Written by Anely Guerrero
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Quantum Qualia: Convergences between Faggin and New Materialism in Consciousness Theory
Introduction: The Architect's Paradox
In the history of science and technology, we rarely encounter a figure who embodies such a fertile contradiction as Federico Faggin. As a physicist and engineer, his footprint in modernity is omnipresent and inescapable: he was the principal designer of the first commercial microprocessor (the Intel 4004), the developer of the silicon gate (MOS) technology that enabled chip miniaturization, and the co-inventor of the touchscreen and touchpad. In short, Faggin is the literal architect of the hardware on which our digital civilization runs.
This technical authority lends singular weight to the central thesis of his recent work, Irreducible. At a historical moment where the dominant Silicon Valley and transhumanist narrative assumes, almost as an article of faith, that consciousness is an inevitable product of computational complexity—that with enough transistors and data, the "spark" of sentience will emerge from the machine—Faggin stands up to say: no. And he says it not from a place of ignorance about the machine, but from an intimate knowledge of its physical and logical limits.
The Mirage of Computationalism
The problem Faggin diagnoses is a category confusion that has infected contemporary scientific and social thought. We live under the materialist assumption that the difference between a computer and a human being is only one of degree (processing power, speed, memory). Under this lens, the brain is simply a "wet" computer, and the mind, its software. Faggin refutes this view by arguing that the difference is one of class (ontology).
His epiphany, born both from his experience designing chips and deep introspection, is that "unconscious matter cannot produce consciousness," in the same way that a simulation of rain does not get you wet. For years, Faggin tried to conceive of how to convert electrical signals into sensations (qualia), only to hit an insurmountable wall: computers process symbols (syntactic information), while consciousness experiences meaning (semantic information). This distinction is not trivial; it is the frontier between automatic functioning and real existence.
In this article, we will explore Faggin's proposal for a "physics of interiority." We will analyze how his CIP (Consciousness, Information, Physics) model uses the principles of quantum mechanics—specifically the irreproducibility of pure quantum states—to offer a scientific basis for the idea that consciousness is a fundamental, private, and irreducible property of nature, and not an epiphenomenon of computation. In doing so, Faggin not only challenges Artificial Intelligence but also restores an image of the human being endowed with a creative agency that no algorithm will ever be able to replicate.
The Critique of Computationalism: Syntax vs. Semantics
To support his thesis that consciousness is irreducible, Faggin must first dismantle the dominant paradigm in cognitive science: computationalism. This theory postulates that the brain is essentially an information-processing machine and that the mind is the functional result of running the right neuronal "software." If this were true, then creating artificial consciousness would be merely a matter of time and computing power. Faggin, however, argues that this approach suffers from a fundamental categorical error: the inability to distinguish between the manipulation of symbols and the understanding of their meaning.
The Chinese Room Revisited: The Abyss of Understanding
Faggin updates and reinforces the classic "Chinese Room" argument by philosopher John Searle. Imagine a computer system that has been programmed to respond perfectly to questions in Chinese using an immensely complex database of syntactic rules. To an external observer, the system appears to understand Chinese. However, the system—or the person inside the room following the rulebook—has no idea what the symbols it manipulates mean; it only follows formal transformation instructions (if you see symbol X, write symbol Y).
Faggin takes this argument beyond the philosophy of language and anchors it in computer engineering. As the creator of microprocessors, he knows that a computer, at its most basic level, is a deterministic system that operates exclusively with syntactic information (bits, zeros and ones). A bit is a physical distinction (high or low voltage) that lacks any intrinsic content. "A machine 'knows' without knowing that it knows," writes Faggin in his notes, noting that its "knowing" is purely mechanical and structural (Faggin, 2024). The machine can process the word "love" or "pain" in milliseconds, correlate it with millions of other data points, and generate a poetic response, but at no point in the process does it feel or comprehend the meaning of those terms.
The Quantum Leap: From Symbols to Meanings
It is here that Faggin introduces his key ontological distinction. Reality is composed of two irreducible and complementary aspects:
Classical Information (Syntax)
It is public, copyable, and measurable. Corresponds to the symbols we use to communicate (words, bits) and the physical structures that process them (brains, computers). Belongs to the domain of sapere (knowing data).
Example: A musical score or a digital audio file. It is a sequence of instructions or data that can be copied identically from one computer to another. The machine can "read" the score and play it perfectly, but it does not experience the music; it only processes the syntax of the notes.
