Good evening everyone and welcome to Dialogue with the Authors. I am Rosa Tumolo, director of Il Giardino dei Libri. The book that brings us here tonight opens with a question we all ask ourselves sooner or later: who am I? Federico Faggin and Erica Poli arrive there from very different paths. He as a physicist, as the man who invented the microprocessor and spent a lifetime building machines. She as a doctor and psychiatrist, deep within the stories of the people she meets every day. Yet, reading their chapters, you realize they arrive very close to each other. And tonight we will try to follow these two paths. It is my great pleasure to introduce our guests, Dr. Erica Francesca Poli and Professor Federico Faggin. Welcome to Il Giardino dei Libri. Thank you for accepting my invitation, it is truly a great pleasure to have you here with us this evening. I'll ask you right away, how are you? Everything good?
Fine, all good. Everything is good.
Good, I am pleased. So, before we begin, we have prepared a short introductory video.
Federico Faggin, world-renowned physicist and inventor, father of the microprocessor and pioneer of digitalization. Today he is at the forefront of the scientific study of consciousness and the nature of reality. Dr. Erica Francesca Poli, psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and criminologist, combines neuroscience with integrative medicine, exploring the deep bond between mind, body, and emotional energy to guide the person toward healing and awareness.
And I am pleased to tell you that 9,430 people have registered for this evening, so many people who tonight have chosen to take some time for a question we usually put off. So thank you to all the participants for being here with us, and before we go on, I would like to show the book, here it is. Consciousness, Knowledge, Quantum Information at the Root of Being. You two are among the authors, but the book is the result of a shared effort and also bears the signatures of Enrico Facco, Debora Rienzi, and Alessandro Barban, so a multi-voice work that brings together physics, medicine, psychology, and theology. It is 134 pages long and costs only 16.15 euros, already discounted, and you can purchase it on our website www.giardinodelibri.it. And before we get into the heart of the conference, a reminder: on the right here you will find the chat, write your questions for Dr. Poli and Professor Faggin. In the second part of the evening, I will read some of them. So, I have read your book and prepared some questions. Let's get into the heart of the evening and I would start right there, with the question the book opens with. Professor, in your book you recount that at a certain point you had everything the world says should make us happy: family, success, fame. And yet, you were not happy. Was that when "who am I" became a real question?
It had been a real question for a while, in the sense that every now and then I found myself realizing that I was pretending to be happy, I mean, I wanted to avoid facing the problem and I didn't understand how I could solve it. And at a certain point, I took responsibility for the problem. I said, "No, I created this problem for myself and therefore I must solve it." And when I made this decision, it took a few years, a year or two, to have an experience that made me understand where the fundamental problem was. The experience—if there's time, I can tell the experience or I can skip it, but the essence of the experience is that I saw myself both inside and outside of me. From my chest came a crazy energy, an energy that was love, my body was warm, it was vibrating, so it was also a physical thing, it wasn't just an imagination, a vision. No, no, no. These were deep physical sensations, even of the body, and my consciousness was in this energy that came out of me and that was love, but unconditional love, a very powerful love; and at a certain point this energy explodes, there is sparkling white light everywhere and my consciousness is everywhere. Not only did it come out with this love, but now it covers all of space and in this moment I recognize myself, I recognize that I am what I observe, I am me, so I was the observer, the observed, and in understanding that I was what I observed, I really changed, I changed my perception and I felt peace. I felt peace for the first time in my life. Before I had never been there and in this experience I recognized myself. This is my home, this energy, this state of love, peace. Then joy was also added to this energy, the same joy I felt when my first model airplane that I built, imagined, bought the materials for, designed, built, and made fly. I was 11 years old and my third model flew. The others didn't make it. And this truly powerful joy of a personal accomplishment, right, of a crazy satisfaction, the same joy I felt when I designed and made the world's first microprocessor work, same stuff. So peace, love, and joy revealed themselves as the essence of who I am.
Thank you, very interesting. Erica, for you, when did "who am I" become a question you could no longer put off?
