That you cannot create, you know, something that can know itself by something that cannot, that doesn't even know what knowing means. You see? How can you explain emergence of consciousness with something that is not conscious? If you can do that, I mean, if everything is a mechanism, then you have to find a mechanism that explains consciousness. There is no mechanism that can explain something that doesn't have a mechanism.
Federico, give me a quick summary of a quantum information-based panpsychism, your overarching theory, and then let's discuss the foundations, the basic ideas with which you start regarding the physical world, materialism, regarding consciousness, life, quantum theory, information structure. What are the basic building blocks with which you start?
So, quantum information panpsychism is a theory that I created together with Professor Giacomo Mauro D'Ariano, who is an expert in quantum field theory and quantum information, that starts with the idea that quantum fields are conscious and have free will. And so instead of having consciousness and free will, perhaps free will not even existing like most physicists believe, and consciousness like a property of brains, this theory promotes the idea and explains why we should start with consciousness and free will at the beginning of the universe, as properties that cannot be reduced to matter and to anything else. They must be primitives of the universe.
Which is the wonderful title of your book, Irreducible.
Okay. So, but to get to that point, which is a radical statement — I'm not accusing you of anything unusual by saying it's a radical statement. So, what are the assumptions that you're making that lead you to come to that initial idea about materialism, physicalism, information, quantum, life, consciousness? What are those foundational ideas from which you build to get that theory?
Yes, first of all, it is impossible — as I myself tried very hard, but you know, no one has been able to explain how consciousness could emerge from matter, which is not conscious. You know, consciousness is such a property that goes beyond what any kind of energy, space, time we know. It transcends any of those properties. Therefore, you cannot get more with less, in other words. So, you have to start with more. And of course, once there is consciousness, in order to be operational, consciousness needs free will in order to act in the world in a way that, you know, because it allows fields to know what they want. And if a field knows what it wants, then it must act with free will, which is also a property we have. Obviously, you know, we are constrained by a body, so we cannot do whatever we want, but fundamentally, free will means that you can decide what to observe and convert into an experience, a conscious experience, and also what of your experience to convert back into symbols to communicate shareable symbols to communicate with other fields. That is the essence of the theory.
Okay. So, what are the assumptions that you're making? You said regarding materialism and physicalism that no one's had a remote way of getting consciousness out of non-consciousness. Now, therefore, consciousness must be primitive. You cannot explain it, but once you accept that there is something that we will, you can explain why, for example, quantum physics must have the properties that it has. Well, I mean, an argument that you've heard, I'm sure, is emergence. Emergence says that at different levels of the hierarchy of being, there are different principles that emerge that were not seen at the lower levels. And strong emergence says that it's impossible, and weak emergence would say we just don't have the knowledge yet, but there's a radical difference. A trivial example is an atomic bomb. You have whatever it is, 15.1 kilograms of plutonium, and you have a radioactive ball. You have 15.2, and you have an atomic explosion. And so, because it reaches a threshold. And when that threshold occurs, there's the emergence between a small radioactive ball and an atomic bomb. I mean, that's the analogy people would use to justify consciousness coming out of the physical brain.
