Welcome to Alice in Futureland Thoughtcast—insightful dispatches from that messy, marvelous border where art, science, tech and culture collide. Host Janine Lopiano along with Alice co-founder Joanne De Luca have spent decades in conversation with the outliers who make us stop and ask: What does it mean to be human? ALICE coined them Electric Swans—figures whose work bends the present toward what’s coming. In this episode, we spoke with one such Swan, Dr. Federico Faggin, the physicist who gave us the microprocessor, touchscreens and touchpads, now turned seeker of consciousness. Faggin took us deeper into the ageless debate of consciousness and questions the physics of reality and free will. And in our discussions, we realized some interesting connections between Faggin’s insights and other Electric Swans from the ALICE Library, so we included a perspective on consciousness and the physics of information from Jacques Vallée, a physicist, information scientist, venture capitalist, architect of the Arpanet (pre-Internet) and friend of ALICE. We also suggest you take a sonic mushroom break with 2 minutes of “Free Will.” Enjoy! FEDERICO FAGGIN: Consciousness cannot be a phenomenon of the brain. It has to be something more basic, something that exists in nature from the very beginning of the universe. So something completely universal and absolutely foundational together with free will. In other words, consciousness had to come with free will. In other words, that would make no sense to be conscious and not be able to decide how to know and what to know. ALICE: Hi, welcome to the Alice in Futureland THOUGHTCAST…insightful dispatches from that messy, marvelous border where art, science, tech and culture collide. We continue our conversation with the esteemed Dr. Federico Faggin—a physicist, engineer, serial entrepreneur and the creator of three pieces of critical tech that run our digital life—the Intel 4004 microprocessor, the touchpad and the touchscreen. But his latest quest is the pursuit of consciousness. In this episode, Faggin takes us through a deep reflection of reality—as he discusses the nature of free will—and the cellular connection of consciousness. FAGGIN: At that time, it was clear that a conscious has had to do with the ability to know and the desire to know and to know itself. And so, I’ve begun to have the first, the beginning of a sense that the purpose of the universe is to know itself, and we are aspects of the totality of reality that allow one, the totality of what exists to know itself. So that was the beginning of a sense that it was possible then to understand, possibly understand consciousness scientifically. And so, I decided to stop everything that I was doing. I started a foundation with my wife to be able to support research of other people that has similar ideas and wanted to research consciousness. And I got to a few years ago when finally, together with an Italian physicist with world authority in the field of quantum information, we finally arrive at the first true theory of consciousness and free will. ALICE: In a previous episode, Faggin explained an experience that opened him to what consciousness could truly be—and it was a whole body energetic burst of pure love—something that was far greater than him. That experience put Faggin on his path today to quantify what consciousness is. And here’s a fact: we still, today, do not have one unifying science-based definition of what consciousness is. Throughout history, culture has debated if there is consciousness—from the early philosophers of Medieval times to Pierre de Chardin, the Jesuit priest, scientist and visionary philosopher famously known for his theory of a planetary “hive mind”—which he called the “noosphere.” Back in the 1950s—before our modern internet—Chardin envisioned a global, interconnected layer of human consciousness and intellect enveloping the Earth. While Chardin had a spiritual perspective, he had a strong belief that still resonates today… JACQUES VALLÉE: Consciousness is not limited to particular entities but that there is consciousness in every atom. ALICE: That’s Jacques Vallée, an internet pioneer, computer scientist, venture capitalist, author, astronomer, one of the world’s leading ufologists—and a friend of ALICE. This excerpt is from our first conversation with Vallée in 2002… VALLÉE: So not only would there be consciousness on other planets but there would be consciousness in everything. And I tend to gravitate to that particular view: that consciousness is really a distributed quality. ALICE: Many experts agree with Vallée. But if consciousness is truly distributed—if it’s part of everything—then reality isn’t just a stage we stand on. It’s something that’s still coming into being. And that collides with the worldview that’s dominated science for centuries. Classical physics describes a universe that is fully determined—every event the inevitable result of what came before it. But quantum physics disrupts that model—it introduces a world of probabilities, where observation seems to play a role in what becomes real. So which universe do we actually live in? One that’s already decided… or one that requires consciousness to complete it? Faggin suggests the answer lives in the tension between these two models of reality. FAGGIN: As you know, there are two types of physics. One is quantum physics, and the other is classical physics. Now, classical physics is the physics that started with Newton and ended up with electromagnetism in the second part of the 19th century. But by 1900, most physicists believed that the world was classical, and classical physics is deterministic. In other words, the laws of classical physics describe nature, describe the ontology, describe objects in space and time, which are supposed to be the real thing. And quantum physics upset all the rules and all the sort of the understanding of classical physics, because it was a theory that was, first of all was indeterministic, as opposed to deterministic. In classical physics, you started with the smallest objects, which are elementary particles, classical elementary particles. But in quantum physics, the particles are not separate. They are state of the field. They cannot be separated from the field. But it was like, it is impossible, cannot be. So the dogma of life is classical has dominated our mindset up until recently and now that there is an opening and people are beginning to see that in fact life cannot be that way. I have coined a new type of information called live information because if you take an electron that works inside a cell, that electron being an elementary particle is three things at once, is information, energy and matter. So you cannot separate matter, energy and information like you separate the power supply, the hardware and the software of a computer. You see? The reductionism of classical physics lends itself to separation of functions, but it doesn’t work that way in living organism. VALLÉE: In physics, you learn that energy and information are two sides of the same coin. That information can be transformed into energy and visa-versa. If you observe a physical system, you are taking information out of the system by observing it but you cannot do that without taking energy out of the system. ALICE: As both a physicist and information scientist, Vallée has advocated for a new physics of information—that we need to go beyond the idea of information presented in dimensions or as aggregated data, and instead, we need to look at the idea of an information universe…which aligns with Faggin’s theory of “live information.” VALLÉE: You can think of the world as a world of energy, particles, atoms, molecules, fields and so on, which is the world that we learn about in school. But you could also think of the world as a universe of information with human consciousness becoming aware of the information from microsecond to microsecond. ALICE: As we dive deeper into the science of life itself, what’s fascinating is how much intelligence seems to exist at every scale. We’re learning that our cells aren’t just passive building blocks—they can sense light, respond to sound, even communicate chemically, almost as if they have their own form of awareness. This echoes Chardin’s original belief that consciousness is in every atom. So we asked Faggin: If cells can sense and respond this intelligently: could consciousness itself exist at the cellular level? FAGGIN: Absolutely. In my way of thinking, the cells have consciousness and free will. A cell is the smallest physical organization in space and time, that has self-consciousness and free will in our theory. Where particles are not conscious per se, they’re state of field, so are the fields that are conscious. And so while an electron exists, if he (the individual) is conscious, his consciousness, this is the consciousness of the field because it cannot be separated, Where in a cell there is an individual consciousness, which means that there has to be a field, the conscious field of which that cell is an emanation. So the cell is a consequence of a field as opposed to being itself conscious, meaning the conscious is not in the cell, it’s the cell which is in the conscious field. ALICE: In Vedic traditions, meditation acts as a vehicle to experience the “field of consciousness” behind the active mind. During deep meditation, the brain begins to register highly structured, coherent energy patterns—what neuroscience has measured as the brain’s rhythm of consciousness—what are known as 40 hertz oscillations. Faggin references energy patterns that can self-reflect as structure energy, of which we know that meditation is just one example of this. But Faggin pushes this further to the cellular level—and that we need to consider the cell as a quant