I could invert that question to: when was it not? Meaning, never. It has always been the question, and it is also the reason why I was then called to the profession that I carry out, which cannot be defined in any way as a job, but rather a profession, a vocation that has always been within me. I have always been, since I was very, very small, an extremely curious child about mysteries. When I was 5, I unexpectedly asked to be taken to see the Etruscan archaeological sites that I had heard were near the seaside resort where we were with my parents and grandparents, and I would slip here and there asking questions. When I was even smaller, with my beloved great-grandmother, who for me remains a figure deeply connected to me even today, I would put all my dolls together with her, I would talk and she would say that I explained things starting from questions that would make her say, "How did she think of that?" So this was evidently in my DNA. And then the question became the opportunity for a wonderful profession that crosses lives and that has, let's say, the great gift of allowing me every day to connect, intuit, and perceive exactly what Federico was saying, in reality, in every person and, naturally, in a dynamic of mirroring, of resonance—which we could even call entanglement—constantly within me. So what Federico described, and what is often described as a mystical experience, an experience of an altered state of consciousness, is very likely what consciousness is meant to be. If we could continue to maintain a deep connection with a dimension that constantly surpasses us, transcends us, but as Federico described when speaking of his experience, it is also deeply rooted in the body. The body is inhabited by the spirit more than we think. It is a seat of perceptions, of representations, it is an "other" within us. And so it is that in some way we begin, if we keep this relationship alive, to realize that we never coincide with anything. There is a dimension, indeed irreducible, to quote one of Federico's book titles, which is very difficult to accept, impossible in some ways to grasp, and yet the only one that defines us, but scientists like Federico know this today, and the ancients knew it too. Consciousness plays out in this very dimension—I like to say—of the orchestra that actually composes the music while playing it, which is something very difficult for the rational mind to grasp. But when we manage to experience that state which sometimes really, even on an ordinary day, we experience when a blade of grass amazes us on the street while we are rushing to work, they are like gaps in space-time: we have the feeling that someone is there. Well, this sensation of presence is a perception of consciousness, only we tend not to give it enough time, enough attention. Well, in my profession, I give time and attention to this all day long, and this is a great gift.
Thank you Erica, thank you very much. So, Professor, let's dive into your chapter. You use a very beautiful image, three colors, red, green, and blue, which mix without boundaries like body, mind, and spirit. Will you tell us about it and what is in the white at the center?
Well, I use this color wheel because it can provide an image of the fundamental aspects that are intertwined, they are indivisible, they are part of who we are. We are matter, body; we are mind—and the mind is not just what the brain does, it is much more than what the brain does—and we are spirit. These three aspects are intertwined and, for example, where matter overlaps with the body, where matter overlaps with the mind, there is what I call living information, that is, the particles, the atoms, the molecules that have been excited by fields. Where instead there is matter—and matter, for example, is the color red, the mind is the color green, and spirit is the color blue. So, when these three colors are so integrated that their union can be represented by the color white, that is love, it is the powerful and complete integration of the three aspects. When one, for example, when I had this experience, the physical aspect was integrated with the mental aspect and with the spiritual aspect. The spiritual aspect was recognizing myself in what I was observing, which was my consciousness. And the mental aspect—I didn't say it when I spoke—but the mental aspect is what made me realize with a thought that what I was observing was the substance of which everything is made. And the material aspect, on the other hand, was the fact that my body was vibrating, it seemed to be in tune, in resonance with the other two aspects. So, therefore, this powerful integration was then love, peace, and joy, and white light. So now I make an even more precise distinction than what I wrote in the book, in the chapter I authored, because back then for me matter was certainly integrated, but now I've seen that there is an even deeper integration than what I had understood. Therefore, matter also has profound aspects. For example, matter is also the memory of experience. So the past is not time; the past is the memory of our experience which only occurs in the present. So these aspects are also much more subtle, but they make us understand that the nature of space and time is not exactly what physics says, even if naturally all the experiments we conduct in spacetime are correct. What is different is the interpretation of what space is, and what time is. So this metaphor of the three colors is very important because it then allows us to broaden our understanding of both science and spirituality. To unite the two fundamental aspects, interiority with exteriority, but also with ontology, which is the material aspect, if you will, ontology in the sense of things that exist and that are not the map. For example, today science believes that reality begins with mathematics, but reality does not begin with mathematics. Mathematics is the map of a territory, it is a language; it describes something that must exist. Ontology comes before its description, and this is the problem that exists in physics today, because the deeper reality is absolutely not similar to the reality that we express and observe with our body. With our body, we only observe the classical world, the world made of bits, but the mind, for example, is the reality described by quantum physics. And quantum physics represents the mind of the universe, while the spiritual aspect is the part of our conscious experience, the aspect of self-consciousness, that is, the consciousness that observes the experience and can also reason about the experience, which animals do not have, but we self-conscious beings do. And then free will, which is the ability to decide which of the possible futures to choose in the present. So the future does not exist until there has been a free choice of the selves. The selves are these quantum fields that control the body. We are a field that controls the body. The body is an instrument of the field. When the body dies, we continue to exist, and that is good news. I will stop here.
