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Consciousness is a quantum phenomenon and digital computers, as classical, algorithmic systems, can never be conscious, no matter their complexity.

Jan 26, 2024

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Federico Faggin in one word is LOVE (but we will get to that in a few minutes.)

As we work on producing Alice’s podcast with Federico, we wanted to post an excerpt from our interview with this amazing human who studied machines, made machines and confidently states humans are not machines.

Hello, we’re Alice and we are always in a state of wander. Federico Faggin was initially motivated to study consciousness out of curiosity when he was researching artificial neural networks in the 1980s, but after having spontaneous enlightened experiences of consciousness, he decided to dedicate his time to consciousness research. Faggin believes that consciousness and free will are fundamental and non-algorithmic. Quantum information emerges from them, and the quantum—classical physical world emerges from quantum information. Consciousness is a quantum phenomenon and digital computers, as classical, algorithmic systems, can never be conscious, no matter their complexity.

Federico Faggin is an Italian physicist, engineer, inventor and entrepreneur. He is best known for designing the first commercial microprocessor, the Intel 4004. In 1982 he founded and directed Cygnet Technologies, Inc. which introduced a pioneering personal communication product for voice, data, and electronic mail. In 1986 he founded and directed Synaptics Inc., which today is the leader in human interface solutions having pioneered the touchpad (1994) and the touchscreen (1999) that have revolutionized the way we interface with mobile devices. In 2010, he received the 2009 National Medal of Technology and Innovation from President Obama, the highest honor the United States confers for achievements related to technological progress. In 2011, Faggin founded the Federico and Elvia Faggin Foundation to support the scientific study of consciousness at US universities and research institutes.

Below is an excerpt from our interview with Federico Faggin.

What was the experience that made you start questioning consciousness?

“Well, at the time when I was studying neuroscience, I realized that there was a problem with consciousness. At that time I was still a materialist, so I thought that consciousness was a phenomenon that happened entirely in the brain. So just like scientists are saying today, the consciousness is a phenomenon that arises from the functioning of the brain. And in fact, it's a phenomenon that has no causal power. In other words, the brain makes the decisions, the brain is actually the working system, and consciousness somehow is an emergent property of this functioning of the brain.

Then I said, if that is the case, I should be able to make a conscious computer. The more I thought about it, the more impossible the task became. It was in that context I realized that consciousness must be a different property, not necessarily a property of the brain, but something else.

At that time I was not happy about my life, despite having reached everything that any person would consider a highly successful person. I was not happy and I didn't know why, and that was also a problem of consciousness. I wanted to understand why, and I wanted to understand consciousness, because it was impossible. I couldn't find a way that I could transform signals into qualia, qualia being the way we know by feeling, by sensations and feelings.

In that milieu, I intensely wanted to understand consciousness, and I received a gift in the form of an experience. It happened while I was vacationing at Lake Tahoe with my kids and my family, just skiing during the holidays. One night I woke up around midnight. I was thirsty, so I got up, got to the kitchen to get a glass of water, and then I went back to bed.

And as I was just trying to fall back to sleep, thinking nothing, just trying to go back to sleep, at one point out of my chest came an energy, powerful energy, just like a gushing energy. But it felt physical. It was not a thought, it was physical energy coming out of my heart, and it felt like an unbelievable love. Something that I never even closely had an experience of. It was love mixed with peace and mixed with joy. But then this gushing energy that was white, scintillating white, exploded, and all of a sudden this energy is everywhere. Now all of a sudden my consciousness is in that energy which is outside of me. So what's going on here? I was completely baffled by that experience while it was happening. But at the same time, I was engulfed into that love and joy and peace. There was the living of that experience. And my body was warm and vibrating. My cells were, it felt like there were points of light, white lights everywhere, and I was that light, but also I was the vibration of my body, and I was also all the feelings of love and joy and peace.

My mind at one point said ‘oh wow,’ this is the energy of which everything is made. Everything that's in the universe is made of this stuff, which feels love and peace and joy. And I recognized myself as a point of view of this totality of the universe looking at itself. It was like a point of view of the totality of reality looking at itself. So I was both the observer and the observed.

It was a baffling, baffling experience that then left as unexpectedly as it came. And it probably lasted a minute or two, no more. It was one of those things that changed me completely. My point of view of what I was was completely upset. Before I felt I was separate from the world, now I'm the world observing itself. How more different can it be than what I thought I was, right? Now, the idea of dying was no longer coherent with the experience, because how can that being, which is everything, that can know itself, actually die?

