Physicist Explains that Consciousness Is the Basis of Reality

In the past, you were convinced as a physicist that consciousness must somehow emerge from the operation of the brain. What made you change your mind?

Well, what made me change my mind was the fact that I could not understand how consciousness could emerge from a computer that, you know, where there are only electrical signals. And therefore, from the brain, as science is telling us, which has electrical and electrochemical signals and molecules and so on, it didn’t make sense to me and so I started studying whether I could or could not have a computer be conscious and the more I studied, the more I tried to make it happen, the more impossible it became. And so it was in this milieu, in this questioning that was going on within me that I had an extraordinary experience of consciousness that told me that consciousness was even much more than I thought it was, and so after that experience, it was clear that consciousness was something way beyond what science was even hinting at, and I needed to explore it because that experience was so powerful and so life-changing that I could not let it go.

It was through this process that I arrived at the conclusion about 20 years later that consciousness must be fundamental. It must be the starting point of reality, as opposed to the ending point of an evolution that created us.

So, next to the intellectual insights, it’s your direct experience of consciousness that has shifted your perspective?

Yeah, absolutely. It was that experience that showed me clearly that we are much more than I thought we were. So that experience essentially allow me to see myself as the world that observes itself through my point of view. So I was a point of view of the world that observes itself with that point of view, which is, you know, completely different than what was my sense of self. I perceive myself as a separate from the world, observing the world outside of me.

And so I was certainly not the world. I was simply something other than the world. Now I am the world observing myself, and the world is love. The world is joy, is peace, is something that I never felt like that before. So how can I be not only the world, but a world that is so unbelievably familiar at some level, and yet so powerful and incredible? At that time, also, my body was resonating with that experience, so my body was hot, like my cells were completely, you know, all vibrating together, and I saw the, you know, I saw, basically, it was a white scintillating light, and I understood that that white scintillating in light was the stuff of which everything is made.

So everything was in resonance, so to speak, and it was the first unity of experience that I had. I then understood for the first time what was meant for a spiritual experience. A spiritual experience is one that makes you be one, makes you feel, makes you live yourself of as one with the world. So I am the world. I am one, but I’m also a viewpoint of one. So I’m a part, but also a whole, which is kind of contradictory superficially. But it is also what quantum physics is telling us, that when they describe particles as something which is both a particle and a wave, where the wave can be everywhere.

So already quantum physics is similar in concept to that experience. How and why, in your view, has that experience of consciousness come about? Basically, at that time I was not happy about myself. I had achieved everything that the world says that if you do, you should be happy. But I wasn’t happy, and I didn’t know why. I mean, objectively, I should have been happy. And so happiness is also a question of consciousness, right? It’s consciousness that allows us to be happy or not happy.

And so while I was trying to understand what consciousness is by trying to make a conscious computer or a program that could feel something, I was distressed. I wanted to know. And I wanted to know not because I wanted to do anything with it, just because I wanted to know. And it was that intensity, I believe, that brought that experience. That experience came during a vacation, Christmas vacation, holiday. I was up in Tahoe, Lake Tahoe, which is in California, and well, we had a vacation home with my family. And I woke up one night, thirsty, and took a glass of water, and that experience happened. It started with a rush of energy coming out of my heart. There was, you know, feeling, it was a love, it was feeling like a love that I couldn’t possibly generate. How can I generate this kind of love? It is, you know, and if, and I saw it as a, as a beam, you know, about a couple, you know, one or two feet wide of white scintillating light that then exploded and filled the entire visual space. and as if I was seeing the entire universe which then was identified as me. So all of a sudden, I am that. Wow. I mean, how is that possible?

So as you can see, this kind of experience is not something that you can read in a book and understand. It can only be understood if you have this experience, if you live it. And it’s exactly what consciousness does. Consciousness is the capacity to know by living what we know, by becoming what we know. So consciousness is a magical property that cannot be defined with anything simpler than itself, and that’s why it must be fundamental. It cannot be derivative from matter that has none of these properties.

You know, it was so clear after that experience that consciousness must be fundamental, but I wasn’t ready to say that because I’m a scientist and I was brought up with the idea that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of the brain. So it’s not even real in the sense that it has no causal power. And so I decided to study that, study consciousness by myself, but with help of others, a therapist and people that follow some spiritual traditions so I went through many types of meditations and so on, and through that process, I had many other extraordinary experiences of consciousness that gave me the contour, so to speak, of what consciousness is.

