Federico Faggin's books and theories (August 2025)

Federico Faggin

Physicist, inventor, and entrepreneur Federico Faggin, born in Vicenza (Italy) in 1941 and a long-time resident of California, is well known as the inventor and designer of the silicon MOS microprocessor (Intel 4004, 1971), and for having played a major role in the development of touchpad and touchscreen technology with his company Synaptics, which he co-founded in 1986. In December 1990, while on vacation with his family at Lake Tahoe, Faggin had a non-ordinary experience – which he called an awakening – which he described in these terms: «...as I waited in silence to fall asleep again, I felt a powerful surge of love-energy emanate from my chest, something I had never felt before. This feeling was clearly love, but a love so intense and so incredibly fulfilling that it surpassed all my ideas and experiences about the nature of love. I perceived it as a broad beam of white light, sparkling, alive and blissful, bursting forth from my heart with incredible force. Even more incredible was the realization that the source of that love was myself! Suddenly, that light exploded, filling the entire room and then expanding to embrace the entire universe with the same white radiance. Then I knew without a shadow of a doubt that this was the "substance" from which everything in existence is made. It was what created the universe from itself. With enormous surprise, I recognized that that light was me! The entire experience lasted perhaps less than a minute and changed me forever.» We can recognize in this experience, despite its brevity, the manifestation of that particular energy, described as light-love, whose presence and effects we have observed in several NDEs.

Following this experience, Faggin felt a growing interest in consciousness and in understanding its role not only in our inner lives as humans, but also in our very knowledge of reality. Drawing on his expertise in computer science and classical and quantum physics, he began to develop a theory that he has made known in recent years in three books he has published: Silicon - From the Invention of the Microprocessor to the New Science of Consciousness (Waterside Productions, 2020), Irreducible - Consciousness, Life, Computers, and Human Nature (John Hunt Publishing, 2024), and Oltre l'invisibile - Dove scienza e spiritualità si uniscono (Beyond the Invisible - Where Science and Spirituality Join, 2024). In 2020, in collaboration with Giacomo Mauro D'Ariano, professor of theoretical physics at the University of Pavia and director of the Quantum Information Theory research group, he published in English an article (revised in 2021) entitled Hard Problem and Free Will: an information-theoretical approach, which can be freely downloaded from the arXiv website. I am unable to express an expert opinion on the content of this article, as my knowledge of quantum computing is superficial and limited, and I lack the mathematical resources to understand quantum field theory in sufficient depth. I can only say that, from an internet search using artificial intelligence, as far as I am aware the article has not been peer-reviewed to date (August 2025) or has aroused particular interest among experts in that field: so all we can do is wait for future developments.

As for the popularization of Faggin's theories, I recommend anyone interested to read his books – especially the second one (Irreducible) – and to listen to some of his numerous lectures and speeches that have been published on YouTube in recent years, which can be accessed through this URL. Everyone is free to interpret Faggin's theories in light of what their own psyche and critical intellectual resources suggest to them. Although the author also introduces a new terminology (using words and expressions such as seity, unity of consciousness, living information, etc., the meaning of which we will dwell on shortly), he himself recognizes that what he has developed has previously been said by others, in one form or another, but that no one before him has been able to demonstrate the scientific value of such theoretical formulations. In many ways, reading Faggin's books (or listening to his speeches) can have an enlightening and stimulating effect on our mental experiences, and many of his elaborations on the various topics he deals with show similarities with what I have presented on this site and in the pages of this blog. However, I believe that not everything Faggin writes or says is developed with sufficient clarity, and therefore I will also set out my criticisms on this page.

A brief exposition of Faggin's theory: part one

Faggin's theory is presented in his second book (Irreducible), to which I will refer. His third book (Beyond the Invisible), written in the form of a dialogue with the author's sister-in-law Viviana Sardei, has a more popular and partly didactic nature, although it can offer some further food for thought. In the first chapter (The nature of physical reality), Faggin traces the progress of classical physics from Copernicus, Galileo and Newton up to Einstein, highlighting the importance of experimentation and the fact that every theory remains scientifically accepted as long as it continues to pass experimental tests, whereas a single experiment yielding results that differ from those predicted may be sufficient to require its revision or replacement. The discoveries and successes of classical physics determined that confidence in the authority of science that characterized nineteenth-century positivism, fueling the naive illusion that humanity would be able to understand and control all the laws of a reality considered as objective and immutable. At the end of the nineteenth century, however, some phenomena such as blackbody radiation, the photoelectric effect and the Lorentz transformations remained inexplicable in the light of classical physics. The theory of light quanta (subsequently discovered and called photons) proposed by Einstein in 1905 to explain the photoelectric effect, marked the beginning of that authentic revolution which, during the twentieth century, radically changed the interpretive frameworks on which classical physics was based. The first chapter ends with some references to the origins of quantum mechanics and the quantum field theory of electrons, and with a paragraph with a significant title (The End of Certainty) which refers to Gödel's incompleteness theorem.

