Strawberry Causal Fields Forever

Proving (or Icarusing) a Unified Causal Field Theory—the Final Frontier of Causality

As cheeky as the title may be, what follows is quite serious.

Over the past year, my research into modeling democratic and cognitive collapse—driven by rhetoric, in-grouping, and disinformation—ran into a fundamental obstacle: recursive feedback loops. Or more precisely, the absence of any causal framework capable of modeling them rigorously.

These loops are central to everything from polarization to viral misinformation. Yet standard tools—directed acyclic graphs, statistical interventions, structural equation models—fail to capture their essence. I suppose I might’ve realized sooner that I was modeling a complex adaptive system before applying to Ph.D. programs unequipped to help. But I digress.

This isn’t abstract for me. The model I’m building is aimed at countering what I believe to be the greatest internal threat to American democracy in 160 years: tribalism and division.

And my stake in this isn’t just academic. I’m a veteran and a Jew, which means two things:

I swore an oath to defend this democracy—but the methods must evolve.

Liberal democracy is the only system in which Jews—and many others—have ever been safe, because it is built on the principle of protecting everyone, not just those in power.

That oath still matters to me. So I took it seriously. I chose rational self-interest. I attacked the problem like I needed cognitive CO₂ scrubbers and the ones in the LEM were shaped funny. Which is to say: I didn’t care what any method was originally designed for, only what it could do.

So I went rummaging—through the Kuhnian drawers of science, looking for tools that fit together, regardless of discipline. The only requirement was coherence. I called this strategy radical methodological arbitrage.

Starting from first principles—not legacy theories—I pulled tools from physics, geometry, and dynamical systems. What emerged wasn’t a tweak. It was something larger: a Unified Causal Field Theory.

📜 Core Claims (Formal Proof Linked Below)

1. Causality ≡ Dynamics.
   1. Causality is not a statistical abstraction, but a physical, geometric property of systems.
2. Legacy causal methods are projections.
   1. DAGs, DiD, RDD, SCMs, and others are rigorously shown to be lower-dimensional shadows of this field-based causal structure.
3. Hypertime emerges (Open to suggestions for new terms, see proof for context and meaning).
   1. Recursive feedback and memory are encoded via higher-order derivatives—an emergent tensor dimension.
4. The Fubini Test for Hidden Variables.
   1. A novel method for detecting hidden-variable bias using operator commutativity and integral order invariance.

I know how this sounds. A policy wonk claiming to have discovered a Unified Causal Field Theory? That does sound like crank science, but I studied physics before public policy, so maybe it's only 2pi/10 on the absurdity scale. But you will find none who find this more absurd than I. 

But here’s the thing: it may be wrong, but it is not unserious.

I’ve attacked this proof with everything I’ve got—including multiple frontier AI models trained to find errors, inconsistencies, and degenerate edge cases. I’ve reached the limit of what I can validate alone.

So now I face a choice:

I can stay quiet, avoid embarrassment, and pretend that the math this math enables will fade into obscurity; but security through obscurity never has been a choice worth pursuing when it comes to things like these has it?

The other option? Send up the flair and see who comes to help.

I say help because the broader cognitive field theory—which I have nearly finished developing—carries significant dual-use risk; if you want to know what I mean by dual risk, think Joseph Goebbels juiced up on machine learning and AI. I believe responsible disclosure to ethically aligned communities and rigorous peer review is the only viable path. That belief notwithstanding, peer review is only possible when people are willing to listen, and stress test your work in earnest.

It is the need for earnest stress testing that brings me here; I have been told that Less Wrong is a community that values truth-seeking above status-seeking. It is the need for earnest need that brings me here; because, unbelievable as it might be, the article I share now on Unified Causal Field Theory is, by far, the more likely of the two to be taken seriously by those who haven't read past the title.

So, in short, this post is a credibility builder for my main theory. And it will deliver on the promise to be worth your effort to critique and try to prove wrong. And while I do not think that it will be proven wrong, but I have to know for sure because calculus of negligence, not ego, demands it.

🙏 What I’m Asking:

Mathematical feedback: Review of the formal proof—especially its axioms, logic, and causal equivalence derivation.

Critical analysis: Help identifying flaws, overgeneralizations, or invalid assumptions that break the proof; though any constructive criticism is welcome.

If valid: Advice on securing an arXiv endorser or routing this toward the right peer review pipeline.

Here’s the formal version of the paper, permanently archived on Zenodo:

👉 https://zenodo.org/records/16440409

If I’m wrong—mark my name in the footnotes below Kepler and the Platonic solids.

But if I’m right... we may be standing at the edge of a deeper theory of causality and in turn of cognition; of the two the latter is the far greater risk, and I’ll need help ensuring it’s used ethically for the betterment of humanity.