And so through this process, after 20 years, I was convinced that, hey, science is wrong on this on this count. Science is telling us that consciousness is, you know, is a phenomenon, a material phenomenon, and that cannot possibly be. And that’s when I decided that I have to study this full-time, where before I was dedicating 30-40 % of my time, you know, about 12 years ago I decided that’s it. I need to do this, and I started a foundation, the Federico and Nadia Fadrin Foundation with my wife and the purpose of this foundation is to understand scientifically the nature of consciousness and understand what does it mean in the narrative of what of how this universe evolved because clearly if consciousness is fundamental the universe could not have evolved as inert matter to later on evolve consciousness 13.8 billion years later after the big bang. So consciousness must have had a hand in the creation of this universe from the very beginning. So to me, that meant that the story around the creation of the universe that science is telling us cannot be correct.

If you had to explain consciousness to a child, what would you say?

I would say to the child that consciousness is what allows him to feel love for his mother, for his father, for his sister and brothers, if he has any, and for the things that he loves, even for a toy. I mean, the feeling that he has, that’s what consciousness does. Now, because consciousness is so, so much part of how the child knows and what the child feels about himself or herself, he may not understand what I’m saying, because it’s, you know, we know because we are conscious. So we never question until much later why are we conscious, what is, in fact, you know, even the idea that consciousness must be something special, must have arisen in the human consciousness much later, maybe 10 ,000 years ago, maybe 20 ,000 years ago, but certainly not early on, certainly much after the birth of language.

So, to me, consciousness is so natural that even science has underestimated what it is, because we could not know without consciousness. A computer doesn’t know anything, so a computer cannot ask itself any question, cannot really see itself do what it does. Consciousness is that capacity of a self-reflection that is inherent in the stuff of which everything is made. And the computer is really a symbolic structure that we think is made of matter, but matter is actually a great illusion because matter is made of particles and particles are not objects. They are, even in physics, they are states of the fields of particles. So this, an electron is not a particle, it’s not a little ball, a little, you know, a little sphere, microscopic as you wish. It is actually a state of a field. It’s actually much closer to information.

So the reality of what we call matter is really informational reality. has nothing to do with stuff, has all to do with information. But that information is perceived by another informational structure, which is our body. And so it appears to have properties which are really properties of the interaction between the information, which is the body, and the information which is out there, which is the things of the world.

Are we any close to proving scientifically that we are conscious? For all we know, we could just be sophisticated, carbon-based bio-robots.

The fact of the matter is that I cannot prove to you or to anybody else that I’m conscious. I can only prove it to myself. I know that I’m conscious within myself. That is the fundamental property of consciousness. You cannot prove to me that you are conscious. So even the Turing test, which, you know, is supposed to show if a person is, you know, is conscious or is intelligent, is a silly test. It doesn’t prove anything. It is like quantum information. Quantum information cannot be known at all, cannot be copied. It is unknowable. So already physics is telling us that there are things which are not knowable. I can only know something about it, but very little about it.

And in the theory that I have created together with Professor D ‘Ariano, a system that is in a special state, a quantum system which is in a special state, which is called a coherent state, it’s called a pure state, has the experience of itself. And so consciousness is this property of systems, quantum systems, that are in a pure state and therefore can know itself. So quantum information does not describe information because information should be shareable, should be known by everybody, like the information of a computer, like the information of my speech can be heard by everybody and so on.

So the only one that can know that information, that quantum information, is the system which has that state, which has that information. So that quantum state is a representation of an experience, not a representation of information. So it’s simply a misnomer. Quantum information is in fact an experience. And now we can begin to understand what quantum physics is saying. Quantum physics is telling us that there is such thing as experience, which is private to the person that has the experience, and the person is a quantum system that has an experience, and that experience cannot be known by the person that has it.

It feels counterintuitive how classical and quantum physics are concurrently valid. After all, one is deterministic and reductionist, while the other is indeterministic and holistic.