It took a while to get to the nuances of what it meant, and it started me on a process of exploration of my own consciousness, which lasted about twenty years. And I've worked very hard, probably spent 20%, now more like 30% to 40% of my time for twenty years, and I arrive at the conclusion that consciousness cannot be a phenomenon of the brain.

It has to be something more basic, something that exists in nature from the very beginning of the universe. Something completely universal and absolutely foundational together with free will. In other words, consciousness had to come with free will. It would make no sense to be conscious and not be able to decide how to know and what to know.

At that time it was clear that a conscious has to do with the ability to know and the desire to know and to know itself. And so, I've begun to have the first, the beginning of a sense that the purpose of the universe is to know itself, and we are aspects of the totality of reality that allow one, the totality of what exists to know itself.

So that was the beginning of a sense that it was possible then to understand consciousness scientifically. And so I decided to stop everything that I was doing. I got out of all my previous engagements. I sold my last company. I decided to dedicate myself full time to the study of consciousness. Two years later, I started a foundation with my wife to be able to support research of other people that have similar ideas and wanted to research consciousness. A few years ago, together with a physicist—an Italian physicist with a world authority in the field of quantum information—we finally arrive at the first true theory of consciousness and free will.

Do we have free will?

"As you know, there are two types of physics. One is quantum physics, and the other is classical physics. Now, classical physics is the physics that started with Newton and ended up with electromagnetism in the second part of the 19th century. By 1900, most physicists believed that the world was classical, and classical physics is deterministic. In other words, the laws of classical physics describe nature, describe the ontology, describe objects in space and time, which are supposed to be the real thing.

And at the end of that century, turning into the 20th century, there were, however, some anomalies that nobody could explain, and it was through the explanation of those anomalies that quantum physics was born. And quantum physics upset all the rules and all the understanding of classical physics, because it was a theory that was, first of all indeterministic, as opposed to deterministic. For example, it was found quite early that in the '20s that you could not know simultaneously the speed, the velocity, and the position of a particle. You could know one. If you want to know very precisely the position, you could know very little of the velocity, and vice versa.

Which is not the case with classical physics. In classical physics, any object, even a particle, a particle in the classical physics would be like a little ball, like a little ball. A submicroscopic ball that bounded indivisible, separate from all the others and so on. Where particles were found to be states of fields.

In other words, particles, were no longer objects, where in classical physics, you started with the smallest objects, which are elementary particles, classical elementary particles. But in quantum physics, the particles are not separate. They are state of the field. They cannot be separated from the field.

This is sort of crazy, and the consequences of this view of reality are that the states are essentially represent-able with quantum information, and quantum information are quantum bits which are entangled. Sorry to come up with all this crazy stuff, but that's the way it works.

Basically, if two quantum bits are entangled, it means that they have states in common, that even when you separate those particles, those states that they have in common remain in common independently of the distance, and when you measure one, since the measurement of the state is a probabilistic measurement, you cannot know the state. The state of a quantum system is unknowable. If you make a measurement, what you know is at most one bit, one classical bit per quantum bit.

And the quantum bit is an infinity of possible states. You can imagine the quantum bit as a point on the surface of a sphere. So every point on the surface of a sphere is one of the possible states of a quantum bit, where a bit, as you know, is zero or one, is a binary information that has only two possible states.

When you make a measurement of a quantum bit, you will always measure one or zero. For example, in a qubit, a qubit is a direction in space. If you don't know the direction in space, and to make a measurement, you need to choose a direction and make a measurement. But when you choose that direction, you disturb the quantum bit. And so you measure the quantum bit in the direction that you have chosen, and you will find the result of that measurement is, it is in this direction, the direction that you chose, or in the opposite direction. One or zero. One in the direction which that you chose, or the opposite direction will be zero.

And the result is probabilistic. In other words, you cannot know. You will measure one or zero. But if you make a number of qubits, identical qubits, prepare the same way, you make the same measurement, you will find a probability. In other words, some will measure one, some will measure zero. And in a typical situation, it is 50% one and 50% zero.

So here is completely different type of information than the information of a classical computer. Classical computer is zero or one, and when you make a measurement, you'll find zero or one, you don't find a probability. The measurement gives you exactly what the state is because the measurement of a classical system does not disturb the system. Where the measurement of a quantum system disturbs the system and then what you measure is only a probability. First of all, you measure the new state that you have disturbed and that's probabilistic because you can disturb in a positive or in a negative way, one or zero.

