Sonic Mushroom: Chasing Shadows

Welcome to Alice in Futureland Thoughtcast—insightful dispatches from that messy, marvelous border where art, science, tech and culture collide.Hosts and co-founders Janine Lopiano and Joanne De Luca have spent decades in conversation with the outliers who make us stop and ask: What does it mean to be human?ALICE coined them Electric Swans—figures whose work bends the present toward what’s coming.In this episode, we spoke with one such Swan, Dr. Federico Faggin, the physicist who gave us the microprocessor, touchscreens and touchpads, now turned seeker of consciousness. Faggin took us deeper into the ageless debate of consciousness and questions the physics of reality and free will. And in our discussions, we realized some interesting connections between Faggin’s insights and other Electric Swans from the ALICE Library, so we included a perspective on consciousness and the physics of information from Jacques Vallée, a physicist, information scientist, venture capitalist, architect of the Arpanet (pre-Internet) and friend of ALICE.We also suggest you take a sonic mushroom break with 2 minutes of “Qualia.” Enjoy!FEDERICO FAGGIN: Qualia is what something feels like, that feeling is what gives us the knowing of what we feel. Without consciousness we could not know anything.ALICE: That’s Dr. Federico Faggin—a physicist, engineer, serial entrepreneur and inventor of touchscreens and touchpads. In previous Alice in Futureland episodes, we spoke with Dr. Faggin about the reality of computers being conscious (spoiler alert: he argues they can’t be) We continue our discussion with Dr. Faggin on the science of embodied consciousness in the sense of qualiaFAGGIN: Consciousness is the fact that we can understand, that we can comprehend, we can perceive through qualia. And the physical representation of qualia is a pure quantum state. A pure quantum state has all the characteristics of qualia, which we feel.If you think about it, that kind of knowing, we know for example the love that I feel has dimensions that I cannot fathom either. In other words, there are dimensions that I know that I could know but I don’t know yet. So, I know that I know, I know that I don’t know. It’s that kind of sense that I have that however is quite clear for what I can tell. I can tell that this is love and I can tell that is a lot of love and it has certain characteristics, but I cannot define the same way that you could define. If you think about it, just what we see is so unbelievably rich and incredible, and it’s only a tiny little thing because we see with our senses. You can imagine how many possible senses there could be. I mean, we only see an incredibly narrow window of all this information which is here. I mean, right now, here, where I look, I see only air. I actually don’t even see the air, but I know that there is air. There is, in this moment, a hundred thousand communications going on in the microwaves that if, instead of the eyes, I had cell phones, I could actually listen on each of them. You see what I mean?ALICE: When you think about it, the richness of what we experience—the colors, emotions, sensations—is only a sliver of what’s actually there. Our perception filters the infinite into something we can live inside. And that’s exactly where quantum physics comes in. Because while classical physics describes the world we see, quantum physics points to the deeper layer beneath it—the one that gives rise to reality itself.FAGGIN: Quantum physics is one out of which classical physics arises or derives, quantum physics is more fundamental, is the source of what we have called reality. And in fact, what we have called reality is closer to virtual reality. It’s not completely virtual reality because it’s still connected with the quantum reality because the particles are states or the fields. Everything is connected in this reality.But in fact everything is one. Everything is connected and what we call separate is really only in first approximation can be called separate, but in reality it’s not. So there is a way in which even things that appear on first approximation that should not affect each other, they do affect each other. Do they affect each other by these communications that occur at the deeper level that we have not so far recognized?ALICE: What we think of as nothing is actually a vast ocean of energy—a field of infinite potential, constantly fluctuating, birthing and dissolving particles every instant. Some call it the zero-point field. Others describe it as the fabric of reality itself.But what if that same field isn’t just physical… what if it’s the deeper level of being—the source from which consciousness, matter, and meaning all emerge?FAGGIN: There are many properties of quantum vacuum that supposed to be nothing, but there is not nothing, and besides there is space and time, and where does that come from? Anyway, so one is the totality of what potentially and actually exists, and it has three properties. One is dynamic, meaning is never the same, instant after instant. Two is holistic. It means is not made of separable parts. Everything is connected within one, so those two properties are already the properties of the universe described by quantum