It’s a very good point, actually, because quantum physics is more fundamental than classical physics. In fact, most scientists would tell you what I just said. Quantum physics is foundational, and classical physics is a special case of quantum physics. So how come that classical physics is deterministic when the foundational science, the foundational physics, is non-deterministic, is probabilistic, and has all these crazy properties? Well, for this we need to go to a theory, to the theory that I’m developing with Professor D ‘Ariano, and also I have developed myself previously, where basically reality has two aspects. An inner aspect, which is experiential, and which is semantic, where we get the meaning of our experience, we experience it, we get the meaning of our experience.

And a different aspect, which is symbolic, and consists of the symbols that we use as conscious entities to communicate with each other. So what I’m saying then is that reality has two faces, two aspects. One is my experience, which is private, which is described by quantum information. So it’s not information. It is experience. The word quantum information, as I said earlier, is a misnomer. It should not be called information. It should be called experience, because that information is non-clonable. It’s not knowable. It can only be known by the entity that is conscious, the entity that is in that state.

And the outer aspect is the informational aspects, they are symbols created by the entity that is conscious, so they don’t exist in the same way that the experience exists. In other words, the ontology is in the experience. The symbols used to communicate the experience does not have the same level of reality, even though it is part of the experience, because it’s what I use to communicate, but it is not necessarily conscious. And so that part is what creates what we call shareable symbols, that is classical information that then behaves deterministically. So what behaves deterministically is the outer aspect, which is the lesser aspect of the experience, you see.

You mentioned a new theory that you have developed together with Professor Duriano. What it’s all about?

The theory with Professor Giacomo Mauro D ‘Ariano is a panpsychist theory that recognizes that a system which is in a pure quantum state, so a quantum system that is in a pure quantum state, has an experience of its own state. So that’s a postulate. And the justification for that is very simple. First of all, a pure state is a definite state, exactly like the experience that we have is a definite experience. It’s not made of part, it is an integrated experience as a unity in it, and it evolves as a unity.

And so it’s exactly like a quantum state does, it’s like a vector in a very special space called the Hilbert space, which has many dimensions. And each dimension is complex. Unfortunately, it cannot be explained in any simpler terms than what I have said. So it’s a mathematical space, very complicated mathematical space that, however, is the representation of the inner space of our experience, which is what we know because we have an experience within ourselves and the other thing is that a pure quantum state cannot be known from the outside. No one can know that state exactly like our experience which is private. I am the only one that can know my experience. So that quantum state can only be known by the system that is in that state.

So that’s a very, it’s very simple, but it is so powerful, because nobody has thought about it. And it captures exactly the craziness, in a sense of quantum physics, by showing that pure quantum information is actually is not information, but it relates to experience is actually pointing to an experience, which we can understand. Now we can understand, for example, why we cannot copy pure quantum information, because there is a theorem called the no-cloning theorem that tells us we cannot do that. It’s just a mathematical theorem. It’s a fact of life, so to speak. But nobody understands why there has to be the effect of life. Well, the effect of life is because consciousness, the experience of consciousness, is private. And the only thing that can be copied It is the actual information, which is classical information, like the bits of the computers which can be copied and can be known by many, can be shared.

You speak of an experience of unity and that it’s not made of parts. That makes me think, are whirlpools separate or integral parts of a river? What is your view on the part-whole concept?

The concept of part-whole is fundamental, and it is in fact the way my body is actually built. I have about 50 trillion cells, and each cell of my body contains the genome of the fertilized egg out of which my body was constructed. So each part of me has the knowing, has all the characteristics of the whole, but it is specialized so that it does a specific function while knowing the whole, because it has the genome of the entire organism. A computer is not built this way. A computer has transistors, which are switches, and a switch is just a switch, you know, it’s on or off, period. And it has no knowledge whatsoever of the entire computer, and even less of the software that runs in that computer.

So we are completely different structures than computers, even though most scientists would tell us that we are a machine like a computer, which is not true at all. Even the body, which is quantum and classical informational structure, is in a sense a copy of these conscious entities which are part-wholes. There are points of view of one, the totality of what exists, but they also have all the characteristics of the whole, all the characteristics of one. So this concept is foundational, just like a particle is both a particle and a wave. You see, you know, there is the repetition in life of something which we do not want to understand because the classical world is made of parts which are separable. But a part-whole has to be that way because one is holistic, is not made of parts that can be taken apart. They are integral of the whole and they cannot be taken apart.

Speaking of the points of view of one and many, some people who have had a unitary experience of consciousness report the disappearance of self at the moment of becoming one with their surroundings. What are your thoughts on that?