Sorry to make it so difficult, but what it means is that because of these characteristics, there are two things. Number one, that free will can exist in a quantum system because a quantum system is not deterministic. Whereas free will cannot exist in a classical system because a classical system is deterministic. It means that the next state is determined exactly from the previous state and from whatever laws of physics you applied to the previous state to get the next state.

And that next state is exactly predictable. A classical system can be measured without disturbance. So the state of the system can be shared, can be known by others. In a quantum system this is not the case, it cannot be known. It cannot be reproduced. There is a theorem in quantum physics that says that a quantum state is non-reproducible. It's called the no-cloning theorem. It means that if you do not know, because the only way that you could know would be to prepare the state, but if you don't know the state, somebody gives you a quantum system in a particular state, you have no way to know that state without making a measurement. And when you make a measurement, you change the state and all you can know is, as I said before, a bit per qubit. That's another theorem, is a theorem of Holevo.

Given that situation, what does it mean? Quantum information. And so the interesting thing is that we can now say that quantum information, a quantum state can represent an experience, an experience of a conscious entity, but that experience can only be known by the system that's in the state. So in other words, quantum information has the same characteristics of a conscious experience. It's private, can only be known by the system which is in the state from the inside.

And all that can be known from the outside, including what the system can say about his own experience is a bit per one qubit, so it's much less than what you feel.

Take the example, love. When you say ‘I love you,’ does that express what you feel? Not a chance. What you feel is much richer, but you cannot transfer what you feel to another person. You can only transfer classical information, shareable information about what you feel. And that is always much less than what you feel. So here we have a clear match between conscious experience and its representation with quantum information. So quantum information would be a correct representation. It has all the characteristics of what it represents. If it represents inner experience, which is not the case for classical information, classical information can be copied. The program and the data with computer can be copied, you can make as many copies as you want. That's shareable information.

A computer could not be conscious because if it were conscious, it would violate the characteristic of our experience, which is the characteristic of quantum information because my state cannot be copied. So the people that say, ‘Oh, we copy the conscious in a computer and you can live forever in trans-humanism,’ that's crazy because it violates the characteristics of your experience, which is the privacy of your experience. You cannot copy. And so the only physical representation is with quantum information. However, that representation is not the experience. The representation of an experience is not the experience. The experience can only be known from the inside. You see? It's like the theory of reality is not reality and the experience goes beyond what is represent-able mathematically or with symbols that are shareable.

When you think about it, this really changes the interpretation of what physics is saying. Because conscious has been considered a phenomenon of the brain, physicists have not really thought deeply about it. But now with this new theory, all of a sudden we can actually explain also what quantum physics is saying. Quantum physics is actually describing the interiority of nature out of which the exteriority, which is what is shareable, emerges. And so all of a sudden we have a complete new understanding of what reality is.

You had mentioned qualia before, can you talk more about that and how that is actually shaped by consciousness?

“Well, consciousness is the fact that we can understand, that we can comprehend, we can perceive through qualia. And the physical representation of qualia is a pure quantum state. A pure quantum state has all the characteristics of qualia as we discussed earlier, which we feel is qualia. So if you think about it, that kind of knowing, we know for example the love that I feel has dimensions that I cannot fathom either. In other words, there are dimensions that I know, that I could know, but I don't know yet. So I know that I know, I know that I don't know. I can tell that this is love and I can tell that is a lot of love and it has certain characteristics.

Qualia is what something feels like, but that feeling is what gives us the knowing of what we feel. Without consciousness we could not know anything. In other words, a computer has information, responds to that information mechanically, it doesn't feel anything. There is nothing there. And so we are the ones that could attribute consciousness to a computer because it behaves in a way that is like we would. But that is not an attribution that is unwarranted because the computer doesn't feel anything and is simply copying, is simply reproducing, is simply imitating a conscious behavior. And that's the major problem today with artificial intelligence and this confusion that exists because people think that consciousness doesn't mean much because the working or the brain is what matters.

And the consciousness it's like a, what would you call it? A little froth. It's something that doesn't mean much. The wave is the thing and the froth over the wave is—who cares. But in fact, it's exactly the opposite. Since quantum physics is one out of which classical physics arises or derives, quantum physics is more fundamental, is the source of what we have called reality. And in fact, what we have called reality is closer to virtual reality. It's not completely virtual reality because it's still connected with the quantum reality because the particles are states or the fields as I said earlier. So it's still connected. Everything is connected in this reality. But for all practical purposes to make prediction of the next classical state that you can measure, you can think of a classical system in microscopic objects in space-time as something which are separate from each other, which is exactly like we normally have been thinking about.