physics.There is nothing new here, okay? But the third property is the new property, and that is that one wants to know itself, so the purpose of one is to know itself, and how does it know itself? It takes lack of knowledge, which is in the potential, part of its potential self, and when it knows, it brings into existence that potential knowledge becomes actual knowledge. The actual knowledge is actually an entity, because when he knows itself, he has to know itself completely, because you cannot know a piece of itself, because is holistic. It’s not made of separable parts.Each new self-knowing of one create an entity that has the same property of one; therefore, it wants to know itself, and in fact, one knows itself through its emanations, its creations. I call them unit of consciousness, but you can call it whatever you want. I mean, what does it mean, right? What it means is that basically, when one knows itself, it brings an entity like itself, with all this potential, all these capacities, that can know itself, and through which he knows itself because it’s not separate from itself. And so you start that way, and then these entities can know each other, because they’re all parts all. So in order for me to know myself, I need to know also the other, because the other has a piece of me. We’re all connected. So then we create a hierarchy of entities, and we are saties, which exist in this vast reality.ALICE: If the universe is one vast field trying to know itself, then each of us is one of its ways of doing that—an expression of that self-awareness made local. Every act of perception, every moment of reflection, is the universe folding back on itself, saying: I see me.And that brings us to what it means to be here, in a body. Because if we are emanations of that greater field, then this physical life—the body, the senses, the world around us—isn’t who we are. It’s the interface. The way consciousness immerses itself in experience to better understand itself.FAGGIN: We are experiencing ourselves through a body, but we’re not the body. We control the body. We direct the body from this other. The body exists in our field, just like a living cell exists in the field of a living cell. The same, our body, in a way, is an emanation of ours, in order to have an experience in a reality that is perceived through the body. So this physical reality is perceived through the body. We have an experience. For what? To know ourselves. And so we are here to know ourselves in this method, which is close to what you would do in a metaverse or in a virtual reality, which is where basically you are immersive. That was the word I was looking for, so an immersive virtual reality where you actually feel that you are inside this rea… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aliceinfutureland.substack.com

Welcome to Alice in Futureland Thoughtcast—insightful dispatches from that messy, marvelous border where art, science, tech and culture collide.Host Janine Lopiano along with Alice co-founder Joanne De Luca have spent decades in conversation with the outliers who make us stop and ask: What does it mean to be human?ALICE coined them Electric Swans—figures whose work bends the present toward what’s coming.In this episode, we spoke with one such Swan, Dr. Federico Faggin, the physicist who gave us the microprocessor, touchscreens and touchpads, now turned seeker of consciousness. Faggin took us deeper into the ageless debate of consciousness and questions the physics of reality and free will. And in our discussions, we realized some interesting connections between Faggin’s insights and other Electric Swans from the ALICE Library, so we included a perspective on consciousness and the physics of information from Jacques Vallée, a physicist, information scientist, venture capitalist, architect of the Arpanet (pre-Internet) and friend of ALICE.We also suggest you take a sonic mushroom break with 2 minutes of “Free Will.” Enjoy!FEDERICO FAGGIN: Consciousness cannot be a phenomenon of the brain. It has to be something more basic, something that exists in nature from the very beginning of the universe. So something completely universal and absolutely foundational together with free will. In other words, consciousness had to come with free will. In other words, that would make no sense to be conscious and not be able to decide how to know and what to know.ALICE: Hi, welcome to the Alice in Futureland THOUGHTCAST…insightful dispatches from that messy, marvelous border where art, science, tech and culture collide.We continue our conversation with the esteemed Dr. Federico Faggin—a physicist, engineer, serial entrepreneur and the creator of three pieces of critical tech that run our digital life—the Intel 4004 microprocessor, the touchpad and the touchscreen.But his latest quest is the pursuit of consciousness. In this episode, Faggin takes us through a deep reflection of reality—as he discusses the nature of free will—and the cellular connection of consciousness.FAGGIN: At that time, it was clear that a conscious has had to do with the ability to know and the desire to know and to know itself. And so, I’ve begun to have the first, the beginning of a sense that the purpose of the universe is to know itself, and