The second chapter (The Nature of Quantum Reality) is devoted to quantum field theory (QFT). To quote the author, «According to QFT, elementary particles, atoms, molecules, proteins, cells, organs, and living organisms constitute hierarchical organizations of states belonging to the quantum fields, with ever-growing complexity. These fields have space and time in common and are the fundamental entities that, interacting with each other, create everything that exists physically. For example, all the electrons in our body and in the rest of the universe are waves or "quantum states" of the same quantum field of electrons. Each quantum wave describes the superposition of the possible states of an electron with probabilities specified by the square of the amplitude of the component waves representing each state. I know that this explanation seems far-fetched; however, for the moment there is no simpler way to express it.» Since Faggin bases his theories on the real existence of quantum probability fields, whose effects we perceive in the physical dimension in the form of particles, it is worth examining more closely what this supposed reality actually consists of, considering that the author himself chooses the following title for one of the chapter's sections: «We Don't Know What a Particle Is.»

The ordinary perception of physical reality that we perceive through our senses and our mental faculties refers to stable substances (beyond the changes and transformations to which they are subject over time), endowed with particular characteristics of volume, density and visual qualities that allow us to distinguish them. Obviously, we have a mental representation of the reality of these substances, at least partly conditioned by culturally learned interpretative programs. By striving to understand in depth the structure of material substances, considered as elements of an objective reality whose existence was independent of the mind of those who investigated it, classical physics led to the Rutherford-Bohr atomic model. In this model a certain number of particles such as protons (with mass and a unit positive electric charge) and neutrons (with a mass just a bit greater than that of the proton but without electric charge) are in close contact in the nucleus of the atom of each element, while at a great distance from the nucleus, on various predefined levels, electrons with a negative unit electric charge orbit, whose mass is approximately 1/1836 that of the proton. The number of protons characterizes each element, and the number of neutrons determines the particular isotope of that element. In a non-ionized atom, the number of electrons equals the number of protons. The electrostatic or electrodynamic interactions generated by the electron clouds of the atoms of the elements create more or less stable associations with a two- or three-dimensional structure, called molecules, each of which corresponds to a new substance (with the exception of molecules made up exclusively of atoms of the same element), in accordance with the energy dynamics studied by chemistry. The resulting framework is satisfactory for technological and industrial needs, and clear enough to be intuitively grasped by ordinary human intelligence.

Obviously this dynamic atomic model has limitations, partly determined by the effects of the energies associated with it and the resulting forces, and partly by the fact that, although they are considered point-like by the standard model of physics, the particles of the nucleus (protons and neutrons) still have a size that, although tiny in relation to our perceptual faculties, is not zero. Whenever human intelligence (meant as the intelligence of some human beings) is faced with new problems that cannot be resolved in light of existing knowledge, it is somehow forced to seek new interpretive models that allow scientists to understand and predict what is experimentally observed over time, as a result of technological advances that make it possible to create increasingly complex and efficient instruments for observation and experimentation. I would like to highlight the fundamental role played by time in the evolution of the cognitive models developed by the human mind: it is like a frontier that is continually moved forward, without it ever being possible to attain definitive and ultimate knowledge. It is therefore very important that the idea of a discrete structure of matter (and also of energy and of space-time itself), fundamental to particle physics and quantum theory, is confirmed by experimental evidence. To date, the characteristics of particles such as the photon or the electron validate this idea, while the proton and the neutron are considered to be the result of the complex interaction of particles called quarks and gluons, which are not directly observable individually.

It should be kept in mind that the quantum field theory that Faggin refers to in the second chapter of his book consists of a theoretical interpretation of what is observed experimentally at the level of subatomic particles considered individually or in their mutual interactions. In the paragraph The Worldview of Quantum Physics, Faggin quotes both Einstein ("The world as we created it is the result of our thinking. We cannot change it without changing our way of thinking") and Heisenberg ("The idea of an objective real world whose smallest parts exist objectively in the same sense that stones or trees exist, regardless of whether we observe them or not… is impossible"). It is evident that our interpretation of reality has always been a mental construction, and therefore can be considered a creation of the human psyche, which evolves and sometimes changes radically over time. However, as Heisenberg states, an objective real world (the stones and trees of physical reality) exists, just as there is an organism through which each of us experiences the effects of physical reality determined by our psyche. Things change only when we consider the behaviors and interactions of extremely small particles, at least in relation to the perceptual resources of our senses. I think that Faggin is well aware of this difference, since he continues to consider the results of classical physics valid within their domain of applicability, in light of the statistical equilibrium guaranteed by systems formed by an enormous number of atoms and particles. In the paragraph A Monistic Conception of the Universe the author introduces the concept (not a very original one, to be honest) of a form of panpsychism, according to which mind and matter are two irreducible and inseparable aspects of the same reality.

