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Thinking Allowed: Conversations on the Leading Edge of Knowledge and Discovery with Psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove. Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Today, we're going to have an open-ended conversation with Federico Faggin. Now, let me tell you right now, I regard Federico as potentially one of the most important, significant guests ever on the New Thinking Allowed channel. Many of you know that I've interviewed Bernardo Kastrup over a dozen times, and I regard Bernardo's work as very important because he comes from a science background as a computer scientist, and he argues very, very cogently for the primacy of consciousness.
On one occasion, I asked Bernardo who else did he know in the field of philosophy, people arguing for what is known as the idealist position in philosophy, who would he recommend if besides himself, of course, who would be the best? And he told me, he said even better than himself, he said, is Federico Faggin. Federico received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation from President Obama in 2010. He is best known for designing the first commercial microprocessor, the Intel 4004. After that, he led development of the Intel 8008 and 8080 microprocessors. Then, he went on to found Zilog, the first company solely dedicated to microprocessors, and led to the development of the Zilog Z80 and Z8 microprocessors.
I'll mention parenthetically that in those years, when I also lived in California in the 1980s and 90s, one of my best friends at the time, Dean Brown, who I've spoken about on this channel before, worked for Federico designing the software for the Z80 microprocessor. Federico is author of Silicon: From the Invention of the Microprocessor to the New Science of Consciousness. He's also a contributor to the anthology, Artificial Intelligence Versus Natural Intelligence, along with Nobel laureates such as Roger Penrose and others. His most recent book is called Irreducible: Consciousness, Life, Computers, and Human Nature.
Oh wait, one more thing. Federico has been, I guess, previously on New Thinking Allowed, talking about his life history, his mystical experience, and his theory of consciousness. I think you'll get much more out of today's interview if you watch that one first, and I'm going to link to it in the upper right-hand corner of your screen. If you have a computer capable of capturing that link, I recommend you watch that video first if you haven't already. Federico is based in Northern California, and now I'll switch over to the internet video. Welcome, Federico. It is a pleasure to be with you once again.
Yes, likewise. I'm looking forward to this.
We had a long conversation, but it's been many months. I'm encouraging our viewers to view the previous video. You spend a lot of time going over your very extensive history, building microprocessors, then we talked as well about your personal mystical experience that came to you unexpected at a time in your life when you were pretty much a materialist, reductionist, engineer, and scientist. Then you began after a lengthy period of integrating that experience and coming to terms with it, you began developing your own theories about the nature of consciousness. I think your theories are very significant. I really want to delve into them. Your personal story is fascinating, but I'm even more fascinated personally by your theories. Let's start by talking about free will. I know that's very central to your work.
Yeah, well, free will is the ability that we have to choose the path of our understanding and of our experiencing freely, meaning not because the brain as a mechanism pushes us one way or another, but because we are conscious. Because everything is interconnected, no matter where I start, I have to go around the loop because otherwise we want to understand. Free will, for example, is essential in my theory to the existence of consciousness that has some causal power in our life and in the world. Because if there was no free will, then consciousness would be absolutely worth nothing. Because it would mean that the brain makes the decisions of what he wants as a machine, and consciousness goes with the ride, and he can do nothing about that, which is actually much of the scientism worldview that exists today.
And I use the word scientism to distinguish from science with a capital S, which is what is the work of the best scientists in the world. But unfortunately, many people in science and technology are embracing a very dumbed-down view of reality, which I call scientism, that believes in materialism and reductionism, which has been already discredited by quantum physics. Quantum physics is the theory that describes the deeper world, the deeper reality, out of which the reality in space and time, the objects that interact in space and time emerge. So free will, therefore, if we didn't have free will, our consciousness would be useless. It would be epiphenomenal, which is exactly what most scientists, ministers of scientism, believe in. They believe that consciousness is really an epiphenomenon, that it has no causal power.
