Irreducible: Consciousness, Life, Computers, and Human Nature

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.

Mind bending book. Awesome!

I have a pretty good general familiarity with quantum physics and have read many books on the subject. Although it was a bit over my head at times, the book does a good job of blending the quantum with the conscious, and allowed me to have a better sense of what this combination is or could be like. I’d recommend this book to anyone who has an interest in these topics or spirituality generally.

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.

Amazing explanation of quantum physics that allows us to take a peek at what we know very little of. Book has a ton of (hidden) relationship to very philosophical ideas.

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.

I really liked the framework the author establishes at the beginning and how carefully he thought and wrote about quality, inner experience and quantum physics. After stating that this all leads to falsifiable and testable theory, he utter fails to suggest potential experiments. The last few chapters move from quantum science to wishful, idealistic and hopeful prose the author imagines can describe the future of humanity.