Chapter 3 (The Nature of Machines) is interesting but not essential to our analysis, while chapters 4 and 5 deal with information, examining the history and importance of this concept both for its human applications in the field of information technology and for its implications in the organization and management of the structures of living organisms, as also highlighted on the page of this site dedicated to the origin of life. In this respect, Faggin's considerations set out in the paragraph The Wonderful Organization of a Cell bear many similarities with what I myself wrote more than ten years ago. Also very important are the author's considerations on the semantic value of information and on the different subjective interpretations of the same events by distinct organic individuals, including human beings. Chapter 6 (The Nature of Life) also contains interesting observations on the complexity of the apparently intentional behaviours of unicellular organisms that lack an organized and complex nervous system, and in my opinion correctly interprets living organisms as information processors, highlighting the fundamental differences between a cell and a computer. Chapter 7, which concludes the first part of the book, is dedicated to consciousness, which is represented by the author as follows: «Our consciousness is the inner semantic space where the signals coming from the physical world, both inside and outside the body, are "processed" by the brain and take the form of feelings, sensations, and meanings, i.e., of qualia. Qualia refer to what "it feels like" when a sensation or a feeling emerges within our consciousness. Note that the nature of feelings is completely different from the nature of physical events. A physical event happens in spacetime and is accessible "from the outside" through our physical senses and instruments. This produces a so-called third-person experience shared by all observers. A feeling is instead a private, first-person experience accessible only "from the inside" by the owner of consciousness. However, the interiority I am speaking about is not a physical dimension.» The owner of consciousness is what I call the conscious Ego.

A brief exposition of Faggin's theory: part two

It is important to carefully read chapter 7 (dedicated to consciousness) of Faggin's book, and possibly compare how the same topic is addressed on this site, both on the Definitions page and on the page on Consciousness in the human psyche section, and on the pages on Smart consciousness in the 2020 blog and on Life and consciousness in the 2021 blog. Faggin, obviously, starts from the inner experience of every single human being with a normally functioning brain: therefore, more precisely, he must start from his own inner experience which, for reasons we will examine later, also extends to all human beings, regarded as conscious. However, on this site, consciousness is considered a function, more or less efficient and enhanced, which connects the conscious Ego of each individual with that particular range of events and dynamics of the human psyche attuned through brain activity. The attunements of the psyche experienced by the conscious Ego can be very different from one individual to another, therefore it is neither possible nor correct to refer to a standard model of the human being, except for particular collective needs of simplification. Although in certain parts of his discussion Faggin is quite precise in focusing on the qualities of consciousness, he often remains vague, and consequently it is not clear what he refers to with that term, which depending on the case may refer in different contexts to conscious Ego, intelligence or psyche: a word, the latter, that the author almost never uses, preferring to speak of qualia, without specifying that they represent particular ways in which some attunements of the human psyche are experienced by the conscious Ego.

In relation to consciousness, it must always be kept in mind that the conscious Ego of each human being directly experiences its own consciousness, and by interpreting the behaviour of other human beings also in light of the patterns and interpretative programs acquired from its socio-cultural environment, based on the communications and information it obtains through interactions with others, it reasonably believes that others are endowed with a consciousness very similar to its own. On the page on Life and consciousness, I explained the reasons why one can reasonably hypothesize the presence of forms of consciousness even in higher animals with a sufficiently developed nervous system. However, it is not possible to establish reliable analogies between their consciousness (considered in its function as a vehicle for the demands and dynamics of the psyche) and ours, in the absence of a shared communication system. From a careful reading of that page it becomes evident that a very complex nervous system is required for consciousness to function adequately in the physical reality of organic life, in relation to a conscious and self-conscious subject that we call the Ego. This does not exclude the possibility that other forms of consciousness and mental activity may exist in dimensions other than the physical one, capable of exercising a certain degree of influence and control over living organisms in our world: however, this hypothesis cannot have the reliability and certainty required of a demonstrable explanatory theory, precisely because it is based on an arbitrary extension of what we can know about the dimension in which we currently live to other dimensions that remain enigmatic to us.