So in my work on consciousness early on, it was clear to me that consciousness and free will had to be linked in an inextricable way, because if we didn't have free will, consciousness wouldn't matter. Though consciousness could exist without free will, and in the theory that I have, consciousness can't indeed exist without free will, I will talk about later. But free will without consciousness doesn't make any sense. And therefore, it would appear, on top of it, it would appear from an observer outside of the system, it would appear as randomness, which is exactly what quantum physics describes with the collapse of the wave function.
So we'll revisit this, but one of the crucial conclusions of my theory is that the collapse of the wave function in quantum physics is actually not a random event that nobody can understand why it happens, but it is actually a free will decision of the conscious field that is observed. Not an effect of the observer, but a decision of the conscious field that is observed. For example, if I observe an electron, it's the field of electrons that is conscious and that makes the decision of what electron shows up in space and time when you make the measurement.
So in other words, you're saying that if you observe an electron, it's the electron that's responsible for the observation, not yourself?
No, it's the field of electrons. See, the consciousness is not in the electron. In physics, the electron is not an object. The electron is not a particle in the sense of something autonomous and separate from the rest. In quantum physics, the electron is a state of a field, a state of the field of electrons, just like a wave of the sea. The wave of the sea is a phenomenon of the sea, you know, inseparable from the sea. So we see a wave, but the properties of the wave are fundamentally the property of the sea that manifests in the wave. The same with the electrons. The electron is a state of the field inseparable from the field of electrons, and its properties are the properties of the field. The field in this new theory is conscious and has free will. So it is the field of electrons that decides then where the electron will appear when you do a measurement, because you have set up an experiment.
Oh, okay. Let me make sure I understand exactly what you're saying. It sounds simple, but I have a feeling it's much more complex. Go for it. Go for it. I heard you say the field of electrons is conscious.
Yes. In this theory, the field of electrons is conscious, and I will explain later why you can say that. For now, let's leave it alone. But the important point is that if the field of electrons were not conscious, then I could not interpret the collapse of the wave function as a decision of free will of that field, because it would be just like science is saying, it would be a random event. A random event, unexplainable, random and non-algorithmic, which is what science has found out. The collapse of the wave function is pure randomness. But what does it mean? Nobody knows. Now, with this theory, I'm telling you what it means: it means that the field has made a decision. From the outside, it looks like random to the outside observer, but for the field that has made the decision, that's exactly what it wants to do.
You're suggesting that the field of electrons has wants, has desires.
It's consciousness, absolutely. It's consciousness and has free will, just like we do. In fact, I'm suggesting that we are fields ourselves controlling the body, which is like a drone. In other words, the body is not, the consciousness is not in the drone, but it therefore is not in the body. It is in the field. When you control a drone that, you know, is flying over, you know, I don't know, Afghanistan or whatever, right? So if you fly that drone, what you experience is what the drone sees where it is at, okay? But that experience is not in the drone, and it's not even in our brain. It is actually in the consciousness that controls it, our body.
Well, it almost sounds very dualistic what you're saying, that there's a field that is controlling a machine. It's like Arthur Koestler's book, The Ghost in the Machine.
Well, there is a field, but remember what I told you. Electrons do not exist. They are states of the field. The field exists, not the particles, not the atoms. The atoms are states of other fields, you see, inseparable from the fields. I'm talking about that the material world is not disconnected with the deeper world, where we have mind and spirit, and where spirit is the aspect of us that has to do with meaning, with the meaning of information, the meaning of information, which is not even talked about in science, because information in science is simply a probability. It's the co-logarithm of the probability that you might observe an event or a symbol. That's all there is in physics. There is no meaning for information. And if you take away the meaning, you take away our humanity with that.
