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 qualia
FAGGIN: 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 reality and you are embodied, an avatar inside that reality, and you operate in that reality, to the point that you could believe for a short period of time that you are that body, that avatar in that reality.
Because of this connection between our conscious being and our body so intimate, we actually, before we wake up and we understand that we are more than the body, we think that we are the body. As we are born here, thinking that we are, with this purpose of thinking that we are the body, so that we express in this reality what the body has been programmed to express, because the body is an unbelievably sophisticated computer, quantum and classical. It is something way beyond what we know how to do, but it is a machine, and so it can express in this reality what we are here to know about ourselves, but what we know about ourselves is not the body. It is through the experience of the body interacting with other bodies and with the physical world, we can experience a reality which allows us to know ourselves, and as we know ourselves, one, digital totality of what exists, knows itself, so that’s the idea.
That is the perspective that most of us have now on earth. It’s a perspective that we are the body. Whether you believe religions or not, you’re not sure that you are going to wake up after you die even if you believe on a religious thing unless you had an experience that actually give you evidence, experiential evidence, not intellectual evidence, experiential evidence, because we know by experiences. We do not know by reading a book. We know by experiencing. That’s the core aspect of consciousness.
There is a lot of gaming going on today based on this misunderstanding of who we are and what reality is. By starting with a position in which consciousness, which of course we all know that we have, so if there is a postulate, which is self-evident, is that we, our conscious, that we know because we have consciousness, so consciousness must be fundamental and cannot be explained with anything simpler than itself, because it is the source of our knowing. No matter how you turn it, you cannot know if you’re not conscious. The fact that you can know is because we are conscious, and so conscious must be fundamental. It cannot be a derivative of anything.
ALICE: When you think about it, everything we experience—every thought, every sensation, every word—is the universe finding another way to know itself. And sometimes, that knowing can be as vast as the quantum field… or as simple as a single word that holds meaning for us. So we asked Dr. Faggin, what’s his favorite word?
FAGGIN: Well, probably love, but love not in the way that it is generally understood. It’s the love that I felt in my awakening experience, so that love which is not a feeling. It’s also a force. It’s also a direction. It includes everything. It’s almost like the primary feeling, the primary sensation, feeling, but also the primary force out of which everything can be seen as facets of it. It’s that kind of reality that I see because love is what motivates. It’s a force. It’s not just a feeling. That energy that was coming out of me, which was like, “How can love come out of me?” it was impossible to imagine at that time. How can I be generating that, but also the mystery. I think mystery is also a good word because we live in the mystery.
We want to understand. We want to know ourselves, but for every single thing that we know, there’s an infinity of things that we don’t know, so what we don’t know is all this vaster than what we know. This is true for one as well because any new knowing is finite in a sense, but what remains to know is infinite. I don’t think one will run out of knowing how to know itself, and so it will be a never-ending process of ever expansion, ever increase, but those are hypothesis, of course, anyway, but the mystery remains because, if everything is interconnected, it will be all these connections that you haven’t seen about things that you already see that they are connected, but you see that they are connecting many other ways that you didn’t see before, and that gives you a new perspective. In fact, the heart is the one that needs to be discovered, understood, and incorporated, because it’s the one that provides the wisdom, provides the ethics, provides the love, the joy, and the sense of belonging with the universe, that is needed to solve the problems that we have ahead of us.
ALICE: So beautifully said. It’s humbling to realize that the mystery isn’t something out there—it’s what we are made of. And maybe that’s the real invitation: to keep discovering, not just with the mind, but with the heart.
Thank you so much Dr. Faggin for sharing your insights with us—it’s been an honor to explore these depths with you. Check out Federico Faggin’s latest book, Irreducible: Consciousness, Life, Computers, and Human Nature.
If you’re craving more, please visit us at Alice in Futureland on substack.com where we dive deeper into consciousness, emerging science and the interconnection of ideas shaping the future. Go down the rabbit hole with our free weekly newsletters, Alice books, more Thoughtcasts, Futurecasts and our sonic mushrooms, where you can listen to a musical audiodose of Free Will.
That’s it for this mad tea party, thanks again for tuning in. We’re Alice, and we’re always in a state of wander.
🎧 ALICE Thoughtcast episodes with Dr. Federico FagginEpisode 01: Can Computers be Conscious? Episode 02: Free Will and Cellular Consciousness
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