Because when we are incarnated in a body, living this life, we are actually a much vaster entity that believes to be the body. So when we believe to be the body, we reduce ourselves to only that portion of ourselves that pays attention to the information that is created by the body. So when we do that, we think that we are the body and we become just a separate object. But then if we allow ourselves to think of who we are, then we are the whole. In our native state, we are the whole, but with a point of view. The point of view, which then becomes an even smaller point of view, which is the point of view of the body when we are incarnated. But when we lose the body, we’ll return to have that other point of view, which is vaster, and yet is still a point of view which is unique to us, even if we can see the whole.

Why do we need a body at all? What is the purpose of life?

Why are we here, right? In my model, it’s still a theory, really, it’s an hypothesis at this point, but it is an hypothesis that has legs, so to speak, because it makes sense, is that one, the totality of what exists, desires to know itself. And every time he knows something new about itself, he brings into life, into existence, what he knows about itself. What, you know, in other words, existence is equivalent to knowing for one. So when one knows itself, it has a new self-knowing, not the stuff that he already knows about himself, but a new self-knowing, it brings into existence the new stuff that he knows. And that’s an entity, a conscious entity like us, that has to have all its characteristics. Meaning also that the entity that is brought into being, into existence, also has the desire to know itself. We are like that. And we are here to make an experience to know ourselves. This physical world in this model, in this theory, is simply a creation. It’s like a virtual reality created in a computer where we want to have a special experience.

Now, we conscious entities collectively have created this physical world, which is much more sophisticated than the virtual realities that we create in a computer to have an experience in order to know ourselves. And that makes sense because we are doing exactly the same in our life. We are creating computers And we are creating programs, programs that can reproduce themselves exactly like we have created the cells and the living organisms that then can have an experience in a classical world which is made by a computer. You see, we repeat over and over the same pattern.

What gives a greater impetus to the creative drive in the unfolding of existence? Is it love or the desire to know?

Yeah, my intuition is that love is the taste, so to speak, is the feeling that you have of your self-knowing. That was the taste I had when I knew myself as the universe observing itself with my point of view. that universe and myself, because I was the universe, felt like immense love, immense joy, immense peace. It felt like being at home. Not my home, but a vaster home, which is my native and real home. So to me, love, joy, those are feelings associated with knowing, with self-knowing. So in a sense, if you say love and self-knowing are the same thing, because they’re certainly inseparable. once you know yourself, that knowing of yourself feels like love. So, you know, so then, yes, then it’s the same that I said earlier. A new self-knowing generates a new entity that you can love and that loves.

So, you see, because we tend to think these things are separate, so properties are separate. Properties are not separate. I mean, properties are separate in the classical world, in the world of things, in the worlds of computers. Yes, they’re separate there, but those things are not as real as the ontology of knowing, of experience, where that ontology is holistic and therefore cannot be made of separable parts. So even the properties cannot be separable. So, it means that love and joy are not two separate things. Love contains joy and joy contains love, you see. So a lot of the concepts that we have that we apply to reality are not applicable to the inner world. The inner world is made of stuff that is, you know, where there are no real, there are no parts that are separable. Just think about when you understand something new, you have a, wow, I get it, you know, you feel joy, you feel love for what you have just done. I mean, you know, they’re part of the same structure, you know, you also get a new structure in it, you know, you get this structure inside the new knowing that is a structure. And it is that structure that you try to repeat or represent in the symbols that you use then to communicate your understanding, your knowing, your meaning to others.

That’s why the physical reality also gets ever more complex. Because with our increasing self-knowing to communicate, we need ever more complex symbols. Because my body is a symbol that communicates, and I need that symbol to communicate to you, to others. And so, you know, I’m a symbol made of 10 to the 28 atoms. It’s a lot of atoms to create this symbol, and you, the same. So that tells you the level of self-knowing that we have reached as conscious entities. We need symbols, like you and I, to communicate.

I guess it’s only possible to know all this through first-person experience or perhaps even a deeper experience of consciousness.