But in fact everything is one. Everything is connected and what we call separate is really only in first approximation can be called separate, but in reality it's not. So there is a way in which even things that appear on first approximation that should not affect each other, they do affect each other. Do they affect each other by these communications that occur at the deeper level that we have not so far recognized?”

There's some people saying, oh, we're getting close to consciousness of general AI?

“No, no, no. But the idea that computers will be conscious... The people that believe that you can do general AI believe that consciousness is around the corner. And, of course, I certainly have a different opinion about it. It's not an opinion, it's actually a pretty well-formed theory in fact. It will be clear that no computer can be conscious because consciousness has properties that are not properties or classical systems.

One of the other problems with the current scientific view has been that life has been considered a classical phenomenon. Even cells are being considered classical. In other words, that cells can be described as classical systems and it's not true at all. And only now there are a small cadre of biologists called quantum biologists that studied life as a quantum phenomenon.

The dogma of ‘life is classical’ has dominated our mindset up until recently and now there is an opening and people are beginning to see that in fact life cannot be that way… I have coined a new type of information called ‘live information’ because if you take an electron that works inside a cell, that electron being an elementary particle is three things at once, is information, energy and matter. So depending on the situation, it behaves like one of the three or maybe two of the three. So you cannot separate matter, energy and information like you separate the power supply, the hardware and the software of a computer. You see? The reductionism of classical physics lends itself to separation of functions, but it doesn't work that way in a living organism.

When you have an electron, you have to take all three of them. You cannot say it is information only. It's also energy and it's also matter. Construction material, a proton, the same thing. An atom, the same thing. So only when you get to disorderly assemblages of a lot of atoms and molecules, then you can have something that behaves classically, but at the level of an atom that interacts with another atom, those interactions are quantum. And so to understand how life works, you have to study using quantum theory or what will emerge as a way of doing it, which is live information, but it will not be the same thing as either classical information or quantum information because quantum information is purely in Hilbert space. That has to be represented, it cannot be manifested in space and time yet.

Quantum information really exists in a vaster reality out of which this reality emerges. Once a pure quantum state emerges in this reality, it could be an atom for example, which is a pure state and it can emerge, but then when it emerges, it is explicit. It is shareable. In other words, other atoms can interact with this atom where while it stays represented in Hilbert space, it is not knowable. It is still many possibilities that only when it is in space-time, one of those many possibilities will be the way it will be manifested. You see?”

Consciousness, even at the cellular level, does it start to all come together?

“Absolutely. In my way of thinking, the cells have consciousness and free will. A cell is the smallest physical organization in space and time, that has self consciousness and free will in our theory. Where particles, particles are not conscious per se, they're state of field, so are the fields that are conscious. And so while an electron exists, if he is conscious, his consciousness, this is the consciousness of the field because it cannot be separated, but the field is kind of yes and no. Is it conscious? Yes, it is conscious, but it is not his consciousness. It is the consciousness of the field. You see? Where in a cell there is an individual consciousness, which means that there has to be a field, the conscious field of which that cell is an emanation. So the cell is a consequence of a field as opposed to being itself conscious, meaning the conscious is not in the cell, it's the cell which is in the conscious field.

It's exactly the opposite. Just like the electron is part of a field, is a form, is a state of a field, and therefore it doesn't exist separate from the field. The same, a cell is an expression of a field, and when the cell dies, the field doesn't die. Just like when our body dies in this theory, who we are, we are fields, we don't die. So this theory is coherent with what many religions have been saying, that there is something about us that doesn't die. Clearly the body dies, but there is some aspects of us, some essence of us that doesn't die.”

In your opinion, why do you think we humans, or nature, is conscious?

“Well, now we go to it's no longer the theory of consciousness, but is an hypothesis that in my mind can explain everything else. In other words, it would be like we have to make an hypothesis of what the world might be like in order to then develop the theory of the Big Bang. But you cannot. What happened before the Big Bang or even at the Big Bang is impossible. You have to start sometime later saying, here's what there is sometimes after the Big Bang. If the Big Bang is the beginning of everything, then you cannot say what there was at the origin. Because in the case of physics, that's a singularity that cannot exist.

And in the case of this model, it has to be the property of the totality of what exists that emerge, that somehow begin to manifest fields. Okay? So the idea then is that the totality of what exists has three fundamental properties, and this is the hypothesis, I call it one, this totality of what exists and the totality of what exists by the way, has these three properties.

