Irreducible: Consciousness, Life, Computers, and Human Nature

Wow! I have been a consciousness junky for most of my life but this book breaks new ground. Science needs measurement data and an idea that subsumes the data into a broad pattern of explanation. For a well-known example look at how the theory of continental drift now explains how Africa and South America look like they could have fit together as if later moved apart. Wegner wrote up his hypothesis a long time ago but the scientists dismissed it as nonsense because nobody could explain how continents with their mountains could move apart. Because of that key problem, the idea was considered balderdash. Today scientists now understand how continental drift is not just a harebrained scheme, but is well explained so the original idea is correct. Today we are in the same situation with consciousness. I saw a book (title and author forgotten) where 50 different consciousness hypotheses are mentioned. Many of them seem to me to be as crazy as shifting continents but this one combines enough pieces to strike me as the best one! The author is a physicist and expert in computers and combines quantum waves with their "collapse of the wave" and "Entanglement" into an idea that includes elements of what is known as spiritual dimensions. Science does not accept the spiritual as having any practical value within science but Federico Faggin sees quantum waves as having the necessary structure to make a logical case for what I call the soul, he makes up some safe names that avoid conflating a science-based theory with accumulated thousands of years of philosophical jargon. Just as Wegener was ahead of the scientific curve and then was saved with new observational data, I see some places today where utterly unexplainable observations suddenly take on a new interpretative meaning and thus serve to strengthen this crazy idea for consciousness. Note that new observations that speak to the future necessarily seem initially crazy. Today we have a data set that meets that characteristic and hence could be a source of information that adds predictive substance to this idea of quantum waves as a unifying spiritual scheme. In physics the "spooky action at a distance" as Einstein put it has no current explanation except in the view offered by Faggin. Also the 90 years of accumulated data by psychiatrists at the University of Virginias Division of Percetual Studies on memories of little children concerning details of a lived life before they were born has the same style as continents fitting together. Today we cannot understand how children could remember a life that clearly did not occur before they were born but with the light of "Quantum Information-based Panpsychism, the accumulated descriptions of a past life take on a new dimension of possibility. His book might be hard to read for those with a very limited understanding of quantum mechanics but he works hard to make it all as understandable as possible. Hard-nosed scientists will find this a difficult pill to swallow but its well worth the effort. I call this book extremely important as do many other reviewers here.

federico’s a bit of a quack (no offense (sorry)) but I still bought this book to explore his perspective and it’s helped “open my mind” in a sense. I don’t ascribe to his philosophy, but I’m glad to have had the opportunity to learn a new perspective on, well, technically everything, and it has helped me think about everything more, which means this book did exactly as I hoped reading it would do for me.

I have been interested in what is 'really going on in the universe' since having a series of anomalous experiences in mid-life. This drew me to quantum physics, despite knowing that my lack of a deep mathematical background would limit such explorations. Fortunately, there are a few people, like the quantum physicist and designer of the Intel microprocessor Federico Faggin, who, because of their deep understanding of the meaning behind quantum physics and quantum information, are capable of transmitting this understanding fairly well with words. Meaning means 'to bear upon' and in his book Irreducible, he explains how Quantum Information bears upon Quantum Physics which bears upon our everyday physical world that includes both classic and quantum physics realities. I have a copy of the film made by the polymath Mae Wan Ho that demonstrates the non-locality of quantum coherent resonance in the fruit fly embryo under ten power magnification with polarized light. The first time I saw it was a magical experience involving an embodied knowing of seeing something profound. There is both a feed-forward and feedback relationship in Faggin's understanding of reality that involves resonance and non-locality through meaning. It is consistent with David Bohm's understanding of the interconnected universe in his description of Explicate (physical), Implicate (quantum) and super-implicate (informational) layers of reality. I recommend this book to those who are losing faith in a purely mechanistic understanding of life and the inanimate world. Also recommend it for those, who like Faggin, have had otherwise inexplicable anomalous experiences, because here is a book that will help you understand how and why what happened to you that makes sense. If however, you are committed to scientific materialism because you have never experienced anything intellectually nor experientially that shook your faith in it, don't bother because the cognitive dissonance will probably overwhelm you.

