THE SECRET TO TALENT: EMOTION MATTERS MORE THAN REASON - Faggin interviewed by Foa

Reason is not as deep as emotions in reflecting who we are. Even a computer can reason, because reasoning is a logical process based on the superficial meanings of words. But emotions, emotions lead us to know and to feel — a feeling, especially when the feeling is suffering. Logic and rationality, when taken too seriously, become scientism, that is, this idea that there is only matter, that all reality is only what can be measured in spacetime, and so on. That is another religion; it doesn't reflect who we are, it reflects only a small part, it reflects the machine, but we are not just a machine. The inventor is anything but rational — the true inventor goes beyond rationality, and inventions come to you like a vision that contains the sense of what you can do, not only that, but also the energy, the motivation to do it.

Because emotions allow us to arrive at knowing ourselves at a level even deeper than rationality. Rationality is often used to justify what we want, for example, right? So we find a reason, we invent a story to justify what we do. And therefore reason is not as deep as emotions in reflecting who we are. And even a computer can reason, because reasoning is a logical process based on the superficial meanings of words. But emotions, emotions lead us to know and to feel — a feeling, especially when the feeling is suffering. And we talked about suffering in the previous episode, where suffering is a fundamental index that there is something to understand in us. And whether the suffering is psychological or even physical — very often the body responds with an illness to a problem that is a psychological problem, a problem of not wanting to do certain things we should do. And so the body responds in such a way that if we take even the illness, saying, 'Ah, this illness — is it possible that this illness tells me that there is something I haven't done, or that I've done wrong, or that I haven't done?' And so it is a form of emotion, right? When I speak of emotion, I mean any form of feeling and emotion, not just the trivial ones. In fact, even the subtlest ones are windows onto our soul, onto who we are.

So for me emotions are a mirror of the spiritual aspect, just as thoughts are a window onto the mental aspect, and the sensations we feel of well-being or otherwise are a mirror of the physical, material world. We have three fundamental aspects: matter or body, mind — which also includes the computational aspect we have inside us, the brain, etc. — and then the spiritual part. And these three aspects are integrated, they work together. Often we see only one, but not because there is only one; there are always three, it's just that there may be more matter and less of the other two, so we see only matter, right? Because the body, among other things, is very limited in its sensory perception. Whereas if we — not only the body, but we — open up to a wider spectrum of perception, we can obtain information from levels of reality we didn't even believe existed. For example, the awakening experience showed me that I am the whole observing myself from the viewpoint I have always had. How can I be the observer and the observed at the same time? You see? These things are things that are even unreasonable to someone who doesn't understand that there is more to human life than logic and rationality. And logic and rationality, taken too seriously, become scientism — this idea that there is only matter, that all reality is only what can be measured in spacetime, and so on. That is another religion; it doesn't reflect who we are, it reflects only a small part, it reflects the machine. But we are not just a machine — the body is a machine, but we are far more than a machine.

That is, they reached a state of grace that allowed something to flow out that they would never have reached with mere rationality. But the inventor is anything but rational — the true inventor goes beyond rationality. Whereas rationality is typically that of the academic, who wants this and that, measures things — those things are fine, but they are not sufficient. Because in the end the world moves forward through the creative aspect, which are inventions. And inventions come to you like a vision that contains the sense of what you can do, not only that, but also the energy, the motivation to do it. And in short, it is far more than simply a drawing or an image. There is emotion already in this vision — there is the sense of 'ah, how beautiful, now I want to do it' — and the motivation to do it. And so I have always had these things since I was a boy; I built model airplanes, and for me the model airplane was a way of expressing this capacity to imagine and then to put together something that, from this imagination, arrived at the parts, and then the parts had to be integrated and reproduce what I had seen. So a descending process of analysis, an ascending process of synthesis, which was intuitive — now I can describe it, but back then it was just 'you do it this way.' 'Can you explain it to me?' 'No, because I don't know how to explain it.'

Yes, I seriously believe that we come here already with an agenda. Before anything else, we don't have just one life. We have more than one life. We are not the body, so the self we are is a field that controls the body; the body is an instrument of the field, and we come into this world choosing certain characteristics and shaping the ego and the body in such a way that they can manifest those aspects — the Self, that is, the vaster self, which I call the Self — manifest those aspects it wants to understand in this reality. So we are predisposed to do certain things and not to do others, and through this predisposition we help the Self, who we truly are, understand what it wants to know about us — for example, above all, what intention we have.

Yes, in the previous interview we talked about two extremes: what kind of selfishness is in me? What kind of altruism is in me? Where is it that I need to... why? Where is the connection, where is it that I need to balance? These things create a reality — we come into this reality and move in such a way as to help the vaster self that we are understand, through the things we do and don't do, that lack of understanding of how to mediate, how to harmonize these two extremes. And so, in my view, this is why in this reality we can experience things through a body that is almost impossible to experience when we don't have a physical body.