In his interesting and accurate exposition of Quantum Field Theory in the book La realtà non è come ci appare (Reality Is Not as It Appears - Raffaello Cortina Editore, 2014), the Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli, born in 1956, emphasizes that it is practically impossible for the resources of human mind to truly understand quantum physics (which even seemed absurd to Einstein). Richard Feynman (1918-1988), the famous American physicist who made a notable contribution to the development of quantum electrodynamics, also wrote: «I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.» We can therefore only acknowledge the extraordinary predictive capabilities of the mathematical functions on which it is based, confirmed by a large number of experiments. Experiments conducted at an extremely small scale confirm that the reality of the physical world is granular, that is, made up of indivisible quantities of energy, particles (energy in another form) and space-time (quantum gravity). All variables undergo continuous fluctuations, and their appearance in one place or another when an experiment is conducted to determine, for example, the position of an electron, cannot be predicted in any way, even if the quantum field (wave function) provides a picture of the probability that the particle will appear in a certain region of space (for example, 90%, in the case of the atomic orbitals of electrons). This indeterminism is unavoidable when experiments aim to determine the properties of a few particles at the atomic or molecular scale, since at that scale the experiments themselves consist of interactions between quantum fields.

Quantum theory, therefore, does not describe the essence of a reality considered independent of the observer, but only the ways in which different probability fields interact and influence each other (collapse of the wave function) in the interactions between physical systems. Of course, when experiments are performed at scales involving billions and billions of particles and energy quanta, the results are determined by the global stability of the system (guaranteed by statistical probability) which is the basis of classical physics. We must not lose sight of the strange effect that the extreme specialization now required to advance knowledge in one field or another of research has on the human mind: the quantum physicist, for example, may identify reality with that particular aspect he is investigating, forgetting the informational complexity that underlies the constitution and evolution of living organisms, which nevertheless represents a fundamental element of the experience of human life. Similarly, even a biologist can identify reality with the information encoded in DNA, without considering the complexity with which the fragmentation of life into a multitude of individual organisms determines the organization and the conflictual dynamics we find in nature, and also in the human psyche. In light of these preliminary considerations on quantum physics, let us now examine the ideas put forward by Faggin in his book, to see which aspects of his theory can be interesting and stimulating and which deserve critical examination, also in relation to the attunements of the positive polarity of the human psyche from which they originate.

In chapter 9 (A New Model of Reality) the author somehow attributes to Nature faculties such as consciousness and free will («If Nature is fundamentally conscious and has free will, as I suppose, the basic laws of physics must be indeterministic and probabilistic, just like the laws of quantum physics are»), without further clarification on what is meant by consciousness and free will: one gets the impression that these terms are used in the sense in which the conscious Ego of a human being interprets them in light of its own personal experience. Evidently, these are not resources and energies that can be measured and quantified. Faggin then proposes a holistic model of the universe: «In the model I propose... consciousness, free will, and Life exist from the very beginning as constitutive properties of the holistic Whole (One) that also contains other properties that allowed the evolution of the inanimate universe.» The idea of a holistic universe governed by the laws of quantum physics (which, let us remember, were developed by the human mind to interpret what happens at the atomic levels of reality) is not new: it had already been proposed by the American physicist David Bohm (1917-1992) in his book Wholeness and the Implicate Order, published in 1980. The idea was then further elaborated by the American writer Michael Talbot (1953-1992) in a book that became quite successful: The Holographic Universe (1991). Both books can be downloaded from the Library.

Faggin, like Bohm, hypothesizes the existence of a fundamental reality made up of pure quantum fields (that is, not excited by their mutual interactions), whose manifestations in the physical state, due to the fact that they can interact with each other, are the object of perception, investigation, and interpretation by the intelligence of the human mind, as it manifests itself in the dimension of our organic life. Quantum fields in their pure state constitute a multitude that can ultimately be traced back to the One, from which all the others derive, and then to the elementary emanations (such as those of the fields that give rise to electrons or photons) to which Faggin attributes a consciousness unit (CU) and a more or less limited form of free will: «A CU is the simplest part-whole, i.e., the simplest quantum system that can contain the essence of the whole, and possess an identity that, once created, can no longer be extinguished.» From the interactions between elementary quantum fields, new and increasingly complex quantum fields arise, each of which is endowed with new properties and more evolved forms of consciousness and intent. The author attributes the name seity to each of these numerous quantum fields, to which he attributes the purpose of deepening their self-knowledge, and therefore that of the One. This is a framework whose interpretation is far from simple, and whose experimental verification, in my opinion, presents insurmountable difficulties. In particular, it seems to me that Faggin considers quantum theory as something that faithfully represents reality, and not as a construction produced by our mind (and ultimately by the human psyche) to interpret the results of experiments conducted on a reality that remains enigmatic and indecipherable to us in its essence in the most coherent way possible.