Conscious choices are a private affair. In order to fully understand why another person makes the choices they do, we would have to know everything they know and feel everything they feel. We’d have to live their past experiences, attending to the same details, shaping our mind to the same environments, aiming our hearts in the same directions. We would, in fact, need to become that other person. In quantum mechanics, the uncertainty principle points to something similar in nature. We can force a choice by making an observation, and we can discern patterns in a multitude of similar choices, but we can never fully understand why nature chooses as she does. So in this way, nature is akin to a conscious agent. It is primarily this similarity that Faggin probes in his book, along with a fascinating weave of cell biology, information theory, the holographic principle, and the comparatively limited nature of digital algorithms. At the outset, he presents nature as a dynamic and holistic totality that is irreducible into separate parts. But very quickly he reduces this totality into a pantheon of quantum entities: some of these have an indelible identity and free will (like us) and others do not (like the electron field). He calls these entities seities, and they never die. They are actually beings from another realm that are constantly communicating with each other, and the world we know is constructed of the symbols of their language. Each of us is piloted by one of these immortal “seities” (as we pilot a character in a VR game) in a continuous effort towards self-knowing, though part of our seity believes we are the organism (the ego). To me, this all sounds like a desperate attempt to deny our own ephemeral nature. If nature is a conscious Whole, then we are nothing but eddies of thoughts and feelings within a cosmic mind. Maintaining a separate, unchanging identity within a dynamic unity is an inherent contradiction, and not even a desirable one! There is nothing indelible about our identity. There is no perpetual bubble around our momentary sense of self. In fact, if we embrace the idea that we are here to grow and understand, then the best thing we can hope for is a cosmic expansion of self - a popping of the bubble - a dissolution of “me” into One. “One has a knowing of Itself that is given by the superposition of the knowings of all the selves that emerged from It. This knowing is knowable only by One.” I see this as a wise insight: one of many that I highlighted from the book. But I argue that superposition is only revealed through measurement. Perhaps death is that measurement. Aversion to death is universal, so any worldview promising self-permanence is seductive. That is how any religion gains followers, after all. But nature shows us how identity works wherever we look, and permanence has nothing to do with it. Organisms grow and evolve and die. Each organism alters their environment, and each environment shapes the organism. Identity is a relationship. It is how we organisms see ourselves right here, right now, within our own ecological and social world. Changes in that environment bring changes to our psychological mirror. Therefore, our identity adapts. Whatever this thing called “me” is, it isn’t the same as 2-year-old “me” or octogenarian “me”. This “I” bends, grows, and eventually… fades. I, like Faggin, see consciousness as the foundation of our reality. And I, like most people, fear death and am tempted by the promise of a spiritual elixer of life: the immortal soul. But after decades of searching within the world’s religions and spiritual and psychological traditions, I found no “true” self. And after those same decades spent among the dying, I watched humans wither like plants, which is quite unlike a seity doffing a flesh suit. No, if we crave immortality, then we must become greater than a self. Less “me”, more “we”. Identification shifts from individual to collective, as an ant to its colony or a human to its tribe, but at a much grander scale. Become the ecosystem: Gaia herself. Or become the cosmos that grew her. Either way, get bigger than an individual and broader than a species. Only with self-surrender and dissolution of boundaries can we reunite with our real, dynamic, universal Self and return with new appreciation for this brief separation we call life. In other words: die before you die, and every breath becomes a gift. “Feeling superior to Nature is the primary source of our distortions, and the root cause of our suffering.” I couldn’t agree more.

Federico Faggin designed the first Intel processor. Had an axis-shifting spiritual experience or revelation about the world beyond and the oneness of all things, which he describes in the beginning. He goes on to dismantle the current notions of computers eventually becoming conscious along with the reductionistic conflation of information with meaning; and the Claude Shannon model's inability to reckon with meaning or semantics. Breaks down the world into three levels of causation Consciousness / Information / Physical, in which the direction of causation runs in that same order. Which is comparable to the model in the paper "The Role of Quantum Mechanics in Cognition Based Evolution" which says levels of causation are Cognition / Code / Chemicals. Two Electrical Engineers clearly thinking alike. Faggin Defines Quantum Mechanics as a science that is really about the interiority of conscious experience (i.e. only the system can know its own quantum state), rather than the objective measurement of objects. He argues that this new framing can make QM comprehensible for the first time. Identifies evolution as the action of proactive conscious actors (not merely observers) in contrast to the now-obsolete Neo-Darwinian view. He calls a "unit of consciousness" a Seity. The concept is not all that different from a soul. In this beings are eternal. He speaks confidently and not hesitantly from his experiences with the beyond. He avoids "God" terminology. He talks about "the One". The book delivers a lot of great quotations and is a skillful integration of rigorous logic with spiritual and artistic insight.