Thank you very much. Listen, Professor, when we flip a coin, heads or tails, right? It only seems like chance because we don't have all the information. You write that in quantum physics, it is different. There, it is not chance; it is a choice. Who chooses?
In the case of, for example, obviously the coin is a purely material structure in spacetime and the coin, its movement can be described by the laws of classical physics. Therefore, even if we cannot, we do not know, we don't have all the information that, if we did, we could even predict if it's heads or tails with certainty. We could predict with certainty because classical physics, as a first approximation, is a deterministic physics, so there are laws and if one has all the information, these laws will say whether we will see heads or tails. For us, since we don't have all the information, we must use probability. The probability of it being heads or tails is 0.5, meaning roughly half the time it comes up heads, half the time it comes up tails. But this half the time is over a very large number of repetitions of tossing the coin in the air, right? Maybe heads, heads, tails, heads, heads, heads, heads, tails, tails, heads, tails, tails, etc. So you cannot predict what, I mean, each time there is a 0.5 probability regardless of what we saw before. This is how classical physics works. In quantum physics, however, the probability does not refer to the lack of knowledge of what will happen. In classical reality and quantum reality, the probability refers only to the fact that what we will measure depends on a choice of free will. In quantum physics, it is not called free will; it is called the collapse of the wavefunction. Quantum physics allows us to calculate the probabilities of all possibilities, but it will not be able to tell us what will happen. So because what will happen, happens at the moment the interaction between the measurement system and what we are observing occurs. What we generally observe in quantum physics are fields and the excited states of fields, and so, for example, the electron is an excited state of the electron field, and let's imagine the electron field as a sea, and the excited state as a wave of the sea. It is not a completely perfect comparison, however, because the field does not have a surface, while the sea has a surface, but a structure that is part of the sea, so the electron is a structure, a form that is part of this field that is everywhere. So, when we observe an excited state, we want to see where, for example, where an electron will manifest, we can only calculate the probabilities. But then, who decides, and how does the manifestation occur when a measurement is made? When a measurement is made, if thousands of cases are performed, the probability distribution calculated by mathematics is correct, but each individual case cannot be known. Because the collapse of the wave function, which is what physicists use as an idea to determine what will manifest... what we will see, the collapse... the wave function says that what will happen is random and not algorithmic. We, on the other hand—and when I say we, my colleague who developed this theory with me, Professor D'Ariano—we say instead that the wave function collapse is actually a free-will decision of the field. That is why, being a free-will decision, there is no way to tell what will happen, and therefore the future does not exist yet. The future is created by the free-will decisions of quantum fields. This is very important.
Thank you. Erica. So, the professor has brought us into the world of physics. Your chapter, however, begins in a courtroom; you start with Kafka's The Trial. There is a defendant, there are public prosecutors, and there are defense attorneys. I wonder, who is the defendant, and why do you include us, ordinary people, among the defense attorneys?