we are aspects of the totality of reality that allow one, the totality of what exists to know itself. So that was the beginning of a sense that it was possible then to understand, possibly understand consciousness scientifically. And so, I decided to stop everything that I was doing. I started a foundation with my wife to be able to support research of other people that has similar ideas and wanted to research consciousness. And I got to a few years ago when finally, together with an Italian physicist with world authority in the field of quantum information, we finally arrive at the first true theory of consciousness and free will.ALICE: In a previous episode, Faggin explained an experience that opened him to what consciousness could truly be—and it was a whole body energetic burst of pure love—something that was far greater than him. That experience put Faggin on his path today to quantify what consciousness is.And here’s a fact: we still, today, do not have one unifying science-based definition of what consciousness is. Throughout history, culture has debated if there is consciousness—from the early philosophers of Medieval times to Pierre de Chardin, the Jesuit priest, scientist and visionary philosopher famously known for his theory of a planetary “hive mind”—which he called the “noosphere.” Back in the 1950s—before our modern internet—Chardin envisioned a global, interconnected layer of human consciousness and intellect enveloping the Earth. While Chardin had a spiritual perspective, he had a strong belief that still resonates today…JACQUES VALLÉE: Consciousness is not limited to particular entities but that there is consciousness in every atom.ALICE: That’s Jacques Vallée, an internet pioneer, computer scientist, venture capitalist, author, astronomer, one of the world’s leading ufologists—and a friend of ALICE. This excerpt is from our first conversation with Vallée in 2002…VALLÉE: So not only would there be consciousness on other planets but there would be consciousness in everything. And I tend to gravitate to that particular view: that consciousness is really a distributed quality. ALICE: Many experts agree with Vallée. But if consciousness is truly distributed—if it’s part of everything—then reality isn’t just a stage we stand on. It’s something that’s still coming into being. And that collides with the worldview that’s dominated science for centuries. Classical physics describes a universe that is fully determined—every event the inevitable result of what came before it. But quantum physics disrupts that model—it introduces a world of probabilities, where observation seems to play a role in what becomes real. So which universe do we actually live in? One that’s already decided… or one that requires consciousness to complete it? Faggin suggests the answer lives in the tension between these two models of reality.FAGGIN: As you know, there are two types of physics. One is quantum physics, and the other is classical physics. Now, classical physics is the physics that started with Newton and ended up with electromagnetism in the second part of the 19th century. But by 1900, most physicists believed that the world was classical, and classical physics is deterministic. In other words, the laws of classical physics describe nature, describe the ontology, describe objects in space and time, which are supposed to be the real thing.And quantum physics upset all the rules and all the sort of the understanding of classical physics, because it was a theory that was, first of all was indeterministic, as opposed to deterministic.In classical physics, you started with the smallest objects, which are elementary particles, classical elementary particles. But in quantum physics, the particles are not separate. They are state of the field. They cannot be separated from the field. But it was like, it is impossible, cannot be. So the dogma of life is classical has dominated our mindset up until recently and now that there is an opening and people are beginning to see that in fact life cannot be that way. I have coined a new type of information called live information because if you take an electron that works inside a cell, that electron being an elementary particle is three things at once, is information, energy and matter. So you cannot separate matter, energy and information like you separate the power supply, the hardware and the software of a computer. You see? The reductionism of classical physics lends itself to separation of functions, but it doesn’t work that way in living organism.VALLÉE: In physics, you learn that energy and information are two sides of the same coin. That information can be transformed into energy and visa-versa. If you observe a physical system, you are taking information out of the system by observing it but you cannot do that without taking energy out of the system.ALICE: As both a physicist and information scientist, Vallée has advocated for a new physics of information—that we need to go beyond the idea of information presented in dimensions or as aggregated data, and instead, we need to look at the idea of an information universe…which aligns with Faggin’s theory of “live information.”VALLÉE: You can think of the world as a world of energy, particles, atoms, molecules, fields and so on, which is the world that we learn about in school. But you could also think of the world as a universe of information with human consciousness becoming aware of the information from microsecond to microsecond.ALICE: As we dive deeper into the scienc… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aliceinfutureland.substack.com

