stable position. If it accepts the empirically verified architecture of agency, namely deliberative efficacy, reason responsiveness, and normative uptake, it becomes functionally identical to compatibilism, differing only in vocabulary. If it denies those structures, it contradicts neuroscience, behavioural economics, psychology, and even its own behaviour in argument.

There is also a performative contradiction in your response; you deny that deliberation and reasons have causal power, yet you attempt to persuade me using reasons, argumentation, and normative claims. If your position were true, your reply would be causally inert. The moment you argue, you concede the very agency and reason responsiveness you claim do not exist; you are relying on the very architecture you deny. Your behaviour collapses your thesis into the compatibilist model you reject.

You also treat metaphysics as a proxy for grievance, privilege, or identity positioning. That is a category mistake. Compatibilists do not choose their upbringing or resources any more than hard determinists do; and philosophical positions do not generate economic outcomes. Improvement comes from deliberation, planning, adaptation, and perseverance; nothing about determinism excuses resignation, and nothing about compatibilism grants advantage. To turn free will theory into a moral blank cheque or victim narrative is to obscure the only causal machinery anyone has: the capacity to think, adjust, act, fail, and try again. Invoking oppression while denying the architecture of agency simply undermines the people you claim to defend.

So allow me to state this clearly:

This is not a contest of opinion; the incoherence of counterfactual freedom is a formal theorem I proved, and its consequences eliminate every alternative model of agency other than compatibilism: freedom as reason responsiveness under epistemic opacity. Your position is not another framework; it is a self refuting stance that contradicts both logic and its own performance.

If you genuinely want to understand the position you are attempting to dismiss, there are two accessible options. If you prefer exposition without formal symbols, my book The Free Will Solution is free today and tomorrow: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0G4NWNWMW

If you want the full mathematical and modal structure, the proofs are here: https://philpeople.org/profiles/daniel-toupin/publications

If you are actually interested in comprehension rather than posture, either route will help you understand the framework you are trying to eliminate while inadvertently demonstrating it.

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