David Bohm also presents a holistic interpretation of the universe, based on his deep knowledge of quantum physics, but his approach, as set out in the book mentioned above, is much more cautious, since he confronts from the beginning the problem posed by the capabilities and limitations of the representative, intuitive and intellectual faculties of the human mind to correctly interpret reality. Even for Bohm, quantum physics leads us to consider the existence of a unitary implicit order from which that explicit order of reality emerges, which we can observe, investigate and interpret in the light of the resources of our mind, which are also determined by the implicit order. Thus, both Bohm's and Faggin's theories seek to highlight and support the holistic unity that underlies every aspect of reality, adding the consideration – more explicit on Bohm's part – that the human mind must also interpret its own existence within the context of this unity: in this sense, at least, I think we should interpret Faggin's statement when he maintains that the purpose of the One is to know itself through the various forms determined by the increasingly complex organizations of the seities and the conscious experiences that derive from them. However, this interpretation presents many difficulties, which all those who supported it have had to deal with since the dawn of the philosophical development of human thought. In fact, unless we want to consider the explicit order of reality a form of illusion determined by our senses and the functioning of our own mind (as proposed by those Eastern philosophical currents that have elaborated the concept of Maya), we must face the consequences that the fragmentation of the One produces on the very operative and interpretative faculties of the human mind, in particular with regard to the repercussions that such fragmentation has on the influence exerted on the conscious Ego by different attunements of the psyche. From this perspective, both theories present a certain naivety, since it seems evident that the conscious Ego of their authors is under the influence of the positive polarity of the psyche, even if from time to time both Bohm and Faggin seem to realize this fact.

It's hard to interpret the fragmentation of the One in light of the attunements of the human psyche

When trying to interpret the totality of what is considered real, one should never forget that human faculties such as consciousness, will, and intelligence – as experienced and known by our conscious Ego – are phenomena limited to our world, that is, planet Earth, since we have no information about how life could have possibly developed on other worlds in this universe. In this respect, Bohm seems to be much more aware than Faggin of the pitfalls involved in the mental elaboration of theories of everything, since he devotes the entire third chapter of his book (Reality and Knowledge as Process) to examining the difficulties of relying on the constructions of our minds when dealing with something that goes beyond the limits of our capacity for understanding. The solution proposed by Bohm for this problem seems really interesting to me. But within the framework of our human experience (with all the limitations it presents) we have to face another difficulty for which no satisfactory solution has yet been found: the fragmentation of the One, in fact, determines not only creative experiences based on the harmony and cooperation of the parts, but also experiences of disagreement, hostility, conflict, domination and destruction. Our conscious experience records these events already within nature, that is, even before their interpretation by our psyche determines any human activity. Indeed, as already highlighted on the 2020 blog's page on The Universe and Nature, natural phenomena often show no regard for the fate of individual beings. While competition for resources among organisms or groups of organisms is the rule, nature has proven remarkably inventive not only in creating predators that can survive only by feeding on their prey, but also in developing complex and sophisticated unicellular forms of parasitic life that cause disease and suffering of all kinds in other living organisms.

These characteristics of organic life are obviously reflected in the intrinsically bipolar dynamics of the human psyche, of which – as I have repeatedly pointed out on the pages of this site – each of us experiences only a relatively limited range of attunements, determined by one's own personal destiny. This destiny, different for each individual, can be attributed partly to the genetic characteristics of the organism and partly to the environmental and sociocultural conditions in which the organism is formed, develops, and receives the educational and conditioning programs that society transmits to it. We must also take into account that overall endowment of resources of uncertain origin that the conscious Ego can rely on as it matures (such as intelligence, willpower, beauty, energy, tenacity, etc.), which together contribute to determining personal history, considered both from the outside, in terms of communicative manifestations, actions, and behaviors perceived by others, and as inner life, experienced only by each conscious Ego. It is also worth remembering that the conscious Ego of 95% of human beings (and this is probably an underestimate) identifies completely or almost completely with the dynamics of its own psyche, whatever they may be, to the point of becoming virtually a prisoner of them. I have called this condition human automaton, specifying on this 2019 blog page what should be meant by this expression. We have no reliable information about the reasons and purposes why things should work as they do, and so we can only acknowledge the power of the human psyche in determining the destinies of humankind as a whole, which, over time, is expressed in what we call history.

Not infrequently one gets the impression that even intelligent people, when they are under the influence of the positive polarity of the psyche, are inclined to regard those who are subject to the negative polarity of the psyche almost as victims of a deception, to whom it would be sufficient to explain reasonably and politely how things really are in order to obtain a change of orientation and, so to speak, a conversion towards the positive polarity. I can't deny that this happens in some cases, but it's not the norm. The very orientation of the positive polarity of the psyche often leads us to naively think that the attunements of other people's psyche are more or less similar to our own, and consequently to believe or hope that what has a certain effect on us can also have a similar effect on others. It is true that the vast majority of human beings (or human automatons) need to receive from the outside, that is, from personalities with sufficient authority and charisma, instructions on the forms of thought (and behavior) to adopt in accordance with the needs of their own personal psyche: it is probably a still widespread legacy of the herd instinct by which we entrust the survival and safety of our organism to figures who are considered guides, leaders or, as they say today, influencers, in relation to one aspect or another of social life. To this we must add the more or less hypnotic effects that certain stimuli and repeated signals have on the human mind, especially in those circumstances in which the conscious Ego is subjected to the dynamics of the collective psyche of the masses. Politicians, advertisers, entertainers, and all those who are able to exercise a form of power (always determined by the psyche) over others are well aware of all this. For this reason, many feel the need to express and share their ideas with as wide an audience as possible, in the hope of exerting a persuasive influence. However, it is easy to observe that even when these people invite others to think for themselves, they often want others to think the same way they do.