Welcome to Alice in Futureland Thoughtcast—insightful dispatches from that messy, marvelous border where art, science, tech and culture collide.Host Janine Lopiano along with Alice co-founder Joanne De Luca have spent decades in conversation with the outliers who make us stop and ask: What does it mean to be human?Alice coined them Electric Swans—figures whose work bends the present toward what’s coming.In this episode: one such Swan, Dr. Federico Faggin, the physicist who helped give us the microprocessor, touchscreens and touchpads, now turned seeker of consciousness.What began as scientific rigor became something stranger: an embodied encounter that broke the frame and left him asking questions no machine could answer.FEDERICO FAGGIN: “When I was studying neuroscience, I realized that there was a problem with consciousness. At that time I was still a materialist, so I thought that consciousness was a phenomenon that happened entirely in the brain...if that is the case, I should be able to make a conscious computer. The more I thought about it, the more impossible the task occur.”ALICE: Hi, welcome to the Alice in Futureland thoughtcast…insightful dispatches from that messy, marvelous border where art, science, technology and culture collide. In this episode, we spoke with Dr. Federico Faggin in our quest to understand the experience of consciousness—and if computers can be conscious.There’s no short way to describe the incomparable Dr. Faggin, but here’s a quick snapshot: he’s a physicist, engineer, inventor, famous designer of the Intel 4004 microprocessor, and the first to invent touchpads and touchscreens. He’s a serial founder of companies working on human–machine interfaces, image sensors, and more.Lately, he’s turned his attention to the science of consciousness through the Faggin Foundation.He’s one of the greatest luminaries of technology today. But to Alice, he’s an “Electric Swan”—a rare mind whose work signals a new paradigm—and makes us question, “What does it mean to be human?”Faggin’s been chasing questions about consciousness for decades—first out of scientific curiosity, later after an unmistakable, embodied experience that shifted everything for him.FAGGIN: I intensely wanted to understand consciousness, and I received a gift in the form of an experience. It happened while I was vacationing at Lake Tahoe with my kids and my family, just skiing during the holidays. One night I woke up around midnight. I was thirsty, so I got up, got to the kitchen to get a glass of water, and then I went back to bed.And as I was just trying to fall back to sleep, thinking nothing, just trying to go back to sleep, at one point out of my chest came an energy, powerful energy, just like a gushing energy. But it felt physical. It was not a thought, it was physical energy coming out of my heart, and it felt like an unbelievable love. Something that I never even closely had an experience of… it was love mixed with peace and mixed with joy.At one point said ‘Oh wow,’ this is the energy of which everything is made. Everything that’s in the universe is made of this stuff, which feels love and peace and joy. And I recognized myself as a point of view of this totality of the universe looking at itself. So I was both the observer and the observed.Given that situation, what does it mean? Quantum information. And so the interesting thing is that we can now say that quantum information, a quantum state can represent an experience, an experience of a conscious entity, but that experience can only be known by the system that’s in the state. So in other words, quantum information has the same characteristics of a conscious experience. It’s private, can only be known by the system which is in the state from the inside.ALICE: If you think about it, Faggin suggests our inner experiences behave like quantum information: private, impossible to copy, and only describable in fragments.That makes me wonder—are we our own quantum system living in a world no one else can fully access? If consciousness runs on quantum information, it can’t be duplicated.Our inner life is, by nature, unrepeatable.Which flips the whole “mind upload” idea on its head: a machine might simulate your data, but it could never feel what it’s like to be you.FAGGIN: What you feel is much richer, but you cannot transfer what you feel to another person. You can only transfer a classical information, shareable information about what you feel. So here we have a clear match between conscious experience and its representation with quantum information. So quantum information would be a correct representation. It has all the characteristics of what it represents. If it represents inner experience, which is not the case for classical information, classical information can be copied. The program and the data with computer can be copied, you can make as many copies as you want. That’s