Well, the defendant, in a somewhat Kafkaesque way, is sensed as the chapter progresses and perhaps understood only at the end—without ever fully grasping it, as is fitting—because the defendant is, let's say, metaphysics, the very dimension we are talking about now, which has been a victim, on one hand, from a scientific perspective, of a reckless suppression and, from a spiritualist perspective, of an equally reckless disidentification or disconnection from the material dimension, that is, from the dimension of what we live. We are continuously this tightrope between the visible and the invisible, between the known and the unknown, between the body and the non-body, between the human-animal, why not, and the divine, something that goes beyond, that transcends. So, that is the defendant, and we are all the defense attorneys because, even if certain discussions regarding physics might seem distant—much like certain discussions regarding psychoanalysis or philosophy—they can seem far from our reality, but they are actually concrete. Metaphysics is the most concrete dimension of our lives and of everything we experience. Let's take a banal example, an apparently banal one. Let's take... let's start with an object, right? Let's take this, this pen, which incidentally belongs to my daughter, so I am particularly fond of it. Now, this pen can be bought, and there are many of them in a store, all identical, right? Apparently. And yet, this pen, the Little Prince would have liked it, wouldn't he? With his fox, and this pen is no longer just a pen; naturally, it became the pen my daughter bought with me on a certain day, and so on and so forth. And, by the way, even if it hadn't been bought and hadn't had this kind of history, even in that store it would have been a pen about which Aristotle himself would have told us: there was an aporoumenon, that is, there was something that could not be defined, could not be categorized quantitatively or qualitatively as something determined. It was an aporia, a path without a path. Aristotle has a dimension that perhaps in some ways has been forgotten, because he later became the forerunner of a certain vision of medieval science, of scholasticism, but in reality, Aristotle places metaphysics after physics, which however is meta-physics, that is, something that stands above physics. To talk about what? To talk about all those qualities, those aspects, we could perhaps say those "qualia," to keep to more modern language, that are not definable by physics. And he says the true substance, the concept of true ousia, of essence, is in this dimension. So we can list a whole series of characteristics, even for the pen—it's black, a certain shape—but after that, its origin, how it was created, the intention behind it, everything that led it to arrive in that store, is lost in a background that is, in fact, incommensurable. And yet it defines this pen in relation to another. This dimension is never physical, and yet it is the most concrete of all because it makes this pen this pen and not any other. Think, if we transport this—we are talking about an inanimate object, so commercial—let's transport it to an individual, to a human being whose origin we do not truly know. No scientist can know what actually triggers conception. They can assist it, they can make it happen in a test tube, but perhaps out of 10 attempts at assisted fertilization, one succeeds and the others do not. No scientist can account for this. And when we dream at night, who is it that is dreaming? Who is it that is living? And I could go on infinitely. When we fall in love, why do we fall in love? We can give a lot of reasons, but naturally, none of them truly capture what has happened. When we make a decision, in hindsight we say there are pros and cons, but in reality, we made that decision on the wave of a feeling. And that feeling passes through the senses, therefore from something very physical; but it is also a sense, like one could say of the Tao, with that ideogram that gives the idea of a sense that is also a path. There, this is lived life. These are the questions for which people come to my office and say to me: "Why?". And I, naturally, avoid it, I avoid going into the "why" and I start to do what was being said, what Federico was saying in some way earlier, that is I try to have them go through a process, to let their feeling walk, to ensure that they walk their words, their emotions; and above all, I don't want to resolve their conflicts, I couldn't even if I wanted to. No one could resolve another person's conflicts, and truthfully, not even their own. One can only inhabit them because, the moment one inhabits them, something extraordinary happens, something quantum we could say, because in inhabiting—that is, in seeing the relationship that exists between the planes: the relationship between past, present, and future; the relationship between self and non-self; the relationship between what I fear and what I desire; the relationship between desire and limitation (I could go on forever); the relationship between loving a person and then no longer loving them, loving two simultaneously, wanting to do a certain type of work but being afraid to abandon certain habits—and so on. In going into this interstice where I am, I stay with what is there and I don't look for a one-way track, then a transformation happens, a transformation that is lived by the person, and the person experiences it and perceives it as an energetic, emotional, even physical transformation. So, when earlier Federico was talking about integration, the integration of the three colors that then merge into this white... well, I see it every day: when a person comes to me and brings a problem, and instead of looking for a solution with the mind, we look for the "non-problem," that is, what really cannot be resolved, and we stay there and start to feel what happens. The nervous system itself begins to enter a different state, we call it a state of connection, and I could go