It seems to me that Faggin too does not escape this need to spread his theory to a wide audience: a legitimate and understandable need, but one which gives the impression that he himself is not entirely convinced of the scientific value of his theory, despite his statements on the matter; otherwise, he could wait for the outcome of some confirmatory experiment to evaluate the scientific community's reactions to what he and D'Ariano have developed. In this respect, David Bohm has always been cautious: even in his books, which were partly dedicated to the popular explanation of his holographic interpretation of the universe, he always developed with particular care the scientific exposition of what he had elaborated, intended for his peers, to whose reactions – whether they were positive or negative – he always paid great attention, responding to them point by point. With this I do not want to argue that, in expounding his theory, Faggin says things that are nonsensical, mistaken, or unacceptable, also because his elaborations are largely similar to those presented by me in the various sections of this site and on the pages of this blog, even if using a more traditional terminology: in fact, I see no point in using the label seity instead of the more classic one of spirit. In any case, I do not think that these are theories to which we can attribute the same value that we recognize in scientific knowledge, given their essentially philosophical nature. I therefore await future developments to understand whether any experiments confirms Faggin's confidence, always remembering what Bohm has highlighted with great insight regarding the value of the postulates of quantum physics as (relative and provisional) representations of reality, beyond their indisputable effectiveness as interpretative tools for the results of the experiments carried out.

The impact that Faggin's theory may have on the human psyche as a whole will not be different from the very limited one achieved by other popularisers, spiritually oriented towards the positive polarity of the psyche. The masses continue to satisfy their more or less spiritual needs by relying on consolidated organizations such as traditional religions, and only a very small minority possess the intellectual resources necessary to evaluate the implications of quantum physics in sufficient depth. Even more limited is the number of those who can rely on the critical thinking necessary to address the complex problem of the adequacy of our mental resources when it comes to understanding the various aspects of what is perceived, considered and interpreted as real in the course of our organic life, as David Bohm tried to do. It may be that our author has a more or less clear perception of the difficulties he will inevitably encounter: indeed, his third book, Beyond the Invisible, differs from the others in its decidedly more didactic and, at times, dogmatic content, justified by the need to explain in a coherent and satisfying manner (comprehensible to a wide audience of readers) the model through which he seeks to explain the nature of reality.

However, in Faggin's third book there are expressions such as: «instead of letting ourselves be indoctrinated... if we are not willing to acknowledge... unfortunately... I fear the world is on the brink of ruin... a new science is therefore needed... I therefore started from a new postulate... internal experience is the source of all reality... it is the seity that decides what it will come to do on Earth... the method with which dictators indoctrinate the people to enslave them... if we believe we are only the ego... the creation of the ego is part of the programming of the body by the seity... I think it must necessarily be this way... it is necessary to recognize for incontrovertible reasons... the seities are self-conscious because they know they are conscious... consciousness and free will exist because they are self-evident... they must understand that... one should... there should be... QIP theory is science, not philosophy, nor religion... it is almost certain that reincarnation exists... it is consciousness that truly understands... these verbal deceptions are not innocent... these laws, however, to be effective, must be applied quickly and severely... postulating the existence of free will and consciousness in quantum fields... all we have to do is want it together to get there... I believe that only a unified vision can illuminate and guide humanity's path... then our attitude toward the lives of others will change from competitive-aggressive to cooperative-relaxed... when we want to understand without ulterior motives, there is always an answer... there must also be a single universal spirituality... the scientific vision is therefore hopeless and without proof... in my model, ontological evil does not exist... what we call "evil" might actually have the function of making us wonder why that evil happened to us... if we want a better future... we possess all the qualities to do good... we will always find excuses to maintain the status quo... many young people are interested in meditation and mindfulness... reaching a critical mass of conscious people capable of awakening others... somehow we, as conscious beings, have decided that we want a better future... we must believe in ourselves, not in what the "authorities" tell us.» And so on.

