The Man Who Saw the Future | Meeting with Federico Faggin | June 9, 2026

I would like to explain a little better the theory I have, which allows us to understand how science and spirituality, which have always been considered two separate things, are actually integrated in the deepest reality and can explain it in a much better way. Science explains nothing at all about the human spiritual aspect, but spirituality explains almost nothing about physics. Instead, in an integrated vision, we can understand the deeper nature of reality and understand who we are, because we are both matter, mind, and spirit. So we have three aspects: interdependent, inseparable, and every manifestation of reality, any manifestation has these three aspects, even if we do not recognize them, but they exist in every manifestation. And if we understand these things, we can also understand that artificial intelligence does not have consciousness, it never will, that we must understand what it can do, what it cannot do, in order to use artificial intelligence with ethics. Ethics is a problem that is not solvable with symbols. Ethics goes beyond symbols, goes beyond the mind, and goes straight to the deepest sense of who we are, which allows us to have that compass that we feel inside us and we know.

Of course, it is possible to cover up, to prevent us from seeing the ethical sense we have inside us, but we also know when we do something we should not do, we know we are doing something we should not do. So the fact that we have this deep sense of ethics is the keystone to understanding where we must develop and the direction the world must go in the future to use the increasingly powerful tools we have in such a way as not to destroy ourselves. So, what does a holistic reality mean? It means that if the universe is holistic, and the fact that the universe is holistic, that is, it is not made of separable parts, has already been demonstrated by physicists. Physicists have discovered that elementary particles, atoms, molecules are all interconnected. They have states in common that do not exist in classical physics, that is, in objects that exist in the spacetime we can observe. And for example, computers, the bits of computers are independent of one another, they have no state in common. The bits are not entangled, they have no states in common. Instead, the bits, the quantum bits, the bits of the quantum computer, but more importantly still the quantum bits, of which the deepest reality of quantum physics is made, the fields, are the state of the fields, and it is quantum information that can be described with quantum bits that are entangled. This structure, this quantum state of the fields, in the theory I created together with Professor Dariano, who is a famous physicist in the field of quantum physics at the University of Pavia, this quantum state is a pure state of the field that physics says cannot be reproduced, it is private, it is not knowable from outside. If one were to make a measurement of this state, at most one can have one classical bit of information for each quantum bit that describes the state. The state of a quantum field requires an almost infinite number of quantum bits and therefore it is an incredibly sophisticated, extremely complex state. And this already tells us that the quantum field is characterized as a fundamental property of its state. This state is where physics starts to then make predictions about what can be measured in spacetime.

But what is the state for? Why is the state not duplicable? The no-cloning theorem says that a state cannot be duplicated, and why? Because the quantum bits are entangled. Well, these things, physicists do not know how to explain them, that is, they are properties of mathematics. So quantum physics actually starts from quantum fields, but then the quantum field is a mathematical structure defined by mathematical functions. In particular, n-dimensional spaces are used, Hilbert spaces, and therefore spaces that do not even exist in spacetime. By the way, the components of these vectors in Hilbert space are components that are complex numbers, they are not real numbers, and so it is a completely mathematical structure. But what is mathematics for? Why is it like this? Well, in the theory I created, starting from the fact that the quantum field has properties that are similar to the properties of consciousness, because even our conscious experience is private. I cannot, the love I feel, I cannot transfer it as I feel it. I must always translate what I feel inside me, I must translate it into symbols. Symbols that then are expressed, are shareable, are classical symbols. The words that I use can be transformed into computer bits. Everything that is visible in the spacetime of classical physics can be represented with classical bits, but the quantum state of the fields, no. But what is it for then? We need to take a step forward. The step forward is to say, 'Ah, but the field, the quantum state of a field, the field can know it from within.' Well, if we start from this little addition to what physics says, we can then say that the quantum state of a field, which in the mathematical theory represents what the field instead knows within itself through a conscious experience. So the quantum state of a field is the representation of the qualia, that is, of the sensations, feelings, thoughts, emotions that we feel within us and that we know directly through an experience. This is an experience of the field, not of the body. The body is a structure that exists in the field that we use to have information and to transform the information that is in this spacetime, a small part of the information that is in this spacetime, into information internal to the body that the field observes, and from this observation it transforms it into a conscious experience of what it has observed. And through these processes, this field manages to know itself, and by knowing itself, one who created the field knows himself.