Quantum Information (Semantics)
It is private, uncopyable, and experiential. Corresponds to qualia—the redness of red, the pang of sadness—which constitute the felt meaning of existence. Belongs to the domain of conoscere (knowing through experience).
Example: The subjective experience of listening to that piece of music and being moved to tears. That internal sensation is the "meaning" of the music. It is a unique and personal state that cannot be "copied" or directly transferred to another person (or to a machine); it can only be lived.
Faggin argues that consciousness does not arise from the complexity of classical algorithms because they are forever trapped in the realm of syntax. "No matter how hard I tried," confesses Faggin about his own efforts to design a conscious computer, "I could not find any way to convert electrical signals... into qualia, because qualia belong to a different kind of reality" (Faggin, 2024).
The Irreducibility of the "I":
The No-Cloning Theorem
This distinction has a devastating implication for transhumanist fantasies of "uploading" the mind to the cloud (mind uploading). The premise of uploading is that if we copy the synaptic structure of the brain (the syntactic information) onto a silicon substrate, we will have copied the person.
However, Faggin invokes the No-Cloning Theorem of quantum mechanics, which states that it is impossible to create an identical copy of an arbitrary unknown quantum state. If we accept, as Faggin proposes, that the essence of consciousness (the "I" or "seity") is linked to a pure quantum state of semantic information, then by physical definition it is uncopyable.
"A pure quantum state... is a defined and private state... that cannot be cloned and, therefore, cannot be known by any [external] observer," he explains (Faggin, 2024).
Attempting to "copy" consciousness is a physical impossibility; we can only copy the data (the memories, the behavioral patterns), but the subjective experience that gives them life—the subject that feels those memories—is irretrievably lost in the process. We are, ultimately, irreducible to our data.
The Ontological Framework: Informational Panpsychism
If materialism is a dead end and computationalism a mirage, what remains? Faggin's answer is a Copernican inversion of our cosmology. Instead of trying to squeeze consciousness out of inert matter, he proposes that consciousness is the irreducible foundation from which matter emerges. This ontological turn, which shares the spirit of the panpsychism defended by Alexander Wendt in the social sciences, takes on a unique technical architecture in Faggin based on the physics of information and supported by recent mathematical formalisms.
The Ontological Inversion: From "Bit" to "It"
The standard hierarchy of modern science is ascending: Matter → Information → Consciousness. First, elementary particles exist; as they organize, they create biological information (DNA, neurons); and finally, if complexity is sufficient, consciousness emerges as an epiphenomenon.
Faggin, in collaboration with theoretical physicist Giacomo Mauro D'Ariano, inverts this causal arrow based on Quantum Information Theory: Consciousness (Field) → Information → Matter
In their joint study Hard Problem and Free Will: an information-theoretical approach (2020), they propose the QIP (Quantum Information-based Panpsychism) model, where fundamental reality is a holistic field of consciousness ("The One") that desires to know itself.
This self-knowledge creates "seities" or individuated units of consciousness. To communicate with each other, these entities must project their private internal states (meanings) into a shared space via symbols. "The inanimate universe did not come first," argues Faggin, "but derives from a deeper quantum reality inhabited by seities... that communicate meanings to each other" (Faggin, 2024). Matter, then, is not the basis of reality, but the public symbolic "language" that consciousness uses to interact—a thesis that extends John Wheeler's concept of it from bit into a conscious it from qubit.
Quantum Information: The Physics of Interiority
This is where Faggin radically distinguishes himself from other philosophical panpsychists. He does not simply state that "everything feels"; he offers a physical mechanism based on fundamental theorems. He defines consciousness not as an ethereal substance, but as a fundamental property of spacetime linked to pure quantum states.
01
The No-Cloning Theorem
Faggin uses the No-Cloning Theorem (Wootters & Zurek, 1982), an empirically verified law of quantum mechanics that prohibits the perfect copying of an arbitrary unknown quantum state.
02
Physical Fingerprint of Interiority
Faggin interprets this theorem as the physical fingerprint of interiority: a pure quantum state possesses all the phenomenological characteristics of a quale (a thought or an emotion), being an indivisible, defined, and private whole that cannot be observed (copied) from the outside without being altered.