Of course, these sentences should be read in their context, and are not in themselves indicative of flawed arguments or unreasonable or unacceptable opinions. However, they do not demonstrate the lucidity and caution that one would expect from a person convinced of the scientific value of his own theory and ready to pay due attention to the evaluations, even the critical ones, by his peers, and to devise the most suitable experiments to verify the falsifiability of the theory, so as to be able to validate it scientifically. As I have already highlighted on the pages of this site, the scientific method cannot be applied to every aspect of what we consider to be reality, and our desire for knowledge often remains unsatisfied because of the impossibility of obtaining adequate and reliable answers to the many questions we ask ourselves. To cope with the discomfort arising from the realization of this state of impotence, the conscious Ego often turns to its own psyche for some surrogate knowledge that can comfort it and, based on its range of mental attunements, receives one response or another, which it can evaluate as more or less adequate to its needs. But precisely because of the plurality and unreliability of the various mental elaboration generated by the human psyche, the scientific method requires that proposed theories have the ability to predict the outcomes of specifically designed experiments before their validity is accepted (at least provisionally). In this respect, the theory of quantum probability fields is in a certain sense sawing off the branch on which the scientific method itself relies, as it certifies – at least in certain domains – the impossibility of predicting certain results of the measurement experiments that are carried out. Einstein had already predicted this a long time ago.

The uncertain implications of time

If I understand correctly, Faggin (like others before him, including David Bohm) hypothesizes an implicit reality, in which he believes that numerous entities exist, in the form of quantum fields (seities), to which he attributes consciousness and the ability to decide (free will), whose interactions would determine the various aspects of the physical reality of our world and our universe, including all those organic forms he calls living information. It can be observed that the existence of an entity (or a plurality of entities) belonging to a dimension distinct from that of the physical universe could already be deduced from classical physics by attributing an origin to the laws in force in the universe itself, even in the awareness that this entity could not be the object of scientific knowledge. It is therefore unclear by what method and with what tools Faggin believes that seities can become objects of scientific knowledge, if not through their physical effects, given that any interior experience always remains subjective, impermanent, only partially communicable and – by its nature – of uncertain interpretation. Furthermore, many complex physical processes, such as the morphogenesis of a fertilized egg developing into an embryo and then a fetus, do not automatically imply either consciousness or free will: in fact, in these cases Faggin is forced to resort to the consciousness and free will of intelligent seities that would control these processes from another dimension. It is certainly an interesting and plausible hypothesis, which can also be shared, without however representing any advance in scientific knowledge, since we humans cannot objectively know anything about what happens in the dimension of the seities.

A fundamental criticism that can be made of Faggin's theory is that it mixes phenomena that occur over time, such as those we encounter and interpret in the reality of our physical dimension, with processes that occur in another dimension, in which we do not know whether time exists in the same way that we perceive it here. For example, we believe that the first and simplest atoms were formed from the primordial plasma, then, in the stars, the more complex atoms, then, under appropriate conditions, the molecules of various substances, initially simple and then increasingly complex, and finally that extraordinary process which we call the evolution of life took place on our planet and possibly on other worlds. Based on our experience of the flow of time, we attribute to every event or phenomenon a before, in which that event or phenomenon was not yet present, and an after, in which we can register their presence. In his theory, Faggin traces these creative processes back to the dimension of seities, which, let us remember, is not that of the physical world in which we perceive and interpret the effects of these processes. These forms of creativity, that is, of increasing complexity and information, which we perceive as events that occur over time, are attributed by Faggin to a process of increasing knowledge that takes place in the dimension of seities, in ways that are far from clear. In a certain sense, it seems that the author wants to attribute to seities forms of communication and information exchange similar to those we find among conscious human beings. For example, he argues that when the seity of the quantum field of electrons interacts with the seity of the quantum field of protons, a new seity is formed, that of the quantum field of the hydrogen atom, whose effects in the physical dimension present new properties with respect to those of both the electron and the proton. But this, rather than an explanatory theory of what we actually find in physical reality, seems to me to be an attempt to explain ignotum per ignotius.

Faggin does not clarify whether, in his theory, time itself – as it is perceived by our conscious Ego in the physical dimension – is determined by a seity. Yet the very concept of time is subject to interpretations and evaluations that, in light of Einstein's theory of relativity and quantum physics, place it well beyond our intuitive perception. So when Faggin claims – in chapter 9 (A New Model of Reality) of his book Irreducible – that «...consciousness, free will and Life exist from the very beginning as constitutive properties of the holistic Whole (One) that also contains other properties that allowed the evolution of the inanimate universe» he should specify that from the very beginning refers to time as we perceive it within the physical dimension, and not to the holistic Whole that exists beyond time. Later on, the author writes that «There must also be a reason that justifies the presumed existence of seities, and the most sensible one I can imagine is that One desires to know Itself. Thus, every new act of self-knowing of One gives existence to that "portion" of Itself that has known Itself. In other words, knowing also means bringing into actual existence what is known from a state of potential existence that contains what is not yet known. Knowing must therefore be ontological, and each new existence, which I have called seity, will be a part-whole of One with the same desire, capacity, and freedom to know itself that One has... Creation is therefore the manifestation of One's continuous endeavor to get to know Itself ever more through the seities.» However, this is a process that, within the One, does not unfold in time, since time itself is an emanation of the One. If this were not the case, the existence of time would be independent of the One, preventing the latter from being the totality of what exists. Ultimately, the idea of One, as Faggin presents it, is essentially anthropomorphic: «The only "image and likeness" of One we know is us... we are parts-whole of One, which means that One is within us and we are within One.»