shareable information.So a computer could not be conscious, because if it were conscious, it would violate the characteristic of our experience, which is the characteristic of quantum information because my state cannot be copied. So the people that say, oh, we copy the conscious in a computer and you can live forever in transhumanism, that’s crazy because it violates the characteristics of your experience, which is the privacy of your experience. You cannot copy. And so the only physical representation is with quantum information. And that representation, however, is not the experience. In other words, the representation of an experience is not the experience. The experience can only be known from the inside. You see?ALICE: Yes, thank you Federico, we see!That’s it for this mad tea party. Join us for more thoughtcasts of A More Human Human with Dr. Faggin as we explore the nature of free will, quantum consciousness and the sense of qualia.Check out Federico Faggin’s latest book, Irreducible: Consciousness, Life, Computers, and Human Nature.And please visit us at Alice in Futureland on substack.com, where we dive deeper into consciousness and the interconnection of ideas shaping the future in our free weekly newsletter, Alice books, sonic mushrooms and Thoughtcasts.Thanks again for tuning in. We’re Alice, and we’re always in a state of wander... This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aliceinfutureland.substack.com

stars breathe in patterngravity hums, time aligns—entanglement singslet the quantumarise.🍄 AudioDose Alice on Sonic Mushrooms: Celestial Coherence🎧 Listen to more sonic adventures on Alice in Futureland.🧠 Play the Alice game Am I Mad?📘 Alice books and newslettersThanks for tuning in.For more wanderings, become an Alice in Futureland subscriber—it’s free.Invite your friends to this mad tea party and let’s see how many things we can learn before breakfast.©2026 Alice in Futureland This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aliceinfutureland.substack.com

The future has a new metaphor to think with: Electric Swans.For a generation, we’ve lived with the language of Black Swans—those sudden, unpredictable shocks that upend systems and expectations. Later came Green Swans, signals of systemic shifts in response to the climate crisis, pointing us toward regeneration and resilience. These metaphors helped us navigate turbulence and think beyond the short-term.But now, a new kind of swan is taking flight.Electric Swans represent the disruptions born not of catastrophe or ecology alone, but of energy itself: electromagnetic, informational, biological. They are not random events but living signals of the new energetic landscape. When accepted, they ripple outward across industries and societies, generating vast new opportunities. They remind us that the real frontier is not out there somewhere in the future, but rising all around us, right now, in the invisible fields and frequencies we inhabit. Hello, we’re Alice and we are always in a state of wander.A Thesis of EnergyThe central thesis of Alice’s journey is deceptively simple: energy, in all its forms, is the next great frontier of innovation.We are used to talking about renewable energy, grids, batteries, and solar arrays. But this story runs deeper. It’s about energy as the hidden substrate of life itself: electromagnetic fields shaping quantum biology, frequencies guiding cellular repair, the resonant architectures that connect brain, heart, and body.Already, we see this frontier emerging in unexpected ways. Fabrics woven with electromagnetic threads. Health solutions built on biohacking and resonance. Electroceuticals that don’t merely treat symptoms but tune the body back into coherence. The twenty-first century is discovering what ancient traditions always hinted at: that energy, in its most subtle forms, is as real and transformative as steam engines once were to the nineteenth century.The Call for Conscious LeadershipBut to step into this world requires something more than new technologies. It requires new ways of being.Amidst the flood of ideas, the endless screens, and the data streams that never pause, lies a deeper expanse of human potential. It begins in the body. The body as interface. The bodymind as compass. Leaders in this emergent landscape are not those who dominate with command-and-control hierarchies. They are those who are tuned-in. They can listen for resonance amidst the noise. They can sense patterns in the apparent chaos. They wield disruption not as a blunt force but as a musical note, struck at the right moment to shift the entire composition. They will thrive in the coming era of Physical AI.Conscious leadership in the age of Electric Swans is about embodied coherence. Growth is no longer solitary, it resonates outward, amplifying through networks, creating platforms where others can awaken, contribute, and thrive. Such leaders do not merely navigate the future. They become conductors of energy, channels through which the potential of the collective flows.The Bodymind and the Science of QualitiesThis is not a metaphor alone. Candace Pert’s work on the bodymind revealed decades ago what science continues to confirm: thought, emotion, and biology are inseparable. Neurotransmitters