Knowing can only be an inner experience. A computer cannot know, a mathematical formula cannot know. So, knowing is what we do as conscious entities. So, as I said, you cannot prove that stuff. You can only prove it within yourself. You know it within yourself. And if you know the same thing within yourself, well, then we can agree, and then we may even find the mathematical formula that captures some of, not all of it, but some of the structure, which is inherent in our joint knowing. But the idea that you have to prove everything that you say is completely wrong. It can only work for a world which is classical. It cannot work for a world that is quantum, because quantum information cannot be cloned, cannot be known. It can only be known, but not known as structure. It can only be known from within by the entity that is in that state, you see.

It is quite something to get your head around, difficult but interesting.

Because otherwise we would be machines. Come on. We would be machines. Of course, that’s what science is telling us. We are machines. But this is the wrong idea that we need to go beyond. Machines are machines. There are machines, but we are not machines. We are also machines. In other words, our body, the functioning of our body can all be described as a machine, but we are more because we are connected with an entity, which is quantum, that does not even exist in this space-time. It exists in a reality which is vaster, contains space-time, but it is vaster than space-time. So I am an entity that controls my body, my body is a structure in space-time, which then can disintegrate, and I don’t go anywhere because I exist, and once I exist, I exist forever. I’m not going to die as a conscious entity. My body dies, of course, but because my body is not an ontology, it’s symbolic.

But all the experiences that one has as incarnated consciousness do not simply disappear, right?

Yeah, those experiences must be stored, their memories, according to this theory with Dariano, must be stored classically. But I may only be the one that understands the code in which I store my experiences. So if you don’t know the code, you may not have my experience either. And besides, even if I had the code of the storage that is simply a pointer to the experience, it’s like an address to memory, but the information is in memory. So my memory of an experience is in the form of a pointer to a experience that is in me. And so I can recreate my experience, but it may not be exactly the same as when I experienced it originally. But it is still my experience, because the dynamism of my experience is such that I can only store a portion of my experience, because my experience is much deeper than what I can put into symbols, exactly for the same reason that I cannot clone my quantum state. my quantum state, I can only feel it. And all that I can understand and code into symbols is a portion of what I feel. Just when you feel love for a son or a daughter, for example, can you express all of that love in symbolic form by writing it or words? No, I mean, only a portion of it. And besides, it keeps on changing. So, love is a moving target, so to speak, it is never the same. So the nature of experience is this constant dynamic thing and constantly changing, but holistic, connected with everything else that we are.

I’ve read in your book, Silicon, that consciousness is already present in the atoms and molecules of which everything is made. Can computers or artificial intelligence become conscious then? the difference between us and them seems to lie only in the complexity and composition of atoms.

No, because that phrase that I made, it was in the context that matter, what we think of as matter, also is conscious, but not in the trivial way in which we think. What is conscious is not the electron or the atom, but is the field of electrons, the field of atoms. And so the consciousness is a property of fields and not the property of matter, because particles, for example, I said earlier, a state of fields, they’re not even things, they’re not objects. So, and we are not made of objects, we are made of states. we are information, really, we are information.

The body is quantum and classical information, where a computer is only classical information. So my body can host consciousness because it can communicate with a conscious being which is quantum, but a quantum conscious being cannot communicate directly with a computer. It has to communicate through a living organism with with a quantum to classical transformation, which is of a different nature than what you could do with quantum to classical in a computer, because a bit is simply a complicated classical structure made of many particles, many states which are disorganized. But the states that are disorganized, they can carry, for example, a signal, and the signal can have two states, and then you say, this signal represents a bit, a zero or a one. But when you go from quantum information to classical information, you have to manipulate at the level of particles and atoms singularly.

So you can only communicate with cells, with living cells, which are quantum and classical structures. They are not classical structures. So even quantum computers cannot be conscious like we are, cannot have free will, because quantum computers use only a special part of quantumness, which is the quantumness that maintains determinism. You have to use unitary transformations. Sorry for using a technical term, but it means that it behaves like a classical system. and therefore a quantum computer can only do what a classical computer can do, but it can do it faster. So that’s the only difference between a quantum computer, the way we understand quantum computers, and classical computers. But a living system can actually be directed directly by a quantum entity, which is a conscious entity that has free will and can do like a drone, so to speak, that allows the quantum world to talk to the classical world with which we interact as a body, as a physical body. But the interaction has to occur at the level of what I call live information, atoms and molecules or particles directly into a structure which is orderly made of quantum parts like living cells. Very different living cell, like I mentioned earlier. A living cell is a part whole, it’s not a part.

