Independent Researcher
Miguel Montalvo Ramos

My work sits at the intersection of modal logic, the foundations of mathematics, and the philosophy of physics.

I am an independent researcher based in Zamora, Spain. I studied three years of physics at the Universidad de Salamanca and completed an undergraduate degree in psychology at the UNED. My research has grown, over the last years, from a sustained autodidactic study of logic, the philosophy of mathematics, and the epistemological foundations of the sciences.

I care about questions that resist disciplinary containment: what it means to prove something; what consequence, validity, and formal structure actually are; how syntax and semantics relate; and how far a rigorous mathematical framework can reach into the intelligibility of the physical world. I work with the slowness that independent research allows — one problem at a time, kept under revision until it stops moving.

Besides formal university studies, my training includes extended self-directed work in mathematical logic, programming in Python, mathematics for data science, and the foundations of physical theory. My current work concerns a characterization of converse well-founded Kripke frames via the uniqueness of semantic solutions of p ↔ ◇p, and the limits of self-explanation in physical theories aspiring to be final.

i.
Modal logic & fixed-point theory
Semantic fixed-point equations in propositional modal logic, particularly their uniqueness over converse well-founded frames. I am interested in frame correspondence by fixed-point uniqueness as a mode of characterization distinct from classical Sahlqvist correspondence and from µ-calculus collapse phenomena.
ii.
Foundations of mathematics & philosophy of logic
The nature of proof and logical consequence; the articulation of syntax and semantics; the structural identity of formal systems; the epistemological reach of mathematical frameworks and the conceptual commitments they presuppose.
iii.
Guarded recursion & well-founded structures
The structural property of rank-locality that underlies uniqueness arguments for guarded operators, and its relation to contractiveness in the topos of trees of Birkedal et al. and to step-indexed semantics.
iv.
Philosophy of physics
The limits of physical self-explanation: whether a Theory of Everything, in any reasonable formalisation, could be self-grounding or must inevitably appeal to structure it does not itself explain. I work on formal versions of this argument and their relation to Gödelian phenomena in fundamental physics.
v.
Adjacent interests
Formal semantics, computational logic, provability logic, the mathematics of prime distribution, and the interaction of logical and statistical methods in artificial intelligence.
2026 Modal logic Preprint

Guarded Modal Fixed-Point Equations
and Converse Well-Foundedness

A Kripke frame is converse well-founded if and only if p ↔ ◇p has a unique semantic solution under every valuation. This reduces a non-first-order frame property to the uniqueness of semantic solutions of a single propositional modal equation, without appeal to validity or to any proof system.

F is converse well-founded  ⟺  F ⊨ FPU(◇p)
2026 Philosophy of physics In preparation

The Limits of Physical Self-Explanation

The Limits of Physical Self-Explanation is a work in progress on the logical and physical limits of strong theories of everything. Its central thesis is that any theory satisfying operative totality, self-inclusion, and strong immanence is subject to a diagonal obstruction: under appropriate physical assumptions on coding, realization, and reflexive domain formation, no such theory can support a total and reliable internally embedded evaluator of its own correctness. The framework combines physical realizability conditions with fixed-point and no-definability arguments inspired by Lawvere, Gödel, and Tarski, with the aim of clarifying the precise boundary between explanatory scope and reflexive semantic closure in foundational physics.

Location
Castilla y León, Spain
ORCID
arXiv
Google Scholar
Correspondence
Open to academic exchange