Federico Faggin

Wired Next Festa Trentino (September 29, 2024)

The matter is the ink with which the consciousness writes its self-experience.

The true reality is the interior one, quantistic, and private. We as conscious entities belong to the part-whole of the One, One is all that exists, [One] is what we call God.

L’intelligenza artifciale non ha la capacità di essere creativa. La vera creatività porta a ciò che non è mai esistito, va ben oltre la combinazione di ciò che già esiste. Se le chiediamo di riprogettare questo teatro, l'AI rimescola le sedie che trova nella stanza ma siamo noi che dobbiamo decidere se ci piace o meno come lo fa, ricordando che quelle sedie sono state ricavate da algoritmi che partono da dati creati da noi. Il computer riconosce la correlazione tra simboli, ma non capisce ed è inutile pretenderlo, perché non capirà mai un tubo.

In the Silicon Valley, there is the view that is widely shared in the world. And it is materialist and reductionist, for which the human being is a machine and reality is describable by the classical physics of objects moving in space-time. It is also the deception of today's artificial intelligence, which is more 'logo' to sell than the real thing. In this view, consciousness and experience are classified as simple phenomena that can be measured and described mathematically, when in fact they are not. This is why the current description of artificial intelligence is actually misleading.

Artificial intelligence does not have the capacity to be creative. True creativity leads to what has never existed, it goes far beyond combining what already exists. If we ask it to redesign this theatre, the AI shuffles the chairs it finds in the room, but it is we who have to decide whether or not we like the way it does it, remembering that those chairs were derived from algorithms from data created by us. The computer recognises the correlation between symbols, but it does not understand and it is useless to pretend it does, because it will never understand nothing.

A robot won't ever be able to be like us, it is solely a symbolic representation, it does what we ask to it to do. With professor Giacomo D'Ariano, who is an authority in the field of quantum physics, I elaborated the first theory of consciousness. There exists a link between quantum information and consciousness, and through this link we are able to explain phenomena that couldn't explain before.

Consciousness is the ability to understand, that is, to be able to have a sentient experience of sensations and feelings and to understand their meaning. This goes beyond what a computer can do. Consciousness is a phenomenon that emerges from a deeper reality that cannot exist in space-time and cannot be explained by classical physics. Only the 'quantum state' can describe conscious experience, so by necessity consciousness must exist before matter, energy, space and time. Physical phenomena, which are more virtual than real, are the creation of a conscious field that observes objects moving in spacetime through the body controlled by the field. The quantum state of the field is the representation of qualia, i.e. the sensations and feelings that constitute a conscious experience. Qualia can only be known by the field that is in that state and go beyond what is representable by a mathematical concept.

We are spiritual beings, temporarily imprisoned in a physical body that is similar to a machine. But we are much more than a machine. We are consciousness, infinite and irreducible entities.

Humanity is at a crossroads. Either it returns to the belief that it has a different nature than machines or it will be reduced to a machine among machines. The risk is not that artificial intelligence will become better than us, but that we will freely decide to submit to it and its masters.

Not even the most advanced form of artificial intelligence can ever replace man. Because there is something in human beings that is irreducible to machine knowledge: self-awareness, free will, doubt, feelings.