Federico Faggin on consciousness and physics

I watched the posted video and am now 1/3 through the documents combined by ML.

I think there is one deep flaw to his construct. 

He says:


But he states quite clearly that consciousness is omnipresent and the other side of the coin from matter.

Therefore even "non-living" matter must be related in some way to consciousness.

He seems to hint at the idea of a holarchy: all holonic levels have some degree of interiority coupled with a perceivable (to us, and to a lesser extent other living forms) exteriority or appearance. Materialists tend to be monistic, thinking in terms only of exteriority, and hence are left with the hard problem of whence comes the interiority that we all experience through one form or another of perception. Idealists tend to be monistic interiorists, saying that all appearances have their root in consciousness, which is the primal, essentially inexplicable source of all.

Federico seems, in a way, to avoid granting primal reality to either interiority or exteriority: they are, as you hint, two sides of the same coin, coexisting and co-evolving in tandem because they are essentially two different views of the same thing. An elementary particle isn't just a particle: it has properties, and through these properties is able to interact with other particles of the same or different kind. When an electron collides with another particle, it experiences something, though probably doesn't have self-reflective awareness of that.

Bernardo Kastrup seems to say that we mustn't think in terms of everything having consciousness (panpsychism). Increasingly, however, I'm having doubts about that, because of Federico's articles among other things. Sure, MAL or Source or God or whatever is in the end unfathomable, the ultimate source of all, but to our level of consciousness, MAL seems to express itself in terms of holarchically coupled interiority and exteriority.

It could be that there's not a distinct difference between living and non-living forms, in the sense that the former are dissociated alters, whirlpools in the great ocean of consciousness, whilst the latter are part and parcel of MAL's natural orderliness and exist within MAL, accounting for our ability to share experiences of reality. Doesn't that seem to hint at a kind of dualism?

I don't know. Federico's ideas have stirred up a hornet's nest in my mind and I feel somewhat less sure about Idealism than formerly. It may be that I'll have to wait a while until things settle down a bit and I can think more clearly.