This book is a facinating and incredible read for anyone interested in philosophy, science, spirituality, and human nature. Faggin effectively explains and presents a fantastic amount of information concerning quantum physics and proposes a provoking theory of consciousness. Much Faggin's theory opperates around panpsychism, however he gives hommage to other theories of consciousness and takes time to explain and weigh the pros and cons behind each idea. Faggin explains so many of life's greatest mysteries in unique and humble manners; the book can be dense at times, but presevere as the information is facinating and can help change your perspective. It's always good to have something challenge your view of youself and the world around you, which is precisely what Faggin accomplishes in this well rounded book. Enjoy.

Deep dive, profound work on consciousness. A fun ride. Had to stop and think about what I've read every few pages or so. My kind of book.

Federico Faggin is the Italian-American physicist and entrepreneur who designed the world's first commercial microprocessor and pioneered the silicon gate technology we rely upon for modern computing. Amazingly, Faggin also experienced an extraordinary epiphany, in which he had first-hand experiences of expansive consciousness that changed his worldview and life. Faggin's book, "Irreducible," takes readers on a journey similar to the one he himself experienced, starting with reductionist materialism, or what he calls "scientism," and proceeding in logical orderly fashion into a full-blown theory of consciousness and free will. Faggin points out that the word "information" has been hijacked. Some people now equate the word "information" with meaning, when the original meaning of the word information is merely the symbolic structure of measurable qualities that we consider to be physically real. Information used to mean meaning, in the sense that we can feel the applicability and relevance and quality of some thing as it relates to us and the universe. Meaning is not possible to obtain from a physical structure, such as a human brain – – meaning is understandable to us at the level of consciousness. This distinction is extremely important, because it starts to make evident the subtle yet essential difference between our identity as physical being, and our identity as conscious agents. Faggin asserts that consciousness and free will cannot arise from a classical physical system such as our body. Faggin takes this stance in direct refutation of the idea that Artificial Intelligence can be conscious—that consciousness can arise from a purely physical system. Where does this all lead? One place this leads is that it takes us directly to the realization that we humans are NOT machines. This may seem obvious, yet over the course of the last century or so, there has been a lot of talk comparing people to machines, with frequent implications that people either already are coming up short or soon will be replaced by machines. We hear about self-driving cars, and so-called "Artificial Intelligence" (AI) systems that write music, create art, make movies, and write books and articles. On the face of it, we might assume there's some kind of AI invasion in the works, and people will be replaced by AI and robots in the not-too-distant future. Yet, Federico Faggin points out that machines are by their very nature reducible, which is to say that while they may process information and copy information, their intrinsically reducible and replicable nature means that they can be copied and mass-produced, yet they do not and cannot access the level of meaning that is the stock-in-trade of we irreducible (non replicable) humans. We humans are much more than simply our physical bodies and brains We are more than computers and/or artificial intelligence, too. Faggin’s theory of conscious states that consciousness arises from quantum fields. Faggin suggests that our conscious selves are the quantum fields controlling our bodies. Mind Body Spirit can thus be viewed as Observer, Observed, and Agent. Faggin considers our mind to be analagous to a quantum field, with the power of being an observer; the body is what is observed and measured, and the spirit is the essence of our true conscious agency, including a need to know oneself.

I will be honest, I needed the help of Ai to explain the part where it gets into scientific modes, but the book is definitely worth reading,

Good book

Excelente livro!

This books tries to clarify the current dilemma faced by modern science regarding the issue of Consciousness. Especially now that we are grappling with AI's fast pace development and quantum mechanics findings on particle entanglement. Some of the concepts are mind bending for a non-scientific person like me. The author's personal take on Consciousness source and manifestation are an interesting proposition, worth consideration. But like everything else I've learned about Consciousness so far, the matter still remains one of the most baffling and weird subjects of our times.

Seguo questo ricercatore da molti anni e ho letto altri suoi libri vado alle sue conferenze Ma questo libro è al di sopra delle aspettative