So these definitions are basically covering the fact that we are humans, that we have meaning, that life is meaningful, that the universe is meaningful, because you will start with something that hasn't had any meaning. How would information make sense to you if all the remaining information was the recognition of a symbol? For example, if I were to speak in Italian, if you don't know Italian, you recognize my words as sounds. You know that those are symbols, but you don't understand the meaning. So would that be information for you? No, it would simply be symbols without meaning. That's what science is saying. But if I speak in English, you understand. So the meaning is much more than just the sound of the word.
I've heard it said incidentally that you could say that there's only one electron in the entire universe and it's everywhere.
When the electron appears, it appears with certain properties which are exactly the same. And from the point of view of physics, you cannot distinguish one electron from another. In fact, their statistics is governed by Fermi-Dirac statistics, which is a completely different statistics than a statistic that would be like Boltzmann statistics, where you can actually recognize the various objects that you are interacting with. Statistics of electrons, for example, obeys exactly the rules of objects that are all the same and indistinguishable one from the other. That's why someone says there is only one electron. Well, yeah, conceptually, there is only one electron, but they may appear in different places in time. So the fact that they're in a different place makes them a different electron in reality.
How would I distinguish between the field that is me and the field that is electrons?
Well, you distinguish because first of all, these fields don't need a human being to actually interact with each other. They can interact with their own particles. The particles which are the states of the electrons are actually like the words that I speak. Those are dynamic symbols that I use to communicate the meaning. So the fields, the quantum fields, talk to each other. The fields talk, communicate with each other. What are they communicating? Their own meaning. Of course, I can hardly know your meaning. I know a little bit of my own meaning, but the meaning that I have within myself is also a meaning which is not a number. The meaning has nothing to do with numbers. Just like qualia, which is the sensation and feelings that we have, have nothing to do with numbers. They go beyond numbers.
The numbers can only measure. There's something that exists in space and time in the classical world. Those are reducible to numbers. You can measure them and they are real numbers, but the quantum states are described with vectors whose components are not real numbers. They are complex numbers. And those complex numbers are not real numbers. They are not numbers really, because they represent a wave. They don't represent a quantity that you can measure. No measurement will give you, no measurement in space-time will give you a complex number because the complex number, you know, the imaginary part of a complex number, which is square root of minus one, cannot be obtained by any operation with numbers. It is something beyond. It behaves operationally like if it were a number, but it's not a number. You see, that's why it's called imaginary.
So in the vector, the n-dimensional vector that represents the quantum state of the field, in that vector, the components which are complex numbers represent probability amplitudes. They don't represent things. They represent what we can know about things. And what we can know about things are only probabilities. So just that alone, think about it. That means that the nature of the state is like a thought. It's not like a real thing. It's a thought before the thought becomes a real thing. Okay. And that's what quantum physics describes. Quantum physics gives you the evolution of a quantum state of a field, for example.
But then if you want to make a measurement of a quantum field of electrons, for example, you have to set up an experiment and in the interaction between the quantum field of electrons and the measurement instrument, you will find an electron will appear in the instrument that measures the electron. Well, what appears, first of all, is not the electron. What appears is after something, this interaction between the two fields creates something that gets amplified and eventually results in something in a classical symbol, something that you and I can see. Because quantum information cannot be seen, cannot be known. The no-cloning theorem is saying that even a qubit, there will be the equivalent of a bit of a computer. A bit of a computer is zero or one and you can know exactly zero or one.
If I give you a quantum bit and I ask you to find out what the state of the quantum bit is, you will never, you will never know. Because no matter in which way you measure it, you will find always one or zero. But the actual qubit represents a direction in space, in three-dimensional space. So it has an infinity of possible states. And when you measure it, you measure one or zero in the direction that you impose on that qubit. You see how it works? So I mean, it's really mind-boggling if you think about it, but it's actually saying that we, in our interaction, we are not dictators that look at the world like in classical physics. I don't look at a movie independent of my presence. We are participants, but it's more than that. We are actually observer, observed, and agent, all three rolled in one. And depending on how we interact, we can be at one moment, we can be observer, and then can be observed, and then can be actor or agent.