So in this way it is possible to explain that consciousness must be a fundamental property of One that cannot be explained by anything that does not have consciousness. So one must start from consciousness as an ontological property, not mathematical, ontological. Consciousness and free will are ontological properties of the fields of One, One through the fields, and through this process One knows Himself. And many struggle to understand why. But why must One know Himself? Well, also we, since we are parts-whole of One, we represent fields that are emanations of the unified field that is One. These emanations of One are the aspect of self-knowledge of One when He emanates a field. That is, in other words, when One knows Himself for the first time in that direction in which He has known Himself, He creates a field, a part-whole of Himself. The part-whole of Himself is the equivalent that we also have in the body, which is a quantum and classical structure, where every cell of my body has the genome of the fertilized egg, a cell that created the whole body. So, life, living beings have properties that are not the properties of a computer, of a machine, they are quantum and classical properties. Every body is formed by cells that are part-whole of the organism of the whole body. As we are fields that are part-whole of the unified field that is One.

Obviously these are not easy concepts, one has to think about them, reflect on them, but the important thing is that One knows Himself through the fields He creates. One is what connects from within all these fields, and a field can be interpreted as a set of, as they say in quantum physics, basis functions, that is, a form in which, one of the infinite ways in which One can know Himself, like a set of coordinates with which One can know Himself. But One can know Himself potentially in an infinite number of directions. So One is the superposition, the state of One is the superposition of the states of His parts-whole which together create the experience of Himself, the self-knowledge of One. With this principle it is then possible to explain how the deepest reality is a spiritual reality because self-knowledge is the origin of life. For example, when One, by knowing Himself, creates a part-whole of Himself, life begins from One, not from biology. The duplication of Himself into a part-whole begins from One, so life is produced by One and the body is simply a physical structure that has the same essence, but is much more reduced compared to what One does with His fields. You see? So the fields are structures of incredible complexity because they have the capacity, they have a computational capacity that is represented by their quantum state which evolves, they have a physical capacity to express what they want to express through a part of what they know, what they understand within themselves, they can represent it with these which are called excited states, which are particles, atoms, molecules for example are excited states of the fields and can communicate with other fields using these excited states.

So matter is integral with the field. The field has the mental aspect which is the computational aspect, but the field also has the aspect of self-knowledge through a conscious experience, the qualia. And the qualia are what produce the essence of self-knowledge of One, which I call meaning. So the cycle closes, then meaning can be put into symbols, symbols of a different nature from the symbols that are the excited states of the fields. The symbols used to represent the experience become the memory of the experience and are a fundamental part of what makes spacetime. Spacetime is largely a memory of the self-knowledge of One. So I stop here because one could go on for hours and hours, but to give you a sense that this theory therefore unites interiority and exteriority in a scientific theory that makes predictions, it can be falsified even if falsification is very difficult because the quantum state of a field cannot be reproduced, this the physicists have discovered, so it cannot be reproduced in the laboratory, the quantum state of a system, the quantum state of a field in particular, but yes, the field itself can know it and therefore it is possible statistically to obtain the same state and therefore to find resonance. This resonance I am talking about is not a resonance in spacetime, it is not a resonance of physical waves, it is a resonance of quantum states. And it just so happens that what helps, this is new physics, what helps to bring the states of fields into resonance is love. Love is like a force that allows entering into resonance and bringing the same meaning to two or more conscious entities, fields that want to know themselves, and the deepest self-knowledge, the meaning of one's own knowledge, also manifests itself as love, the sense of self, an ever more powerful love as one knows oneself more and more. So love must be part of physics. Love today is not a word found in any physics text, nor in neuroscience. And love instead is what distinguishes us from machines. I stop here.