Yes. Well, I've also asked these boys and girls, and almost all of them say, 'I came here into this body to help my parents.' To help my parents. What does that mean? It means that the kind of love the parents must come to know in themselves toward a person who seems, from the human point of view — and especially the mother, the mother created this person — and there is this love that comes, but why isn't it healthy like the others? Why, and so on, and these internal tensions, these very subtle problems about which we know nothing because they are their problems. But having this person who somehow helps the mother or the father understand that there is more than the body — because that is precisely the point: we are so immersed in our lives thinking we are the body, and therefore there is only one life, when the body dies there is nothing more. Scientism says this: we are a machine, so obviously when the body no longer works, you throw it away and that's it. And so you see, there is this depth through... typically through a reader, these boys and girls manage to communicate — naturally they can't communicate through the body; the ego never fully identified with the body because the body doesn't respond. So the consciousness of these young people remains halfway between the deeper reality we all come from and the physical reality here. So they keep that connection, like the children we spoke about earlier in the first part — children who still have characteristics closer to the essence of who we are. These too have these characteristics, and you should hear what they say. I think Dr. Bertelè has also written a book recently, I believe, where there are pieces that this reader managed to transcribe from what these people want to communicate. In my case, for example, one of them, out of the blue, said that she wants to see Faggin, and nobody knew who Faggin was.

So, as you can see, she is another one who is very, very close to my feeling, I to hers, so that every now and then she sends me a message.

Absolutely. But in fact, what we are living through is, in a sense, the suffering no longer of an individual, but of all humanity. Today we exist in a world so full of tension, in which we keep repeating the same things. But there are more than 50 wars around the world. Why? Why? Artificial intelligence — and they tell us that artificial intelligence will be better than us, will replace us, all these things. But then who are we? We are arriving at a point where people must choose, they must choose who they are, and it is a crucial point that will bring about a kind of spiritual watershed. Because if one wants to be the body, one will keep waging wars, whereas those who choose otherwise will make leaps forward. Those who make a leap forward will bring a new Renaissance, and the others will continue doing what they have always done. And one hopes that this new phase of humanity will be much better positioned to bring humanity to the next level of development, because we can only move in the direction of knowing ourselves ever more; there is no going back. Once one has come to know aspects of oneself, one does not go back.

In my opinion, yes. And I see it now, I see it also... naturally not in the form of an accurate measurement, but many people tell me, 'Look, I've had an experience similar to yours,' and they are more able to express this need at a level that, in my view, didn't exist when I was growing up. Though I could be wrong, but my feeling is that there is a movement much stronger than what I could perceive 10 years ago.

Absolutely.

Resonance means that we bring our interiority to the same state, the state of the interiority of the self. It is like the quantum state of a field that, resonating, means it is the same state. For example, let me explain one of the extraordinary phenomena of quantum physics: it is what is called the Bose-Einstein condensate. If you take molecules and lower the temperature close to absolute zero, you manage to make all the molecules be in the same state. When this happens, it is as if you had a single molecule. You can no longer count the molecules; they are...

They are one. What does that mean? It means that one has arrived at having the same meaning from the point of view of the state of the field. In the theory I have with Professor D'Ariano, the state of the field corresponds to the same meaning inside you. The same meaning inside you. So if you and I care about each other, for example, we manage to bring our state into resonance. This is not a physical resonance; it is a resonance of existence, of meaning. It is the resonance of the state of the field, which is not a physical state; it is an inner state, because only a small part of this state can be manifested outside. The meaning of information goes beyond what can be measured from outside and what can be manifested from outside. Another very important point here: in physics, in science, the word 'information' is not applied to meaning; it is applied only to the probability of a symbol. You recognize a symbol, and the probability that this symbol has of manifesting or not gives you the amount of information carried by that symbol. It has nothing to do with meaning. And this is one of the fundamental problems of science. Science has used the word 'information' for what is not information for us, because for the two of us, for us humans, information is the meaning of a symbol. The meaning of symbols is what we call information, not the fact that a symbol exists. A symbol without meaning has no information for us. So giving the name 'information' to something that has nothing to do with meaning is exactly what artificial intelligence is doing: it calls 'intelligence' what has nothing to do with human intelligence. And this is a very serious problem, because any form of dictatorship starts by changing the meaning of words. And so this is a very serious danger, because it becomes the dictatorship of scientism — scientism that is changing our values, telling us we are a machine, that information has nothing to do with meaning, that artificial intelligence will replace you because it knows better than you, and so on. These things are truly part of this nexus we are in, where people must understand and must choose.

Absolutely. Artificial intelligence is fine if it is applied to solving problems that are mathematical problems; it's perfectly fine. I do a multiplication in 3 minutes — I don't know about you, but I take 3 minutes to do a multiplication of, say, 20 digits by 20 digits. The computer does millions of billions in a second, you understand? There is no comparison. Things that have to do with rules — also games, chess — the computer beats us at the game because there are rules. But we don't always follow the rules; when we don't follow the rules, the computer can no longer understand anything. Because as long as it follows the rules, the rules are mathematics, and the computer does mathematics better than us. So in all the things where artificial intelligence helps us do that part that is difficult for us because we don't have the memory, we don't have the calculation speed, etc., it's perfectly fine. But the part where today, using language — these large language models that use our language to explain things to us — there we must be very careful, because there the capacity for manipulation is enormous. It's enormous.