on at length, but I won't do it now. There are studies on polyvagal theory, on neuroscience—we could go on and on for a very long time delving into these topics—but there is also a physical substrate that is a functional substrate, and we have states of integration. This is what Federico was saying earlier regarding memory, which could also be recalled simply by remembering St. Augustine's concept: time is the time of the soul. But why? Because we don't have memories like in an archive where we go to pull a book and everything is written there, and that's just how it is. Every time we remember, we are recreating the condition of that memory from an energetic standpoint within ourselves. There are also many studies and many experiments on this here as well. We are literally recreating it; that is, we are re-actualizing it, we are reliving it in the present. So then, what is a script? Why does a person come to me and say, "Why do the same things always happen to me, the same relationships, the same problems?" Why do I keep experiencing Freud's repetition compulsion? Because, in reality, it is a condition, a memory that has become, let's say, an automatic state that we could call high entropy; that is, there is great dissipation there, there is no more creative energy, there is no longer that dimension of the aporoumenon, which is the unknown that constantly forces me to try to say something more and to stay in the tension of desire. There is a structure there that has become formalized. Low creative energy, low agitation of particles. It is a repetitive, predictable structure where much of my vital energy has been as if dissipated, it has as if calmed down. Sure, perhaps I am calmer, perhaps it is a stable situation, perhaps it is a comfortable situation, but it is certainly not a situation that gives life to life. So what happens? That when we begin to sit with what we cannot explain, and trying to "sit with it" means acquiring degrees of consciousness, but it also means acquiring degrees of freedom. Jung said: "In every chaos there is a cosmos hidden," because every chaos is a womb; it is a womb open to possibility, that is, to that dimension that Federico called free will. What is possibility? It is having a bit more energy available so as not to fall back into an entropic state, so to speak, but to regenerate, to re-agitate this field, and in this agitation of the field, perspectives open up that may be different from those I would have expected, those I would have anticipated. I went to the psychiatrist with a certain idea, with a certain question, and then I discover that the question is something entirely different. So, it is truly possible, and from a quantum perspective, it is truly possible to perceive that the past changes—not because the events have changed, but because that specific position of gaze, of presence, of the
way I inhabit myself has changed, which is the same thing that can collapse the wave function in one way or another. And so, naturally, time is no longer what we think it is. We think that time is a linear container in which we walk, but that is not the case. Time is not just linearity. The vector of time is determined by entropy, but entropy is determined by how much we abdicate our unknown to known structures that, perhaps, give us greater stability, greater repetitiveness, a sort of comfort, but in reality lead us to be in some way enslaved to a script. And the people who come to me, well, they come because deep down they are unhappy, because deep down they detest themselves, because deep down their life has no meaning; and it doesn't have it because they don't do things, it doesn't have it because they let the defendant in that inner courtroom fall prey to those prosecutors who thought that what is worth knowing is only what can be known with a measurement, and is only what can be known objectively and is only what can be explained.
Instead, what is worth knowing is what connects the measurable to the unmeasurable and the explicable to the inexplicable—not just the inexplicable alone, because that would be another spiritualist collapse, another reductionist collapse—but the continuous relationship, the continuous tension between what is visible and what is invisible, between what is measured and what is not measured. When I inhabit this dimension, apart from becoming fascinating, mysterious, full of inspiration, full of creative meaning, I begin to feel that I exist; that is, I begin to have the perception of my being here. And when I have the perception of my being here, I have more degrees of freedom, and when I have more degrees of freedom, the first thing I want to do is give them away, to give of myself and make sure others feel them too. And that is why love, not just understood as love in a romantic relationship, but love as the ontological substance of which being is made, because being is a continuous giving, a continuous self-donation; but in this donating, well, being hides itself: nature loves to hide. It always hides in its deepest dimensions, just as the origin is never known, and naturally, the origin is also always an end, and so we go to the conjunction of opposites. When there are people who manage to inhabit this dimension, even if only for a few moments or for an hour-long session, they will never be the same again. And that is why they will be excellent defense attorneys for the only thing I believe we need, which is precisely the continuous overcoming of something that traps us in a known form.
Thank you Erica, very interesting. Now I have a question for both of you. In the book, you both talk about artificial intelligence. Erica, you imagine religions managed by artificial intelligence with God responding to everything day and night with a click, and you write that algorithms push us toward identical tastes. Professor, you instead write that a machine cannot know that it does not know. What do we lose if we entrust the big questions to a machine? Professor, I'll start with you, please.