Artificial intelligence already beats the best human minds at chess and the game of Go. It also creates terrific artwork. It’s even possible already to envisage machines designing and building other machines better than people can do. What is the future like for us?

I would say that it is easy to extrapolate, you know, we love to extrapolate, like we extrapolate, for example, a series with a limit to infinity, but infinity is very big, is much bigger than any, any large thing, no matter how large you make something which is finite, infinite is much larger. So here we have the same problem. We think that we know so much about artificial intelligence, but in reality, the things that we can do are things which have rules, which we have determined, like making multiplications. You know, we have rules, and so we can make a computer that makes multiplications, I don’t know, one trillion times faster than we can do it. But so what? The same is playing a game where there are rules, but we can play games where there are no rules. We can figure out the rules. We can do things that computers can never do because we have consciousness, because we understand, because we have also heart and we have also belly, which is courage, which is the ability to take risks, which is abilities that computers don’t have.

So we are absolutely selling ourselves short when we say the things that you just said. Oh, the computers of the future will be much better than us and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But that’s not true. The computers are beautiful machines that can absolutely be helpful to us, but they can also be used to kill more efficiently than we do. And so we have to be very careful here. We have to be very careful not to lose our sense of who we are, because if we think that we are machines inferior to the machines that we will build in the future, we will self-destruct. I’m sure of this.

But artificial intelligence is already increasingly used to improve precision or to shorten the decision-making time. So, it’s possible that for efficiency reasons systems like defense or medical devices will be transferred entirely to artificial intelligence in the future.

The worst thing that we can do is to delegate to artificial intelligence decisions which have an ethical and moral character. If we do that, we are doomed.

Would it be fair to say that human beings, in other words, biology, will inevitably merge with technology in the future?

There is definitely, in the future, there is definitely the possibility to create cyborgs, which is what you are referring to, in other words, a mixture of living entities and computers, but then those will be conscious. And so how will the consciousness of that, you know, can we control that consciousness? I don’t think so. So, if we do that, then we have entities that we cannot control. There are entities that will have consciousness, that can be inhabited by conscious entities that we cannot control. So, I don’t think it would be wise to do that, but it can happen, it can be done.

Indeed, we already experiment with DNA, cloning, and also implant chips in animals’ brains.

It will be done, and there will be dire consequences by making mistakes in that area. So that’s an area that I would stay away until we understand how life works. We do not understand how life works, but life has ways to evolve that we have no idea. And so, we are playing with fire if we do that, and we should not play with fire. Well, we are kids now playing with fire, and we better be careful.

Some people speak of achieving immortality by downloading themselves into a computer or a machine. What are your thoughts on that?

That’s the silliest thing I heard, right? Because we are immortal. You know, my consciousness is that, you know, all I’ve said today is that we are immortal. So why do we need to download into a computer? Besides, if I could download in a computer, my personality, my memory, all I am could be copied in other end computers. You see, that’s why it is not possible. We are unique by design, by the way we were created. We cannot be copied. We are unique. we are who we are and we’ll always be what we are. That’s why my experience cannot be clonable. And my experience is described as quantum information. That’s why quantum information is not clonable, because it has to be only knowable by its owner.

But functional magnetic resonance imaging technology and deep neural network software can already allow us roughly decipher some of our inner perceptions.

It can only see generically, it may see that you may be hungry, for example, but not the experience of hunger that you have, that the feeling tones of your hunger are not in those signals.

So, purely from a technical point of view, it will be possible to download some limited information, but certainly not experiences or entire consciousness.

That’s right. In fact, you know, you can measure, for example, a quantum system, a simple quantum system, not, you know, a complex quantum system like we are, it’s just out of bound, but a simple quantum system you can measure. But when you measure it, first of all, you disturb in an irreversible way, the system that you measure. So you only see a portion of it. And the portion that you see at most corresponds to one bit, one classical bit of a computer, to a quantum bit of the system of the quantum information that you represent. So the quantum information is many quantum bits entangled. you get at most one bit per quantum bit. That’s another theorem of quantum information, Olivo’s theorem. And by the way, a quantum bit is an infinity of states. A quantum bit corresponds to a point, to any point on the surface of a sphere. So it’s a direction in space. A direction in space that can be an infinite possibilities, it reduces to zero or one. That’s how reduced is classical systems, like a computer, or like physical reality when you make a measurement. You can only get one bit per quantum bit.