One is the potentiality of all existence and the actuality of all existence, because otherwise you have to assume that something can come from nothing, nothing meaning truly nothing, and as we know, even the quantum vacuum is not nothing. The quantum vacuum is fluctuations. It's a property, it's potential energy density which cannot even be calculated. There are many properties of quantum vacuum that supposed to be nothing, but there is not nothing, and besides there is space and time, and where does that come from? Anyway, so one is the totality of what potentially and actually exists, and it has three properties. One is dynamic, meaning is never the same, instant after instant. Two is holistic. It means it is not made of separable parts. Everything is connected within one, so those two properties are already the properties of the universe described by quantum physics.

So there is nothing new here, okay? But the third property is the new property, and that is that one wants to know itself, so the purpose of one is to know itself, and how does it know itself? It takes lack of knowledge, which is in the potential, part of its potential self, and when it knows, it brings into existence that potential knowledge becomes actual knowledge. The actual knowledge is actually an entity, because when he knows itself, he has to know itself completely, because you cannot know a piece of itself, because is holistic. It's not made of separable parts. If it was a piece of itself, it would only know a piece of itself. No, it has to know itself totally, and in this way, it creates what I call a part hole of itself. It has to be a glance at itself in which he gets itself and knows itself with that particular point of view.

Each new self knowing of one, create an entity that has the same property of one; therefore, it wants to know itself, and in fact, one knows itself through its emanations, its creations. I call them ‘unit of consciousness’ but you can call it whatever you want. What it means is, basically, when one knows itself, it brings an entity like itself, with all this potential, all these capacities, that can know itself, and through which he knows itself because it's not separate from itself. And so you start that way, and then these entities can know each other, because they're all parts. In order for me to know myself, I need to know also the other, because the other has a piece of me. We're all connected. So then we create a hierarchy of entities, which I call ‘saties,’ and we are saties, which exist in this vast reality.

We are experiencing ourselves through a body, but we're not the body. We control the body. We direct the body from this other. The body exists in our field, just like a living cell exists in the field of a living cell. The same, our body, in a way, is an emanation of ours, in order to have an experience in a reality that is perceived through the body. So this physical reality is perceived through the body. We have an experience. For what? To know ourselves. And so we are here to know ourselves in this method, which is close to what you would do in a metaverse or in a virtual reality, which is where basically you are immersive. That was the word I was looking for, so an immersive virtual reality where you actually feel that you are inside this reality and you are embodied, an avatar inside that reality, and you operate in that reality, to the point that you could believe for a short period of time that you are that body, that avatar in that reality.

Because of this connection between our conscious being and our body so intimate, we actually, before we wake up and we understand that we are more than the body, we think that we are the body. As we are born here, thinking that we are, with this purpose of thinking that we are the body, so that we express in this reality what the body has been programmed to express, because the body is an unbelievably sophisticated computer, quantum and classical. It is something way beyond what we know how to do, but it is a machine, and so it can express in this reality what we are here to know about ourselves, but what we know about ourselves is not the body. It is through the experience of the body interacting with other bodies and with the physical world, we can experience a reality which allows us to know ourselves, and as we know ourselves, one, digital totality of what exists, knows itself, so that's the idea.”

The aim of your foundation is a the creation of a new mathematical theory of consciousness, that you want to hopefully be testable for predictions and helping others. Can you tell us about the work that you and physicist Giacomo Mauro D'Ariano have done, and how you feel this can be utilized in the future?

“Well, in fact, the mathematics of this theory is exactly the mathematics of Hilbert's space. In some ways, when I was saying those things, I didn't know if there was a need for new mathematics or not. But now with this theory, and Giacomo Mauro D'Ariano is the physicist that we work together to develop this specific theory of consciousness that comes with the fundamental starting point, which is a quantum system, that is in a pure quantum state, has the experience of its own state, and that defines what consciousness is…

The fact that, for example, quantum state is a definite state, is a factor in.. complex space, has all the properties, like non-clonability. They have the property that when you measure it, you can measure it, at most, one and so on. So all of those things now become part of it, and so you can now begin to do science with it. But this is the least of that, because the most crucial thing is that it changes completely the idea of who we are. This is much more important, because ultimately, our future is determined by the ideas that we have about ourselves. The fact we live in a reality that is richer than the reality that we thought was the only reality, which is this space time reality is telling us that that reality cannot be measured with any instrument, but it can be experienced with our consciousness.

