A More Human Human with Dr Federico Faggin, Episode 03: Qualia and the Quantum Sense of Knowing
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