What Faggin calls One (and what I prefer to call Spirit, referring to an energy active in a dimension distinct from that of the physical world, given that the human mind cannot encompass every aspect of what exists) can be endowed with a knowledge that not only includes every inner experience that has involved every conscious Ego that has lived or is living in our world, but probably much more. At any rate, this knowledge is already complete in itself, and is not subject to the factor of time as we experience it in the course of our organic life. In fact, some of those who have experienced an NDE report how, once they had enterd the Spirit dimension, they received a block of complete knowledge capable of answering any question that arose in their mind in an absolute and indubitable form. However, when they returned to their bodies, they were told that they could not take this knowledge with them, although they would retain the memory of the experience of knowing everything. Furthermore, the perception of time by most NDE experiencers is completely different from our normal human experience. I have the impression that Faggin relies with a certain naivety on the psyche (on his own psyche) to hypothesize aspects of a reality that, precisely because it escapes the ordinary perceptive and experimental faculties of our mind, can only be subjectively intuited, and therefore it can never be the object of scientific knowledge, since such intuitions can vary significantly from one conscious Ego to another, especially when they are determined by a particular range of attunements of the human psyche. The fact remains that the possibility that there exists a sort of archive in which all human experiences are preserved – consultable by spiritual entities who have access to it in a dimension different and separate from ours – is one of the hypotheses that can explain certain mediumistic communications and some aspects of NDEs.

Faggin is therefore free to attribute to quantum fields in their pure state (seities) a quality he defines as consciousness – which has not been demonstrated to coincide with the consciousness experienced by the Ego of a human being – which is not quantifiable and cannot be measured. So it is not clear why this attribution should have the value of objective scientific knowledge, given that the author himself recognizes that consciousness can be experienced and known by a seity only from within and only subjectively. As for free will, understood as the manifestation of a will, it is limited, case by case, both by the laws of physics, chemistry and biology (whether or not they are known to us humans), and by the statistical dynamics that occur between billions and billions of interacting particles, with all the consequences that derive from this, as Faggin himself acknowledges. In any case, the impossibility of predicting the behaviour of complex systems, such as that of a paramecium, the unicellular organism cited as an example by Faggin, could be attributed to the intelligence of entities, alien to our physical dimension (to which our organisms also belong), capable of developing programs that are then inserted into or transmitted to the organisms themselves, without the latter necessarily having to be conscious. Ultimately, even Faggin must admit that consciousness and free will can be attributed only to the seities, and not to the substances or organisms that represent the living information through which the seities manifest themselves in the physical world, precisely in order to know themselves through the exchange of information. The conscious Ego of human beings (and perhaps, to a lesser extent, that of higher animals) therefore represents an exception, in that it is able to consciously and self-consciously elaborate forms of knowledge, however rudimentary and provisional, within the reality of this physical world of ours.

I conclude by saying that the ideas expressed by Faggin are often interesting and stimulating, however they always fall within the realm of subjective elaborations determined by the human psyche, whose level of truth is established on the basis of their ability to spread and persuade a more or less large audience (as happens with all religious faiths) and not on the basis of objectively verifiable scientific experiments. This basic ambiguity is reflected in the concerns and hopes expressed by the author in his third popular book (Beyond the Invisible), swinging between the pessimism of those who consider the present condition as largely determined by an essentially reductionist and materialistic form of scientism, and the hope for a spiritual rebirth that could lead to a radiant new Renaissance. These mental processes, which, faced with the complexity of the human condition, with all its lights and shadows, appeal to hope for a better future and to the so-called goodwill of all those who are willing and will commit themselves to making it a reality, are typical of the positive polarity of the human psyche. Even a cursory study of history – both past and recent – shows us how, while the conscious Egos of many human beings have always been sensitive to such more or less illusory attunements of the psyche, the negative polarity of that same psyche has not remained idle, involving other human beings in its dynamics. This site has examined in sufficient depth the various dynamics with which the bipolarity intrinsic to that particular energy we call the human psyche determines, through the fragmentation of consciousness into billions of individual entities and the resulting groupings, the contrasts and even violent and destructive conflicts that characterize our individual and collective life. Therefore, no theory of consciousness can be considered reliable and consistent if it is not able to deal in an authentically cognitive way with the dynamics of the human psyche, granting the conscious Ego an effective capacity to control them.

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