and narratives are entangled. The heart and the brain form a single resonant circuit. Coherence is not poetry, it is physiology.Electric Swans illuminate this truth. They reveal that “innovation” is not separate from the lived body, from the pulse of emotion, from the chemistry of connection. Leaders who grasp this, who embody heart-brain coherence, who understand resonance not only as metaphor but as method, hold a power that transcends conventional strategy. They become the pioneers of what might be called “the science of qualities”: a way of knowing that does not reduce but integrates, that sees the beauty in emergence, that honors syntropic living systems.From Knowledge to BeingThis is also a turning point for futures work itself.For decades, foresight and futures studies were rooted in the pursuit of knowledge, of constructing scenarios, of understanding what might happen. But today, the center of gravity is shifting. The real work is embodied futures: exploring existence, essence, and being.It is not enough to predict the future.We are called to create it.Futures thinking has evolved from a mapmaking exercise to an act of world-building. And in this act, the Electric Swan becomes a guide: not an omen of disruption, but a current we can learn to ride.Riding the LightTo live in the age of Electric Swans is to live in a landscape where energy is no longer background, but foreground. Where leadership is measured not by control but by embodied coherence. Where the work of foresight is not to forecast but to shape.The leaders who thrive in this world will be those who embrace the impossible possibilities. They will ride the lightning not as a storm to be feared but as a wave of transformation. They will stand at the edge of quantum possibility and step forward, not with certainty, but with coherence, courage, and an openness to emergence.This is not just a path to personal or professional growth. It is an invitation to rediscover what it means to be human in a world alive with hidden fields, resonant frequencies, and electric swans rising all around us.Am I Mad?Or, more fittingly: is Alice mad? The answer is no. The real madness is believing we can craft a future we want to inhabit with the same tired tools of futurology, linear projections, deterministic charts, stale narratives recycled until they collapse under their own inertia. That is the madness of the status quo.Alice suggests something different. We insist that futures worth living cannot be conjured from fear or prediction alone. They must be imagined into being. They must be storied, played, and rehearsed as if they were already whispering back to us from the horizon.And so we offer a portal: a card game called Am I Mad?Here, you are not an observer of forecasts but a participant, a Mad Explorer, wandering through the kaleidoscopic terrains of Alice in Futureland. Time bends, loops, and folds in upon itself. Ideas sprout like wild organisms, carrying the shimmer of what-could-be. With a deck of conceptual cards, you navigate this speculative wilderness, assembling vivid narratives of Electric Swans taking flight, technologies that rewire daily life, philosophies that expand the human condition, discoveries that feel like déjà vu from a future not yet lived.This is where the work of foresight shifts from epistemology to ontology. Where imagination is no longer an escape but reconnaissance. In Futureland, we don’t just map possibilities, we rehearse them. We remember the futures we most want, and in the act of remembering, we bring them closer.Because in the end, the future is not built. It is remembered—one Electric Swan, one story, one act of coherence at a time.Craving more?📘 Alice in Futureland books🎧 Alice in Futureland podcasts🧠 Alice in Futureland game Am I Mad?Thanks for tuning in.For more wanderings, become an Alice in Futureland subscriber—it’s free.Invite your friends to this mad tea party and let’s see how many things we can learn before breakfast.©2025 Alice in Futureland This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aliceinfutureland.substack.com

A symphony of sentient seed and signal—where DNA archives, intuition blooms, intelligence roots into petals, trees, soil and machines.This is a world where knowing grows wild—organic, electric, endlessly remembering. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aliceinfutureland.substack.com

Shimmering at the edges of our consciousness, forgotten moments weave past and present into a seamless thread of emotion—each note a whisper from time itself. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aliceinfutureland.substack.com

Some think that consciousness exists in those gaps between thoughts. But what about spaces between tangible things—what lurks in those shadows? This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aliceinfutureland.substack.com

Information through time revealing elusive memories wakes us up to what we’ve known all along. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aliceinfutureland.substack.com

Taste shapes, hear colors, feel patterns, envision sound coupling and uncoupling…sensing mind, body, feeling and outer reality. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aliceinfutureland.substack.com