When the question is hard, the answers get weird

On Federico Faggin's quantum take on consciousness

If you made millions of dollars inventing a world-altering technology, what would you do next?

For Italian physicist and engineer Federico Faggin - inventor of the microprocessor, aka the miniaturized computer which made smartphones possible - the answer changed one night after a self-described “spiritual awakening”. In his new book Irreducible, he writes:

I went back to bed and while was waiting for sleep to return, I suddenly felt a powerful rush of energy emerge from my chest like nothing I have ever experienced before and could not even imagine possible. This alive energy was love, yet a love so intense and so incredibly fulfilling that it surpassed any other notion I previously had about love. Even more surprising was the fact that the source of love was me.

[…] I knew then, without a shadow of a doubt, that this was the substance out of which everything that exists is made. This was what created the universe out of itself.

As someone trained in academic physics, I have inherited a keen skepticism for theories of the world that are presented without a strong case of evidence, and which don’t come with verifiable predictions. Two years out from my graduate studies however, I find myself much more drawn to the taboo. It appears Faggin turned in the same direction, because after a career of engineering computer hardware, he turned towards the question of consciousness.

When the question is hard, the answers get weird. And what question is harder than that of the nature of consciousness? Historically, there have been two camps among philosophers of mind. The first are the spiritual dualists, who believe that body and soul are made of two different substances (the latter of which makes no commitment to the laws of physics). The second camp are the materialists, who believe solely in the existence of the physical world. Materialists assume that consciousness, like everything else, can be explained by some emergent feature of a complex-enough arrangement of matter. Scientists are usually materialists, and tend to carry a strong repulsion from anything that even smells dualist.

Recently, there has been a growing (but still unpopular) voice of a third camp of people. These people, including philosophers John Searle and David Chalmers, believe that there is no contradiction in accepting the existence of a fundamentally subjective nature of consciousness, while also accepting the laws of physics. According to these thinkers, there’s a limit to Western science when it comes to the mind, and we are unwavering in our collective denial of it.

Science only accepts the existence of objective truth. The only things that are of interest to science are those which can be measured the same way by every observer. That’s why when tasked with studying the mind, scientists have focused on measuring brain activity, trying to create a mapping between physical states of the brain and mental states. The attempt here is to reduce things like beliefs, hunches, and wills to the corresponding configurations of the brain. But what if that mapping doesn’t exist?

Within the reductionist framework of science, the question of explaining the nature of subjectivity itself is fraught with contradiction. It’s as if the project of science is to explain away subjectivity, to prove that it is an illusion. And yet, we know the existence of the conscious mind, because we live it every day.

I had let Faggin’s new book gather dust for a few weeks before deciding to finally brave it. Why? Because I had heard about his answer to consciousness, and it felt outlandish. My scientific dignity felt threatened. As I noticed this resistance though, my interest grew. What am I so scared of?

The book’s arguments are unabashed. The foundational idea is that consciousness is fundamental. Starting from there, Faggin retells the story of science, of computers, and of life, stressing all the ways in which computers are distinctly not life, and vice versa.

Faggin presents a strong case that a computer can never be conscious (no matter what AI “optimists” will try to tell you). Having worked so closely with computers, he provides a well reasoned argument here. Computers are deterministic, and the whole is purely a “sum of its parts” (you can in principle separate its hardware from its software). Every example of life on the other hand is autonomous and inseparable - a cell’s hardware is inextricably linked to its software, and they are both contained in the combined matter-energy-information content of the cell (something Faggin calls live information).

The argument extends to artificial intelligence. Despite an AI’s ability to recognize the patterns and learn to identify certain objects, there is no comprehension. For example, imagine an AI trained to identify images of dogs. You could easily construct an image that the AI would mistake for a dog, but which a human would have no problem recognizing is not a dog. While an AI needed hundreds (or more) images to train on, a child could have an intuitive understanding of what a dog is after witnessing just one. To a computer, dog is just another symbol, devoid of meaning and characterized purely from its measurable qualities. To a child, a dog is also a conscious experience, and with that the child has a much greater capacity to generalize and intuit about it.