03
Nature's Private Interiority
"Quantum physics is telling us that Nature has a private interiority that is the source of the public exteriority we observe" (Faggin, 2024). Thus, the quantum world ceases to be a realm of strange probabilities and becomes the rigorous mathematical description of internal experience.
The PIP Model and the Construction of Reality
To give mathematical rigor to this vision, Faggin relies on Operational Probabilistic Theory (OPT), extensively developed by D'Ariano, Chiribella, and Perinotti (2017). This theory demonstrates, through informational principles ("purely mathematical axioms"), that it is possible to derive the laws of quantum physics—and the very fabric of spacetime—without presupposing the existence of matter or energy a priori.
Faggin adapts this into his PIP (Probability, Information, Process) model, where physical reality emerges from the interaction of conscious entities. It is not blind mechanical forces that move the universe, but the exchange of meaningful information between conscious agents. "Seities" possess genuine free will; their creative choices collapse the wave function of possibilities into actual realities (classical bits). In this way, recent studies in the foundations of physics suggest that the physical universe is a cooperative virtual reality generated by the network of consciousness.
This vision powerfully resonates with Wendt's "quantum social ontology," who also argues that social structures are wave functions collapsed by human intentionality. However, Faggin takes the thesis to the physical extreme by relying on OPT: not only society, but the atom itself, is an informational artifact of communication between consciousnesses.
Comparative Analysis: Faggin on the Ontological Battlefield
To understand the magnitude of Federico Faggin's proposal, it is imperative to situate it not only as a physical theory but as a philosophical intervention that dialogues and collides with the dominant currents attempting to explain—or dissolve—the mystery of consciousness: eliminative materialism, quantum biology, and social quantum structuralism. Through this comparative analysis, the convergences and divergences that define the singularity of Faggin's "informational panpsychism" emerge.
The "Hard Problem": Irreducibility vs. Eliminative Materialism
The sharpest contrast in Faggin's work is established with the academic orthodoxy represented by eliminative materialism (associated with figures like Daniel Dennett and Patricia Churchland). This current holds that "subjective experience" or qualia is, ultimately, an illusion generated by neuronal processing, reducing the mind to classical brain functions. Faggin rejects this premise based on a fundamental distinction between symbols and meaning.
He argues that materialism commits a category error by confusing syntactic information (electrical or biochemical signals) with semantic information (the felt meaning). In his own words, "symbols are the carriers of qualia and qualia are the carriers of meaning," a property that is ontologically distinct from the algorithms that process it (Faggin, 2024). While materialism assumes that computational complexity will eventually produce consciousness, Faggin, from his authority as an architect of modern computing, maintains that "a machine 'knows' without knowing that it knows... its knowing is unconscious and mechanical" (Faggin, 2024). Consciousness, therefore, is not an emergent epiphenomenon, but an irreducible axiom of nature, a property that must exist before or simultaneously with matter for experience to be possible.
The Search for Mechanism: Divergences with Penrose and Hameroff
Although Faggin shares with Sir Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff the conviction that classical mechanics is insufficient to explain consciousness and that the answer must reside in the quantum domain, their approaches differ in the locus of explanation. The Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch OR) theory of Penrose and Hameroff seeks to locate the quantum phenomenon in specific biological structures, neuronal microtubules, attempting to validate consciousness through biological hardware (Wendt, 2015).
Penrose & Hameroff
  • Focus on biological structures (microtubules)
  • Seek mechanism in hardware
  • Biological emergence approach
Faggin
  • Focus on information theory
  • Emphasize nature of information itself
  • Foundational ontology approach
Faggin, instead, adopts a more abstract and foundational approach based on Quantum Information Theory. For him, the crucial aspect is not just the biological substrate, but the nature of information itself. He defines pure quantum states as "defined and private states" that cannot be cloned (No-Cloning Theorem), which isomorphically reflects the phenomenology of internal experience: private, unique, and uncopyable (Faggin, 2024). While Penrose seeks the biological mechanism of emergence, Faggin postulates that physical reality itself is a virtual space (P-space) that emerges from a vaster reality of conscious entities (seities) that communicate via quantum information.
The Scale of Agency: Faggin's Individual vs. Wendt's State
It is in the dialogue with Alexander Wendt that the political and social implications of Faggin's theory become most acute. Both authors converge on a quantum panpsychism: Wendt argues that "consciousness inheres in matter at the fundamental level," rejecting the view of matter as passive and inert (Wendt, 2015, p. 31), a view that resonates with Faggin's assertion that "all that exists... must be conscious" (Faggin, 2024). Both also agree that free will is real and grounded in quantum indeterminacy, where the collapse of the wave function represents a genuine choice and not an algorithmic chance.