You’ve started a foundation dedicated to the scientific study of consciousness. What are the most promising fields in science today to study consciousness, and why?

Well, there are many extraordinary experiences of consciousness that we know very little because science has not really done much to study them so far. For example, out-of-body experiences, which hundreds of thousands of people have done. And so those are type of extraordinary experiences that could be studied systematically and understand how consciousness can in fact experience reality without the sensory system of the body. How is that possible? How can you out of body see things like they are in the physical world or even see worlds which don’t correspond to this physical world. This is not an occasional person that has these experiences but there are hundreds of thousands of people that do this. But even more simple things need to be studied and for example special effects that we have like three-dimensional effects that we have when we see only in two dimension, our eyes are two dimensional. And so we have special things that happen in the brain that are not explainable without the notion of consciousness. But most important, we need a theory that can make predictions. And the first theory that I know of is this theory that D ‘Ariano and myself had developed is this theory is falsifiable, so it’s actually a physical theory that can be disproven. If it could not be disproven, it would not be a theory. And so now we can formulate questions in a way that is scientific and then we can proceed with making experiments. So this is the first step, is to have a theory that is, in principle, a theory that considers systems as black boxes and can make predictions. And this is the road ahead of us.

Where can we learn more about your new theory?

This theory is already published as a chapter in the book. The book is entitled Artificial Intelligence Versus Natural Intelligence, So, artificial intelligence versus natural intelligence by Springer, and it’s available right now. So, it’s already a published theory, and then we can go from here.

I’ve read in your other book, Silicon, that we need a paradigm shift in the organization of science toward the primacy of consciousness and free will. What needs to change for such a shift to occur?

Well, we need to take seriously the fact that consciousness may be, for the people that don’t believe, a fundamental property of nature. And so we cannot just dismiss it, as has been done in the past by most scientists, so that it’s taken seriously. Of course, by taking seriously consciousness as a fundamental property, as I said earlier, the entire narrative of science needs to change. And that is why many people don’t accept this because it would mean that the story that we have, that we’re telling each other is not correct. And so that’s a major, major consequence of starting in this direction. And yet the theory with Ariadno doesn’t change anything of the facts of physics that we know. It simply interprets it in a completely different way, the nature of reality. And because of that, we can imagine questions to ask that with the prior mindset we would never ask because we would consider silly or stupid. it. So it is time to step forward and take seriously the nature of consciousness, because science certainly doesn’t have the explanation. Science cannot explain why life exists as a natural phenomenon. This is where a cell self assemble, no one has shown how a cell can self assemble into a living self reproducing cell. For example, there are people are are arm-waving, just like the eye arm-waving when they say that consciousness is produced somehow by the brain, but that’s not an explanation. So I can, in fact, with this new theory, explain eventually, can be explained, why brains can be created by conscious entities that interact with each other, because eventually their self-knowledge will bring them to the creation of structures which are what we know as a brain.

What piece of advice would you give to someone whose career path is related to science?

I would say the following. I would say that as an overall general comment, that we started with the idea as scientists that the world is objective, and through that premise or presupposition, we have made tremendous progress, but we ended up about 100 years ago with inability to explain phenomena that classical physics couldn’t even hope to explain. In fact, the mathematics of classical physics predicted, you know, phenomena that went to infinity when in fact they went to zero, like the emission of black body radiation. So trusting too much our mathematical model, when we go to the, to the extreme cases, we, we can find ourselves in big trouble. Today, we cannot join general relativity with quantum field theory, which are the two pillars of physics. And it seems impossible to be able to do that. I think that it will be impossible unless we change our ideas of what quantum physics is telling and what general relativity, especially the gravitational force, stands for. So by changing the paradigm and by considering that inner and outer reality exist, because we know that they exist in ourselves, and we can now imagine the world as an interaction between subjective and objective, between quantum information, which is the subjective aspect of us, and classical information, which is the objective, shareable part of reality. So here we have a new way of understanding reality that is richer and that returns humanity, returns meaning and purpose to the universe that the idea that we live only in an objective world devoid of any purpose and meaning has destroyed. So thank you very much. Ascensia Foundation recommends Dr. Faggin’s books Silicon and Artificial Intelligence versus Natural Intelligence.