All of a sudden, our consciousness is the most incredible instrument that we have to know ourselves, and of course we have known that all along, but except we thought that it was the brain. Instead, the brain is nothing. It's just simply like a drone controlled by an intelligent being, which are the ones, and so we are much faster than we ever thought we were. We thought that we were perishable bodies. And now we say, "No, no, no, no." In fact, we can, even in this life, we can explore other realities and already know that some people can go out of body and explore other realities. Well, science considers so far those as fantasies and so on. Now this theory says, "No, no. Those things can exist, and so they can be explored." In fact, the only way that we know anything is through consciousness, so even physics, the only way that we know physics is through consciousness. It only knows, right?

That's what science is saying. In fact, the science starts with postulates. Postulates are supposed to be self-evident truths, because you cannot prove them if they're true or false, because you have to start with postulates that are assumed to be true. Then, logically you derive consequences. In mathematics, the correct consequences of postulates are theorems. Theorems, they can be proven logically, but even there, mathematics has shown that a simple enough system of postulates cannot prove all the possible statements that can be made based on those postulates. In other words, there are truths that cannot be proven true or false. And so there are statements, they cannot be proven if they're true or false, and that kill the positive, the logical positivism of the 19th century, where mathematicians especially thought that you could prove any truth of an axiomatic system, and that study is not possible.

There are infinite truths statements that can be true or false, but you can never tell, so now you can actually choose the truth of an axion that you cannot be proven. So you can actually have two ways to go. One saying it's true, and the other one's saying it's false. In fact, we already done that with the non-Euclidean geometries. For example, the postulate or the parallels could not be proven with the other postulates, so it was independent, and it could be true or false. If it is true, you have the Euclidean geometries. If it is false, you have the non-Euclidean geometries, so there you go. So reality is much richer than logic can prove, and even that tells you a lot, right?

By starting with a position in which consciousness, which of course we all know that we have, so if there is a postulate, which is self-evident, is that we, our conscious, that we know because we have consciousness, so consciousness must be fundamental and cannot be explained with anything simpler than itself, because it is the source of our knowing. No matter how you turn it, you cannot know if you're not conscious. The fact that you can know is because we are conscious, and so conscious must be fundamental. It cannot be a derivative of anything, and I'm not the first to say this.

To me, this change of heart, because this is a change of heart even more than it is a change of mind, I think that our heart is foundational, is part of who we are, and so is our courage, our ability to act responsibly with courage, even against our interest, because it's fair, because it's right, it's correct. The mind, which is not the rational mind, that is the smallest part of the mind and is the part that is mostly used by scientists, but we also have, in the intuitive mind, the ability to probe deep, deep truths that are impossible or put reason alone and with logic alone. We are multidimensional beings, in a sense. We're not just reasoning, but just machines that reason. Not at all.

In fact, the heart is the one that needs to be discovered, understood, and incorporated, because it's the one that provides the wisdom, provides the ethics, provides the love, the joy, and the sense of belonging with the universe, that is needed to solve the problems that we have ahead of us, and so this cooperation of all these three aspects of us, because we are more than just what is described by science. Typically, science describes us as machines, and so the machine has no heart by definition. Is it really what we are? If we are machines, then of course machines with artificial intelligence will be eventually better than us, but this is because we have not defined us with all the parts that we have. Where do we put the heart? The machine has heart. What the hell?

There are people talking about empathic robots. Are we kidding ourselves? I'm offended by even the idea that there could be an empathic robot, because it tells you, ‘Oh, dear. Oh, I love you.’ I can say I love you when I don't feel anything. Is that love? No, that is not love. Because since we are machines, and not machines. Body is a machine, the body can do what artificial intelligence does, but the body control is driven—not driven in the sense of driven, but the body directed by conscious, who we are, the conscious being that we are, where the non-algorithmic understanding, the non-algorithmic capacity to make decisions, which are non-algorithmic. They cannot be decided by law, but they're free. They're creations. This true creativity that we have, this is what is who we are…

There is incredible evidence. Look at all the near death experiences, there are hundreds of thousands of near death experiences. Most of them have a very well established process that repeats itself, most of them are spontaneous, and what happened, right? The heart plays a fundamental role in those experiences. It is all experience of heart. The experience of mind, the experience of awakening that I mentioned earlier, and I had many others, but it is an experience mostly of the heart. It's the heart that actually can understand these things, because the heart is the center of feeling, not the center of action and not the center of reason. The reason is non-feeling. The reason is a machine. The heart is involved, because we're not separate. Those three centers (mind, body, heart) that we have that were mentioned before, they're not separate.