However, they diverge radically in the unit of analysis and the localization of agency. Wendt, as a social theorist, extends quantum coherence upward to argue for a structural holism. He proposes that the State can be considered an "organism" with a form of emergent collective consciousness, where individuals are entangled in a social wave function (Wendt, 2015, p. 275).
Faggin, on the contrary, defends the sovereignty of the "seity," defined as a self-aware entity with unique identity and free will. Although he accepts that we are emanations of a holistic "One," he emphasizes that experience is irreducibly private and localized in the individual seity. For Faggin, classical systems (like computers or mechanical bureaucracies) lack interiority; therefore, a social structure operating under algorithmic or classical logics would not possess consciousness. While Wendt seeks to "endow the State with mind," Faggin's ontology acts as a bulwark for the individual, suggesting that true creative agency resides solely in embodied consciousness and not in aggregated structures.
Deep Dive: Syntax vs. Semantics and the Nature of Power
The most powerful technical distinction Faggin offers for political theory is the differentiation between sapere (to know) and conoscere (to be acquainted with). Sapere corresponds to syntactic or classical (Shannon) information: public, copyable symbols processable by machines and bureaucracies. Conoscere corresponds to semantic information: the internal understanding of meaning, which is private and quantum (Faggin, 2024).
Syntactic Level
Modern States and AI systems operate here: processing citizens and data through deterministic algorithms
Semantic Reality
Lived life with felt meaning, inaccessible to algorithmic control
Semantic Resistance
Human interiority as mathematically uncomputable by control systems
This distinction allows theorizing contemporary power as an ontological friction. Modern States and Artificial Intelligence systems fundamentally operate at the syntactic level: they process citizens and data through deterministic algorithms and laws, seeking to optimize variables without "feeling" the meaning of those operations. Technocratic power is, in essence, the attempt to reduce semantic reality (lived life) to syntactic control (administered data).
Faggin warns that delegating decisions to these systems is an existential error, as "understanding is a non-algorithmic property of consciousness" (Faggin, 2024). An AI can process legal or military syntax faster than any human, but it lacks the capacity to feel the meaning of suffering or justice. Thus, citizenship is reconfigured not only as a legal status but as a semantic resistance: the affirmation that the human being possesses an interiority (private quantum information) that is mathematically inaccessible and uncomputable by control systems. Political agency, in this light, is the exclusive capacity of consciousness to collapse the wave function of possibility into creative acts of meaning, something that no syntactic structure can replicate.
Ethical and Social Implications: Quantum Humanism against the Algorithmic Dystopia
If we accept the ontological premise that consciousness is an irreducible and fundamental property of nature, qualitatively distinct from syntactic information processing, the implications for global ethics and governance are immediate and profound. Federico Faggin does not limit himself to an abstract critique of Artificial Intelligence; he warns of an existential danger arising not from the rebellion of machines, but from human abdication before a materialist view that equates algorithmic efficiency with wisdom.
The Petrov Factor: Intuition as an Existential Safeguard
To illustrate the operational difference between computational logic and human consciousness in critical situations, Faggin turns to the historic 1983 incident involving Stanislav Petrov. This Soviet officer, faced with a satellite alert indicating an imminent nuclear attack by the United States, decided to trust his intuition and not report the alert to his superiors, thus avoiding a thermonuclear war. Faggin points out: "He was an analyst, he was sure it was a mistake: his intuition told him... What would have happened if he had been replaced by a soldier trained to obey without questioning? Or worse, what if there had been a robot on guard?" (Faggin, 2024).
This case underscores a critical distinction for contemporary political theory: the capacity of consciousness to access a "direct semantic knowledge" that transcends available data. An algorithmic system, no matter how sophisticated, operates within a closed system of deductive logic based on previous inputs; it lacks the capacity to comprehend the broader context or to feel the moral weight of the consequences. "True intelligence," according to Faggin, is not calculation speed, but integrates "intuition, imagination, creativity... empathy, compassion, ethics, and love" (Faggin, 2024). Delegating high-risk decisions to autonomous systems implies removing this intuitive and ethical component that, paradoxically, may be the only thing preventing catastrophe when data is misleading.