Um, we lose the spiritual dimension and also a large part of the mental dimension. The machine is simply a game of symbols, and we taught it how to assemble symbols based, for example, on a question we ask, which then requires the subsequent symbols to be the most probable regarding a history of, a sort of synthesis of human knowledge that we have made the machine learn, in such a way that the machine seems to understand what it is saying, but in reality, the machine understands nothing. No, no, it does not experience, it has no experience of the symbols. The symbols defined by science are forms without meaning; they cannot even be called symbols. The word symbol implies that I assign a meaning to a sign, to a physical structure, to a physical phenomenon. Then that sign becomes a symbol. But in the case of physics, it is enough to recognize the sign, which is not a symbol. They call it a symbol, but they should call it a sign. It is enough to recognize the sign and the quantity of information carried by that sign, which is a kind of... it's a vulgarity, in the sense that it has nothing to do with meaning. But the quantity of information carried by that sign is just a probability; in reality, the quantity is inversely proportional to the probability that that symbol will manifest. So a very probable symbol carries little information because I can already predict what will happen, while a symbol that is very improbable will carry a large quantity of information. That's all.
There is no meaning in the symbols of information used by science, and this is a very serious harm because for us, information is the meaning of the symbols. If a symbol has no meaning, that symbol says nothing, meaning it doesn't even contain information. So here there is a divergence between what is matter, measurements, and so on, and bringing into the description of physics something that is not physical, because meaning has nothing to do with physics, meaning has nothing to do with matter; it is something that goes beyond matter, simply a carrier of meaning. We have assigned a certain meaning to that material structure and then, to understand that meaning, the other person must already know the meaning. In other words, a symbol cannot bring a new meaning to a person if that person does not already know or have a similar meaning, one very close to what I want to communicate. So you can see that here we have a very serious problem of misunderstanding what meaning and symbol mean. And the confusion is enormous everywhere. Why? Because, um, because then we, the symbols are, um, ah for us, symbols have a structure such that one can take other symbols, put them together, and call them a new symbol. Then this new symbol is put together with other new symbols and then called a new symbol. So there are symbols of symbols of symbols of symbols of symbols at many levels. Mathematics is made this way. The most trivial, the simplest symbols are numbers, but a matrix of numbers is a symbol of symbols of symbols of symbols. And so, in mathematics, which is a language, we try to explain how the world works, but mathematics cannot create the world. Another fundamental difference between science and metaphysics is that science tries to explain reality with a language, but there is a deeper reality that has no language, has no mathematical language, that is, it cannot yet be put into symbols because it is not reproducible.
What I feel, only a small part of what I feel, can I put into symbols. The love that I feel, I cannot transfer as I feel it. Look how this is a fundamental property of consciousness that is reflected in quantum physics and not in classical physics, because in classical physics the state of a system is reproducible, while the state of my consciousness, which is what I feel, is not reproducible. Only quantum fields have this property. The state of a quantum field cannot be reproduced, it can only be known, if one makes measurements, for example, a small part of this state, one bit for every quantum, one bit. So, even there, we realize that quantum physics is telling us something that physicists don't want to accept, because they want a predictable world, they want a world describable by mathematics, a world where the future is already certain.
But, as I said before, the future is not certain: it depends on our free will decisions, but not those of the body. Yes, the body then represents the decision of consciousness, but consciousness does not exist in the body itself. Consciousness exists in the field that we are. We are much more than the body. This is also a fundamental thing because otherwise consciousness cannot be understood in scientism. Consciousness is a property of the brain. So if it exists because it's an epiphenomenon according to most scientists, if it exists, it can only exist in the brain. Therefore, a living cell is not conscious, a tree is not conscious, an animal, well, we give them a bit of consciousness, but once even animals were considered unconscious. So these things are things that have taken us out of the dimension of who we are. Our dimension is love, joy, peace, and collaboration and knowing ourselves, knowing ourselves through others, and cooperating. Today, scientism tells us that the only reason for life is the survival of the fittest. What does the survival of the fittest mean? I take out the other, and I am the fittest. Do you understand? I mean, these things are insane things. There is no scientific principle more insane than the principle of the survival of the fittest. And I start instead from the principle that the totality of what exists is dynamic, holistic, and wants to know itself. And these three fundamental properties, because there can only be one postulate, because two postulates can be in contradiction with each other and it is never possible to prove if they are or not. So only one postulate is possible to start from creation, from how one goes from the whole to the whole-parts. Because the whole, if the whole is holistic, there are no separate parts, everything is interconnected. So what we call parts are always connected to the whole and I call them whole-parts because they carry the whole within them, they are irremediably connected to the whole.
Erica, the floor is yours.
