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...
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