Let us run it. Well, I realize that what I have said raises more questions than it answers, but anyway I must give a sense of coherence and a global sense because otherwise one cannot even grasp the essence of what I am talking about. So, the material aspects, the mental aspects and the spiritual aspects of the fields, any field has all three of these aspects. But not only, but also a particle, for example, an elementary particle when it is manifested is matter. When it is manifested is matter that emerges from the field, from the field which is above all the computational part of the field is mind, is a computational aspect, but the deepest aspect of the field is the capacity of the field to know its state through qualia, sensations, feelings, etc., and the meaning of its experience. And this field, not only, but this field must also put into a form of permanent matter in spacetime the memory of its experience in the present. So we are talking about a field that is a structure of complete, very complex, very... By the way, the fields of physics, how do they obey the laws of mathematics? The laws of mathematics do nothing but express the computational aspect of the field. In fact, there is someone who has a theory, says, 'Ah, we are inside a computer because only the computer can do the calculations and then give us the answers.' No, but then where does the computer come from? That is, the computer, ah, the aliens made it. We are inside a computer made by the aliens and therefore blah blah blah. No, these are things that even many scientists believe up to a certain point, but they are forms of understanding that do not lead to more understanding. But the computational aspect of the mind must exist in the fields, it cannot exist in mathematics because mathematics is our language. Mathematics, science today has a problem with mathematics. The scientist typically believes that mathematics exists independently of what it describes, but mathematics is a language created by our consciousness, by our capacity to understand and therefore to express in a language, a more precise language, more mathematical than normal language, what one has understood. But who does this? It must be who we are. Who are we? The field, we are not the body. The body comes and goes. You see? So the field has these three properties and also an elementary particle is a state of the field, inseparable from the field. This is what quantum field theory says, right? And the electron is not a little ball and it is not even a wave, it is a state of the field, like a wave of the sea that is not separable from the sea. So the electron, the properties of electrons, the electron is inseparable from the field and the properties of the electron are the properties of the field, even if the electron when it manifests has characteristics that are similar to all other electrons, to the point that electrons in certain respects are indistinguishable from one another when they are in an excited state, but they have correlated states that no one understands, that no one knows they must be, and no one can measure them. This is what quantum physics says. So the deepest reality must all be rewritten, in a certain sense, in the new terms that I propose, where there is not only the material part, not only the part that quantum physics says but does not call mind, because in quantum physics mathematics expresses something, but it expresses something that ontologically is where? You see? Mathematics is not ontology. Physicists study physics as if it were mathematics, especially quantum physics starts from nature. One says, 'Ah, the ontology is in the fields, but what are the fields? They are structures, they are spaces that have certain properties, every point has a certain property.' OK, but what is a property? It is a mathematical thing again. So physics that wants to explain ontology makes an immediate jump to mathematics and explains nothing about ontology and only talks about a mathematical theory. Instead, we understand, we know because we experience, mathematics does not experience anything, you see? So the fundamental problem we have today is that we start from principles that are not linked together in an ontology that makes sense and in fact science today eliminates a priori anything that is of the higher mind, for example understanding and so on, but above all the inner aspect of consciousness, free will, the capacity to know the meaning of information as I said before and so on. So today we have a very serious problem in science and I call it scientism, science that has become religion. Scientism is what starts with the idea that we are a body and that is it, there is nothing else but a body. When the body dies, nothing of us remains. Instead my theory says when the body dies, we are the field. When the body dies, OK, the instrument the field was using is gone, but the field continues to exist. So my theory says that we do not die because we are, the essence of who we are is the field, not the body. You see? So when science starts by saying that we are a body and that is it, they have eliminated everything that makes us different from other machines. They have defined us as a machine and therefore they have eliminated our humanity, they have eliminated what is most important to us and this is a very serious problem, especially in the context of artificial intelligence which is beginning to imitate us and seems to know better than us. They say it knows better than us, when in reality they know better than us when they do the operations because the operations are mental structures that we taught the computer, we created the computer to do exactly those mental structures. The computer did not create us, we are the ones who created the computer, you see? We are, today we are confused, OK? And we must understand that we are not what the new religion called scientism tells us. Now I speak more clearly. OK.