The weight to this claim is quite deep. A computer could never be conscious because consciousness is bigger than computation. There is something - some first person subjective experience and comprehension - that is not reducible to algorithms.

Honestly, up to this point, I’m pretty convinced. I’ve read Searle and Chalmers, and I’ve been taken by their arguments that science is in denial about the existence of the subjective. And I do believe that quantum mechanics has shown us that deep down, our universe is not all predictable and algorithmic. What I’m less convinced is what comes next, as Faggin presents his new consciousness-first model of the world.

Faggin has a hard time believing that consciousness could emerge out of unconscious matter. To manage this, he posits that there must be a fundamental quality of matter that is conscious. Just like every particle has some electric charge, every particle has some conscious quality. This idea that everything is conscious to some degree is called panpsychism.

He then spends the second half of his book making the case that consciousness is a quantum state. So this is probably where I should remind you what a quantum state is.

A quantum state is simply the state of a quantum mechanical system. In physics, the “state” of a system is the mathematical description that contains all of the information about it. For example, the state of a classical ball object would contain its specific position and momentum at a given time. If you measure the state of the ball, along with the external forces acting on it, you can in theory run the laws of physics forward and know how it will behave as time goes on.

For a quantum mechanical description of an object, there is more information than what is accessible by measurement. Quantum systems are described by wavefunctions that spread out over many different positions and momenta. Yet we can never observe this wavelike state, because anytime you measure a quantum system, its wavefunction changes, collapsing down to a single value. (Worse yet - if you measure its position, then it’s possible momenta states stretch out into infinity, and vice versa. A quantum particle can never have both a well defined position and momentum). This is called the measurement problem, as the mechanism behind this “collapse” process is still unexplained. What is means for us is that there is quantum information that gets lost in the process of making a measurement.

To Faggin, the fact that there is information knowable only to the quantum state itself and to no one else makes quantum states a great candidate for mathematically describing consciousness. After all, your conscious state is knowable to only you, and words can only scratch the surface of what it’s really like.

There’s another feature of quantum states that people love to compare to consciousness, and it comes from the no cloning theorem. Basically, because you can never know all the information in the quantum state, you could never duplicate its state in a different quantum system. This sounds conveniently like consciousness - unlike a computer program which can be run the same way on different hardware, you cannot transplant one person’s consciousness into a different brain.

He follows these arguments to some extreme endpoints, eventually going so far as to say that consciousness comes before matter, and that the whole classical world emerges out of a singular consciousness field. He loses me on most of this last half of the book.

Some questions that immediately challenged me:

• If everything has some fundamental consciousness, then what differentiates life from non-life?

• He believes that consciousness is represented by a pure quantum state, but surely our brains are much too messy, and interact far too much with their environment to maintain these states?

• He claims that “higher” consciousnesses are built out of many singular “conscious units”. How then would you ensure the oneness of the self in a consciousness as complex as a human being’s?

• He claims that the “wavefunction collapse” of quantum mechanics is really the result of a fundamentally conscious choice being made. But to me, free will is a distinctly macroscopic experience, unaffected by quantum-scale randomness.

The latter half of this book is a wonderland. If you like weird ideas, you can have some fun here. An extra-out there one is his answer to the question: why does the universe follow ordered physical laws? Well, the laws of physics are just the syntax of the language that the fundamental conscious entities use to communicate, he says!

While I’m hesitant to buy into many of his ideas, I can’t deny that they’ve stuck with me. In particular, I have come back many times to the idea that my formulating thoughts is the action of collapsing a larger quantum mechanical truth into a limited representation of classical symbols. Something about it feels… right? It might just be a charming metaphor to explain why it’s impossible to describe the smell of a rose, or the feeling of love, no matter how many words you use. But maybe, if we accept that the true nature of the world is quantum mechanical, including our brains, then there might be something to it.

On the other hand, it may easily be a case of misattribution of one thing we don’t understand to another. Who’s to say!

P.s. I want to say a big THANK YOU to everyone who has subscribed so far, and an extra big thank you to my 3 paying subscribers! It’s an incredible feeling to think my niche interests and thoughts could be of value to people. I’d love for this to be a space of open conversation, so if you ever feel inclined to weigh in I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!