A beam of energy came out of my chest. It was physical. Just, you know, unbelievable force. It was love. It was a white scintillating light. It was love, joy, and peace. And my consciousness was in this beam. I was... That was me. The love that I was feeling was, you know, 10,000 times stronger than any love I have ever felt. But also, the crazy thing was it was coming from me. I was love. How can that be possible? I'm not love.
Federico, what I'd like to do is try to get your personal sense and way of thinking that led to your theory, your important theory of quantum information-based panpsychism. You started as a physicist, an engineer, a scientist, an inventor, an entrepreneur in the very physical world, and have a remarkable theory now. So, take us through the process that you came to this fairly radical approach to reality.
Yeah. Well, it really started with myself doing neural networks back about 40 years ago, 1986. So, when people, they thought the neural networks were worth something, were supposed to be crazy because the experts of AI didn't believe in neural networks. But anyway, so I was studying neuroscience. I was trying to understand how the brain works. But I realized at that point that, wow, I mean, they always talk about electrical signals, biochemical signals in the brain to tell you how you recognize the smell of a rose or the taste of chocolate, whatever, right? But I said, I don't have, I don't see electrical signals. I have the taste. I know something by its taste or by its smell, because I touch it, you know, by the feeling. So, you know, how can you get feelings out of electrical signals?
And so that was the first encounter with the problem of consciousness. It was probably '87, '88, in those years, way before, you know, David Chalmers made a very strong point about the hard problem of consciousness being exactly that. But, you know, I'm not a philosopher, but I wanted to understand. And to understand, you know, I said, well, since the brain is an informational processing device, I should be able to make a robot, something, you know, that interacts with the environment, conscious, if consciousness is really a mechanical thing. For sure. So I started thinking about it. You know, how could I do that? I always inevitably ended up saying, no, I cannot convert bits in the computer, which are electrical signals, into sensations. I don't know what are sensations.
At that time I was also very unhappy with my life. I was suffering, not because I was ill. I was suffering because I didn't know why, and so I recognized that that was a problem of consciousness too. So suffering is a problem of consciousness, and so I wanted to get rid of my problem trying to understand what consciousness is, but at that time, you know, I couldn't. And I had an extraordinary experience of consciousness in 1990. So, I started thinking about it in '87, '88. And in 1990, I had an extraordinary experience of consciousness that allowed me to see myself as the world that observed itself through my point of view. So, I'm a point of view of the world upon itself.
Mhm. That knows itself through this consciousness. How did that happen? Was it a meditative state or, you know...
It just... It was a spontaneous thing. And, you know, basically, I was in Tahoe during the Christmas holidays skiing. So, it was a time of relaxation with the family. And one night, I woke up at midnight and I was thirsty. I got a glass of water, went back to bed, and just, you know, just before falling back asleep, a beam of energy came out of my chest. It was physical. Just, you know, unbelievable force. It was love. It was a white scintillating light. It was love, joy, and peace. And my consciousness was in this beam. I was... That was me.
And it was mind-boggling, right then boom, it expanded, exploded, and everything was filled with this white scintillating light. And my consciousness was everywhere. Also in my body. And my thought was, my God, this is the stuff of which everything is made. This is the stuff that is love. Peace and joy is the stuff of which everything is made. And, you know, my body was hot, vibrating, you know, just like it was vibrating, you know, in harmony with this scintillation of lights. And, you know, the love that I was feeling was 10,000 times stronger than any love I've ever felt, but also the crazy thing was it was coming from me. I was love. How can that be possible? I'm not love.
You know, but here you go. And that also had such a force, such a motivating force that the next day I said, "This is unbelievable. This just changed completely my idea of who I am." And so this vision, this experience set me up for 30 years' worth of work, 20 years of personal work where I explored the nature of consciousness through all the possible ways, meditations, whatever, you know, different traditions of philosophy and spirituality and so on. I did many, many things and I had many additional extraordinary experiences of consciousness during that process. But then after about 20 years, I realized that consciousness has to be fundamental, cannot be explained with anything that doesn't have any consciousness. It has to be that way. You know, you have to start from there.
And also free will has to be part of consciousness. So, you know, most physicists don't believe in free will. And so for me those two things had to be part and parcel of the same thing. And so I decided to leave everything that I was doing, sold my last company, got out of business. Started a new path in my life and that was 2008-2009. I decided to start a foundation in 2011 for the scientific study of consciousness, but basically dedicate myself to finding a joining between consciousness, free will and physics. You know, in other words, joining spirituality and science in a way that was... because it was clear that the universe had to be holistic, could not be made of separable parts. And of course, that's the conclusion that the physicists have reached. You know, the universe is one. It's really one. Everything is interconnected. And if everything is interconnected, how can you explain the whole if you start by parts which are separated? It's impossible. Everything is interconnected. If you separate it, you have taken something out of the reality that you have. So, we must start with one.
And then derive everything else from one. You cannot start from the parts and rebuild one because the parts don't exist separate as you did. So, you have denatured the universe by starting with parts. And that is the reductionism of science that made us start with parts. Historically, they made sense. But now we got to, you know, now that we found out that everything is interconnected, we had to go back and restart with one and then see how from a holistic one we can get to the parts. And the process was...