The Fallacy of Sentient Artificial Intelligence
In the current discourse of transhumanism and Silicon Valley, the narrative is promoted that we are on the eve of creating conscious machines. Faggin dismantles this expectation based on the private and uncopyable nature of quantum states. "When I tell my son: 'I love you with all my soul,' I express a real feeling... When a robot says: 'I love you with all my soul,' it is simply reproducing the same classical information... without feeling anything because it is not a quantum system and, therefore, has no interiority" (Faggin, 2024).
This distinction is crucial for social ethics. If machines simulate emotions without possessing the phenomenal experience (the qualia) that gives them meaning, any social interaction with them is based on a fundamental deception. A society that allows "entities" without the capacity for suffering or joy to make decisions about human well-being is committing a category error with dehumanizing consequences. Faggin's warning is clear: if we do not recognize that our nature is fundamentally different from that of our machines, "our technology will be used against humanity by those who promote the materialist vision" (Faggin, 2024).
Beyond Social Darwinism: An Ontology for Cooperation
Finally, Faggin's intervention has a sociological scope that challenges the foundations of neoliberalism and classical political realism. Scientific materialism, by denying the intrinsic reality of consciousness and free will, has fostered a worldview as an inert mechanism governed by scarcity and chance. Faggin argues that this rationality, "informed solely by the principles of materialism, reductionism, and survival of the fittest, can only lead us to runaway competition, racism, and war" (Faggin, 2024).
In contrast, the CIP (Consciousness, Information, Physics) model proposes that the universe is inherently participatory and holistic. If fundamental reality is a network of "seities" interconnected through quantum fields, the radical separation between individuals—the basis of rational egoism—is revealed as an incomplete approximation. This legitimizes an ethics of cooperation not as naive idealism, but as a strategy coherent with the deep structure of reality. Recognizing that "we are part of nature, that trees are our brothers, that mountains think and feel," as expressed by indigenous leader Ailton Krenak (quoted in Faggin, 2024), is not poetry but an implication of panpsychism that demands a radical reorientation of our political and economic structures toward symbiosis and ecosystemic balance.
Conclusion: The Return of the Subject to Science
Federico Faggin's intellectual trajectory represents more than the personal evolution of a brilliant technologist; it symbolizes a necessary correction in the historical trajectory of modern science. Four hundred years ago, Galileo Galilei and other thinkers of the era, like Descartes, made the methodological decision to separate primary qualities (measurable, objective) from secondary ones (subjective, experiential) to found physics. While this exclusion was spectacularly successful for manipulating inert matter, over time it ossified into an ontological dogma: the belief that, since we cannot measure consciousness with the tools of classical physics, it does not exist or is irrelevant.
Faggin's work constitutes a technical and philosophical refutation of this reductionism. By demonstrating that semantic information—felt meaning—is fundamentally distinct from the syntactic information our machines process, Faggin offers us a way out of the dead end of eliminative materialism. His proposal does not seek to reject science but to expand its perimeter to reintegrate the "participatory observer" that quantum mechanics revealed a century ago, but which the philosophy of science has been slow to accommodate.
Ultimately, Irreducible is a manifesto for the reunification of sapere (symbolic knowledge) and conoscere (conscious understanding).
It invites us to conceive of a universe that is not a blind mechanism running towards its heat death, but a dynamic process of self-knowledge and meaning creation. In this new paradigm, the human being recovers its ontological dignity not as a statistical anomaly or a "biological robot," but as a necessary incarnation of the universe's consciousness, endowed with an agency and a responsibility as irreducible as its own existence.
References
D'Ariano, G. M., Chiribella, G., & Perinotti, P. (2017). Quantum Theory from First Principles: An Informational Approach. Cambridge University Press.
Faggin, F. (2024). Irreducible: Consciousness, Life, Computers, and Human Nature. Collective Ink.
Faggin, F., & D'Ariano, G. M. (2020). Hard Problem and Free Will: an information-theoretical approach. arXiv preprint arXiv:2012.06580.
Murphy, M. P. A. (2021). Quantum Social Theory for Critical International Relations Theorists: Quantizing Critique. Palgrave Macmillan.
Wendt, A. (2015). Quantum Mind and Social Science: Unifying Physical and Social Ontology. Cambridge University Press.
Wootters, W. K., & Zurek, W. H. (1982). A single quantum cannot be cloned. Nature, 299(5886), 802-803.
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