They're all intertwined. We couldn't live if we didn't even have a tiny little bit of heart, even if we don't show much of it. Still, we couldn't live. If we couldn't live, we didn't have enough courage, enough ability to make decisions, free decisions, but to be able to solve the problems that we are in front of us, we need merge to integrate those centers, especially the heart, which is the one that provides the guidance of love, the guidance, ethics, the guidance of the curiosity and intuition, is the most intuitive aspect, the most direct kind of aspect of knowing that we have, but generally, it's not considered even existing from the scientific point of view, because it's all about the brain. It is all about functioning, and the heart is not about functioning. The heart is about feeling, knowing it is about in full interiority. Knowing by being, as opposed to knowing by the symbolic unrolling of an algorithm. That's not knowing. That's machine. Of course, science is about functioning, but science has to go beyond functioning because we are more than just functioning, but because science cannot say that those things don't exist because they cannot explain them. Unfortunately that is one of the things going on today. Scientists basically deny the existence to what they cannot explain, and that is unfair.

The generic reaction that you hear is basically those things don't exist because we cannot measure them, but how can you say that they don't exist? Because most of them say that they do not exist. If you cannot measure, forget it. If you cannot repeat it in the laboratory, forget it. You guys found out that a quantum state cannot be reproduced, so does it not exist because it cannot be reproduced? Sorry.

My first change of mind was to understand that I'm not separate. I had bought the entire description of reality of physics. When you study physics there is a underlying explanation of what's going on that pretty much tells you you are a machine. When you die, nothing is left. Even if nobody has been able to prove that and nobody goes on a pulpit to say those things, but, still, that's what you get at the end. I had bought all of that ethos and understanding and worldview, and it took two minutes to change completely, and that was not even by my own doing. It was by somebody, and it was probably my vaster self that opened up the curtains and allow me to see a little bit of what he sees.

That awakening experience was just opening of the curtains and understanding that my ego was completely identified with the body. I was unhappy because I had not paid attention to who I am because I had believed that the reality is only what's outside and what is inside doesn't matter, doesn't count and makes you suffer and so on. That is the big thing. Everything else after that was little things, but changing. That is the perspective that most of us have now on earth. It's a perspective that we are the body. Whether you believe religions or not, you're not sure that you are going to wake up after you die even if you believe on a religious thing unless you had an experience that actually gives you evidence, experiential evidence, not intellectual evidence, experiential evidence, because we know by experiences. We do not know by reading a book. We know by experiencing. That's the core aspect of consciousness.

Certainly, my understanding of what consciousness is now is much, much better and deeper and more articulate and more interconnected with everything else than I had even five years ago. They are all incremental steps, and so the basic sense that consciousness must be fundamental took a while before I was pretty sure they had to be that way.

On science and spirituality…we are both.

…”This way of understanding of reality basically brings together spirituality and science in a way that changes both. It's not just opposing them two, which is the best that people think that can be done. Now, it's actually showing that science can enrich spirituality and spirituality can enrich science. In fact, once they are completely merged, and they can completely merge, then you cannot even say what is spirituality and what is science because they will be reflected in both, if you want to look at it that way, or not, because it will be one thing. We are beings that are united. We're not divided.

Science and spirituality is exactly this division that exist today where basically the interiority is not for science and the exteriority is not for spirituality. That's crazy. We are both. The theory that I present is a theory in which matter is an aspect of spirituality. They are not separate. The quantum fields are the conscious entities. They have an experience. They want to communicate with each other to know themselves and to know the others because they need to know the others to know themselves. They need symbolic reality to do so. That's why we have classical physics, because we need information which is shareable because the experience is not shareable per se.

That explains why we have quantum and classical, for example. Otherwise, why do we have classical? We don't know, right? Well, we have classical because quantum entities want to communicate and, to communicate, they cannot use quantum information. Quantum information is private. They have to use something called classical information.

There are many, many, many, many questions, and little by little I get answers. At the fundamental level, I feel like the foundation is solid, and so the questions are, "But how could this happen or how could this work?" and so on and so forth. There are so many extraordinary experiences that are reported. I had many. The ones that I have, they all can be explained with this theory. There is a way that I can explain them. For example, poltergeist, it's a push because the impact of the spiritual reality on macroscopic, not microscopic matter, but macroscopic matter appears to be so incredibly powerful that it's hard to explain that one. Those are the kind of questions that I keep on asking because a theory or reality has to explain all that is legitimate reality, and saying that they don't exist, it's fantasy because I cannot explain it, that's not fair. Certainly, I know that I didn't fake any of my experiences, so I want to explain those to start with, and those fortunately I can explain now with my theory.”