It is not a proof, because it is not possible to prove it. But the proof that consciousness and free will exist is that we know we are conscious and that we have a little bit of free will. The proof we have inside us. If someone says to you, 'But you are not conscious?' — excuse me, how dare you say that I am not conscious? It cannot be proved. If you start by saying that consciousness and free will exist, because each of us can prove it within ourselves — an experiment inside me, as you... it is our essence. It is our essence: we understand because we know, because we have consciousness; we understand because we have a lived experience that allows us to understand. We don't just understand the meaning of symbols — we hope and understand the meaning of symbols. This is something the computer doesn't have: neither the experience of symbols, nor, all the less, the meaning of symbols that come from experience. These are two steps, and everything the computer does is recognize a symbol, that's it. And then if we have told it how to juggle the probabilities of the symbols — associated with this symbol there is a probability — it can choose the next symbol, for example, according to the rules we give it. We tell it: choose the next symbol that is the most probable one following this sequence of symbols. That is how the computer builds sentences for us. We ask it a question; the question is a path in this world of parameters that are probabilities. This path — learning makes it so that the computer gives you the next word, which is the most probable one given the word sequence you started with, which is the question you asked it, and so it begins its answer and adds a good word. When it has more than one word with the same probability, since it understands nothing, it cannot choose by understanding. We would choose because we understand, but the computer cannot, because it doesn't understand. So it takes a random one, one of these words, at random, and continues. If the learning has been done well, any answer it gives makes sense — it's not nonsense — but it is not an answer that has the coherence of coming from an understanding; it simply has partial coherence, because in learning the probabilities that come out are all reasonable. So maybe it gives you an answer, and one answer may be better than another for us because we understand, but for the computer it makes no difference.

No, but quantum physics doesn't tell you what will happen. For example, normally quantum physics applies to particles, to atoms — that is, to things we don't see, or that are even difficult to measure. To measure a particle or an electron, for example, you need special instrumentation, so you can only do it in very special cases and be able to measure where an electron arrives, and so on. Anyway, what happens is that in quantum physics, quantum physics doesn't tell you the position in time of the electron, because the electron doesn't have a position in time — the electron doesn't behave like a little ball that would have a position in time. The electron: you know the conditions in which it starts; if you have done an experiment, you can calculate, through quantum physics, the probabilities of what you might measure when you measure it. You can say nothing between the moment you sent the electron with that velocity, in a certain direction, and the moment you measure it — there is no trajectory. You can even, if you know the position with great precision, not know the velocity; you can know the velocity with very little precision; if you know the position exactly, you can know nothing about the velocity — which is absolutely not the case for macroscopic objects. So the variables of quantum physics are probabilities, not the trajectories, the movements as macroscopic objects would have. And probability is not a physical variable. Probability is a variable of our consciousness, because only consciousness wants to predict what will happen. But quantum physics can only tell you the probabilities of all the possibilities in which you can find, for example, an electron. When you make the measurement, you find it here. The next time you make another measurement, you find it here, then here, then here, then here. If you make many measurements, you will find that the probability distribution of the particles is the same as calculated, but you have to repeat the experiment perhaps 100,000 times.

And you see that quantum physics gives you the right values statistically, but it doesn't tell you where you will find the particle when you measure it. In the theory with D'Ariano, it is the free will of the field of that particle that manifests the particle where you measure it. It is not random as quantum physics says. Quantum physics says, since it cannot tell you how it happens — from this probability distribution to what you measure, it cannot tell you how it can happen — but they know that it is random, that is, it is casual, and that it is not even algorithmic. What is there in reality that is random and not algorithmic? Free will, because it means there is no law that tells you how you go from probability to actuality. It must be you to determine it. It is indeterminate, but since the quantum field, we say, is conscious — and it is conscious because the properties of the quantum state of the field are the same properties that consciousness has, that our conscious experience has, which is private, that is, it cannot be reproduced; it can only be known — the field can know it from within, but it cannot be known from outside. When you make a measurement, you can obtain only a small part of the information. And so the theory we have tells you clearly that if you start from consciousness and free will, you can explain why the most fundamental physics must have the properties that quantum physics has, which are the properties of the consciousness we know within us, which we know because it is what we experience. So this theory is actually a theory that truly takes a step forward, also because it explains what physicists have never understood. Physicists say, 'We know why there is the collapse of the wave function, that is, this random, non-algorithmic transformation.' They don't know, and they can't explain it. Because you cannot copy the information, the state of the field. It is a theorem of mathematics. We don't know why, so the why is not known; only the how is known. Whereas we say both the why and the how with this theory, starting from consciousness and free will.

Interstellar is more about general relativity, right? About the problems of time and... it's more physics, the physics of spacetime.