The Genius of Frederico Faggin! - Musings and Meditations
- filipvk
- 3 hours ago
- 6 min read
Dear friends,
I promised you quite some time ago that I would talk about Frederico Faggin, someone whose work I have been following for years. My apologies for the delay, but so now I serve you not one but two fascinating interviews with this remarkable physicist and inventor. The first one dates from 2025, and the second—which you can expect to see soon in the Musings—is from 2026.
I’ve put an exclamation point after Faggin’s name, because the man is a walking exclamation point. He’s Italian, and also passionate (is that a tautology?), and you can tell: his hands rarely stay still, and his animated gesturing is sometimes accompanied by a raised voice but also by plenty of humor. Frederico is a warm man with a big heart, and you can tell that, too. That heart, by the way, is one of the reasons why I want to talk about him, and you’ll understand why when you hear him speak.
Frederico Faggin is one of those scientists everyone should know, but whom almost no one actually knows. Which is actually strange, because without Frederico, we might not yet have a smartphone in our pocket, or a laptop in our backpack. Frederico Faggin developed the first microprocessor, and can therefore be called the father of the modern computer. He also invented the touchscreen on your phone and the touchpad on your laptop. And as if that weren’t enough, he contributed to the development of the first “neural networks,” the technology that forms the basis of all current AI models.
Yet he is one of those brilliant scientists whose work has transformed science, yet who remain completely unknown to the general public, like David Bohm or John von Neumann.
But all of that is not the reason I’m sharing two interviews with him with you. I’m doing this because Frederico Faggin is not only an exceptional scientist and quantum physicist, but because he has also developed a very unique theory about what our consciousness actually is, and what “reality” actually is.
You might wonder why such a physicist and inventor would concern himself with that.
At the beginning of this interview, Frederico recounts a remarkable experience he had one night during a vacation, an experience that led him to reevaluate his ideas about his own consciousness, and consciousness in general.
Like most scientists and physicists, Frederico had previously been steeped in materialism or physicalism as a worldview (see Walkie-Talkie 11 and Walkie-Talkie 12). The experience he describes here convinced him that there is more to it and that consciousness is not merely an epiphenomenon or side effect of brain activity.
That is why, alongside his work as a physicist and technology developer, Faggin embarked on a decades-long quest to uncover the essential nature of the phenomenon of consciousness.
He approached this from a scientific perspective, but because he was able to examine all aspects of this phenomenon without taboos and link the data to his knowledge of philosophy and the latest developments in quantum physics, he was gradually able to develop a theoretical framework in which consciousness is the ground from which everything we call “reality” arises. This perspective is called scientific or philosophical idealism. In Faggin’s version, it is called “quantum panpsychism,” because Faggin views the phenomenon of consciousness as the internal state of a quantum field.
Now, Faggin is not the first scientist to propose something like this: virtually all the fathers of quantum physics (Planck, Schrödinger, Heisenberg) had already reached a similar conclusion a century ago (see the blog posts ‘Science and the Emerging New Paradigm’ and ‘The Scientist, the Monk, and the Philosopher’, and the Musings ‘Five Sigma’ and ‘A Woundrous Afternoon with an Extraordinary Scientist...’
What makes Frederico’s work special is that he has thought through this issue in greater detail than his predecessors and has developed a plausible theoretical framework that offers a clear perspective on the relationship between consciousness and what we call ‘material reality.’
In 2024, his book ‘Irreducible’ was published, a culmination of his decades-long research. I suspect this work will go down in history as one of the key works of the 21st century, on par with Isaac Newton’s ‘Principia’ or Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.
I would therefore like to invite you to watch this special interview with him conducted by the Essentia Foundation, the organization founded by philosopher Bernardo Kastrup (who is also a computer scientist), and whose interview with Álex Gómez-Marín I have previously shared.
Soon I will also share the second interview with Faggin, also conducted by the Essentia Foundation, which was recorded a few months ago.
In the first half-hour of this interview, after Faggin's story about his extraordinary experience, you’ll also be presented with some rather technical explanations regarding quantum physics, but I’d ask you to stick with it if that part is difficult. After the 30-minute mark, the implications of Frederico Faggin’s model for our understanding of what we call “reality” begin to become less technical and more clear.
Let me briefly summarize just a few of those implications:
Consciousness is the internal state of a quantum field, experienced only by that field itself and ‘non-replicable’.
What we call ‘I’ is, in essence, a quantum field that experiences its own state in relation to other fields.
What we perceive as “material reality” is actually a symbolic representation of quantum information. The activity we observe in the brain is therefore not the “producer” of consciousness, but its symbolic representation. And the same applies to everything we perceive as “matter”.
You can compare the above to a writer and a book: the letters, words, and sentences in a book are symbolic representations of the writer’s internal state, which, however, can never fully coincide with the writer’s discrete, “non-replicable” internal world. We notice this even when we simply try to explain how we feel: the words (symbolic representation) can never perfectly express all the nuances of our inner world.
Every individual consciousness (or field) is also a fractal or holographic aspect of the single field of consciousness that underlies the entire observable universe.
What we call “free will” is not an illusion or wishful thinking, but a fundamental aspect of quantum fields and a prerequisite for the existence of anything. The apparent “chaos” and unpredictability at the quantum level are an expression of free will at that level.
What we call “death” does not actually exist: only the classical/quantum organism we call the “body” dies; the experiencing field that was connected to it continues to exist, retaining all the discrete information experienced by and within that field.
Well, I could go on with this summary for quite some time, because the model of consciousness that Faggin proposes is truly a paradigm shift in our worldview—and at the same time a confirmation of millennia-old intuitions.
And if what I just listed sounds like gibberish or woo-woo to you, don’t worry. I’m going to come back to this many times, in different ways and from different angles. Because as Frederico Faggin himself keeps repeating with great passion: once you really start to understand what all this means, you might just have a few sleepless nights. Not from fear or anxiety, but from excitement: the implications of this model, which draws closely on numerous philosophical and spiritual traditions, are nothing short of “mind-blowing,” and a potential foundation for a new worldview.
So let this be a beginning, an appetizer, an “amuse-gueule,” a teaser; and don’t worry too much if you don’t understand everything right away. Enjoy the boyish enthusiasm and passion of Frederico Faggin, who realizes that we need a new worldview if we want to survive and also protect our planet from destruction. A new understanding of who or what we actually are will be absolutely necessary to wake up and do what needs to be done. And who or what we actually are is more wondrous than anything we could have imagined so far.
Thanks for reading and watching, and until the next episode,
Take care,
Filip