Certainly the experience I had has a lot in common with near-death experiences, with out-of-body experiences, with many other experiences. Not only have I had these experiences, but I have had a couple of hundred other extraordinary experiences of consciousness that made me understand that consciousness has properties that are not known by science today or are simply unexplored. For example, near-death experiences, typically hundreds of thousands of people have had these experiences, there are hundreds of books written about these experiences, and for those who do not know, a near-death experience is a person who is clinically dead, that is, whose heart no longer beats. After 2-3 minutes that it no longer beats, the person would be clinically dead if not resuscitated because they are brought to the hospital, after a while they are dead, right? That is, death is not a switch, but a process that lasts a few hours. If one can intervene during this couple of hours and can bring a person back to life, well this happens today with the medical techniques we have much more often than in the past, but near-death experiences have been reported for thousands of years. They were rare though a long time ago. So, the person who dies sees themselves above the body, that is, from the body comes out another body, but it is not the normal physical body because it can leave the room, for example, this body, I will call it the astral body, can pass through the walls of the room, they see themselves above the body, they observe what is happening. They see, for example, the doctor, the nurses performing the operation and who will then bring them back to life. Then often they move to another reality, they pass through a tunnel, but not always, and they find themselves in a reality full of light, love, joy, they describe it that way, where they meet people already dead, who were loved ones who typically meet them, parents who died, for example, siblings, etc., and they have a meeting full of joy, of light, of understanding, they communicate telepathically, that is, they do not use words because then the bodies in this reality interpenetrate, so there is no... they are completely different bodies from the bodies we have here, but a being of light says, 'Look, you must go back because you have not finished doing what you came to do in your life,' and those people find themselves, they would not want to return because they find themselves much better in this reality, and so on. Well, these experiences make it so that these people completely lose the fear of death because they saw that death was not death. Number two, more than 90% of the people who have had this experience have changed radically from this experience. Science does not want to study these things or if it wants to study them it studies them to prove that they are illusions of the mind, they do not exist, that is, they do not part of reality, and this naturally is a disservice because they start out already with the idea of proving that a thing cannot exist instead of being open. My experience produced many things similar to a near-death experience. It changed me completely, it completely took away my fear of death because I saw myself as consciousness outside of myself and therefore I was alive even outside of myself. I was both the observer and the observed of what I thought I was, so I am both observer and observed. So this experience of mine, which are called mystical experiences, these generally are experiences that change perspective and change it permanently. Maybe someone cannot, that is, deepen, and I instead deepened these things, I took them seriously, I never thought that my mind was sick or had some kind of head problem. On the contrary, because these experiences bring a certainty that there is a deeper reality that one did not know existed before, and so if one believes in oneself, one can take steps forward. If instead one believes the psychiatrist who tells them they must take a pill, then no. So I think I have answered enough that these experiences are the fundamental experiences that allow us to know that we are not only the body. Certainly we are also the body, but the body must be seen, in the theory I propose, as an instrument of the field. Consciousness is not in the body, consciousness is not in the brain. What the brain does is a processing of the information that is in this world based on neural networks that have been developed under the supervision of consciousness. So we are a quantum and classical computer supervised by consciousness which consciousness uses to know itself. And the consciousness we believe we are before understanding who we are with these extraordinary experiences is a small part of who we are. The consciousness of the field is not the consciousness we think we are. The consciousness we think we are is simply the ego, above all the ego, it is not only the ego, but it is above all the ego which is that part of the consciousness of the field that has identified with the body, believes it is the body. When this part of the consciousness believes it is the body, it pays attention only to the information produced by the body. That is why if one alters how the brain works, for example, the consciousness observing only the body has extraordinary experiences. But those extraordinary experiences I am talking about, which are when one has an operation on the brain or touches neurons or takes psychedelics, for example, are experiences induced by the fact that the ego observes the body and the body has been altered by chemicals or mechanically or electrically in some way.

You had another question, but I forgot... the quantum computer. Well, the quantum computer is not a quantum field. The quantum computer is a physical structure that we create to process a quantum state that we also created, which is a quantum state that evolves deterministically. The computer is not conscious of its state, even though when the computer does the processing of information it is in a pure state associated with the computer in the deepest reality. That is, like a little flame that then goes out, that is, it lights up and goes out and that is it, but the computer does not know it is conscious, it is not conscious of that little flame because it has neither identity nor free will associated with it. There is a small flame that lasts a short time, lasts the time in which the quantum state of this structure is in a pure state. That is all. So the computer, even the quantum computer, cannot be conscious because the consciousness I am talking about is a self-awareness, that is, the field knows it is conscious, knows that the experience it is having is its own experience and knows how to act with free will, and the free will of the field allows the field to decide which symbols to emit. So what quantum physics calls the collapse of the wave function is completely eliminated. The collapse of the wave function does not exist, the measurement problem does not exist, it has never been solved by physicists. But why it does not exist is because the fields have free will. So the electron that manifests here or here or here or here, of which one can only know the probability with quantum physics, but not which electron will manifest, is not the collapse of the wave function, it is not a random and non-algorithmic function that produces that measurement, but it is the free will decision of the field. So the field is a structure much vaster than any quantum computer we have in mind, even of our body which is a quantum and classical computer of a sophistication orders and orders of magnitude greater than all the quantum computers we have ever created.