What is your favorite word?

“Well, probably love, but love not in the way that it is generally understood. It's the love that I felt in my awakening experience, so that love which is not a feeling. It's also a force. It's also a direction. It includes everything. It's almost like the primary feeling, the primary sensation, feeling, but also the primary force out of which everything can be seen as facets of it. It's that kind of reality that I see because love is what motivates. It's a force. It's not just a feeling. That energy that was coming out of me, which was like, "How can love come out of me?" it was impossible to imagine at that time. How can I be generating that, but also the mystery. I think mystery is also a good word because we live in the mystery.

We want to understand. We want to know ourselves, but for every single thing that we know, there's an infinity of things that we don't know, so what we don't know is all this vaster than what we know. This is true for one as well because any new knowing is finite in a sense, but what remains to know is infinite. I don't think one will run out of knowing how to know itself, and so it will be a never-ending process of ever expansion, ever increase, but those are hypothesis, of course. But the mystery remains because, if everything is interconnected, it will be all these connections that you haven't seen about things that you already see that they are connected, but you see that they are connecting many other ways that you didn't see before, and that gives you a new perspective. Of course, when we talk about vastness, this universe is unbelievably vast, 96 billion light years of diameter.

That's only the part that you could have access to because it goes beyond. We don't know how far beyond it goes. Just that alone, how can it be? If you think about it, just what we see is so unbelievably rich and incredible, and it's only a tiny little thing because we see with our senses. You can imagine how many possible senses there could be. We only see an incredibly narrow window of all this information which is here. Right now, here, where I look, I see only air. I actually don't even see the air, but I know that there is air. There is actually in this moment a hundred thousand communications going on in the microwaves that if, instead of the eyes, I had cell phones, I could actually listen on each of them. You see what I mean? It's all here, you see, where I don't see anything, so what else is here? Reality is so much vaster than what we think it is that just keeping that perspective in mind keeps you young.

If you could name one image that captures how you see the future or what you think of the future, what would that be?

“Ever expansion, just a never ending expansion of everything in all dimensions, yeah, and continuing existence. I see that, when my body will die, I will simply wake up in a vaster reality that contains this reality. In an experience of near-death, to find themselves looking down in the hospital operating room where the body is being operated. They actually see physical reality, certainly not with their physical eyes, because their eyes are closed and the brain doesn't work, no electrical signals and the heart has stopped, which is the worst case of what happens in this case. There is no reason why they could perceive and know anything, and they have one of the richest experiences they ever had in their life and, first, in this reality and then in a vaster reality where they meet their friends that were already dead, their parents and whoever. They have experiences that are heartwarming and change their life in most of them. Those things are telling you that reality has to be much, much vaster and that, when the body dies, we wake up in this vaster reality that keeps on, never ends.

What idea always takes you down the rabbit hole?

“Well, for me, it's basically unraveling this understanding of how (reality) works because there is also the functioning of the thing that has to be understood. There is what goes beyond the functioning, but also the functioning. The functioning is the symbolic aspect of reality, that is, the algorithmic aspect of reality which is functioning, and then there is the meaning, the non-algorithmic, the understanding, the comprehension. The comprehension is the one that allows them to create and understand the functioning. It doesn't go the other way. It's just that we think of it that way, but it's not true. We understand first and then we find a way to explain the understanding through symbols, first, the meaning, then the symbols. Often, we are led to believe that it is the other way around. It's not true.

The crucial thing that came out of the foundation is this theory with D'Ariano. I actually didn't hope that I could have, before going to the other side, a theory that is so compelling like this one. This theory doesn't change anything of what physics is saying. It doesn't invalidate anything. It adds to what already we know. You want even better. There is no new. It's only a simple understanding. It's like an interpretation of what people could not interpret before. You cannot hope for anything better. You don't have to introduce anything new. The new thing is that, obviously, consciousness is now not an epiphenomenon. It's actually a foundation of reality, but it comes from quantum physics, just reading the tea leaves.

Thank you Federico Faggin.

Craving more?

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👁‍🗨 The Age of Holos with Ervin László, philosopher and systems scientist
👁‍🗨 Citizens of the Solar System… Z to A of the ideas that keep the world spinning