Federico Faggin on consciousness and physics

No, Chuck you're just being yourself. In answer to your question, NO. Did I say I did ? However I think I obviously know more about human nature that Carne does with idiotic statements like this one from the interview.

"...People are put in circumstances that makes them behave badly, people are not innately evil, they wouldn't otherwise choose to do evil things"

That is one of the most naïve, crass sentiments I've ever heard from someone who would aspire to change the world. Truly scary !

Thanks for confirming why I have you on ignore.

Thanks for confirming why I have you on ignore.

    And thanks for confirming why that's probably a good idea.  You only ever seem to come out of your 'cuckoo clock' to give me a piece of your mind.....

I came across Federico's work via a mention of it on Bernardo Kastrup's forum.

Subsequently I investigated his thoughts on his foundation's web site where they are laid out in a series of 7 articles -- which I've collated in a word document attached below for the convenience of anyone wanting to read them without ploughing through separate web pages.
-- read the series from the page linked to above.

I'll also post one of his many Youtube videos for your perusal:



The reason I'm posting this is to get your thoughts and impressions. To me it's very interesting because Federico is a bona fide scientist, who designed the first commercial microprocessor, but also appears to have seriously taken on board the idea that consciousness is primal, and is looking for a way to develop new physics and mathematics to accommodate his ideas.

Indeed Faggin is a very bright mind.
From taking a glance at various articles (some of which I think I already encountered years ago) I take it that he's a classic panpsychist... Am I wrong?
He suggests that consciousness is a property of "the primordial energy of the big bang", as he puts it.

It's an attractive idea and it's also the first alternative (to materialism) I've encountered when reading Steiner a decade ago or so. However there are so many problems with how sophisticated sentience emerges from aggregating proto-conscious particles that I find it hard to digest.
(Kastrup has written a couple of very bright essays on this subject)

Maybe rocks are indeed aware to some degree, and maybe Tononi & Koch are onto something with their idea that specific configurations of information are required to manifest advanced states of awareness. It just seems borderline impossible to verify these assumptions on a large scale (i.e. not just on a handful of well selected systems that seem to confirm the theory)

Cheers

Indeed Faggin is a very bright mind.
From taking a glance at various articles (some of which I think I already encountered years ago) I take it that he's a classic panpsychist... Am I wrong?
He suggests that consciousness is a property of "the primordial energy of the big bang", as he puts it.

It's an attractive idea and it's also the first alternative (to materialism) I've encountered when reading Steiner a decade ago or so. However there are so many problems with how sophisticated sentience emerges from aggregating proto-conscious particles that I find it hard to digest.
(Kastrup has written a couple of very bright essays on this subject)

Maybe rocks are indeed aware to some degree, and maybe Tononi & Koch are onto something with their idea that specific configurations of information are required to manifest advanced states of awareness. It just seems borderline impossible to verify these assumptions on a large scale (i.e. not just on a handful of well selected systems that seem to confirm the theory)

Cheers

From Part 4, The Nature of Consciousness:

"Loosely speaking, awareness is the inherent capacity of the primordial energy to observe itself and direct its evolution as it transforms into space, time, and matter of ever increasing complexity. Awareness is then an irreducible, self-reflecting property of the primordial energy, where self-reflection contains the germs of observation, identity, perception, feelings, memory, experience, knowing, learning, understanding, imagining, deciding, acting, willing, intending, creating, and many other higher aspects, all co-evolving together with the material forms."

From Part 6, Explaining Consciousness:

"....the self-knowing that each individual consciousness learns by embodying and interacting with other embodied consciousness in the virtual reality simulator we call the physical universe, allows each interacting consciousness to figure out completely the structure of the non-material pattern that exists within itself that produces the observed behavior. That abstract structure then, by definition, is the self-knowing. I am talking about a pattern existing within consciousness, of which consciousness is not yet completely conscious about, that manifests in the observed interactions, thus gradually revealing to an attentive self the previously hidden order or structure. This is therefore the essence of the mechanism by which consciousness knows itself through an experience in the physical world."

.............................................

"This view postulates the nature of the universe as a co-evolution of consciousness and material forms, starting from a common unified seed.

The material forms, then, are physical representations of the self-knowing achieved by the evolving consciousness of the universe. The intuition here is that for consciousness to know itself it needs matter to function as a dynamic mirror, reflecting to itself its own ever-changing and ever growing self-knowing.

Thus, matter and consciousness are tightly coupled, constituting the co-evolving inner and outer aspects of reality respectively."

A few thoughts on this.

Conscious awareness and self awareness are described as an irreducible inherent innate essence of the primordial energy of the Big Bang, presumably with no further elucidation possible. This still leaves as mysteries the ultimate nature of it, its origin, and the answer to Chalmers' "hard problem" of qualia. Presumably because it is considered futile to look any deeper into this. The ultimate "nature of consciousness" is not explained. 

There is a lot of lyrical and elegant prose expressing ideas incorporating elements of panpsychism, varieties of monism, the "virtual reality simulator supercomputer" concept as metaphor, and even a little interactional dualism. Note that this still doesn't actually explain the ultimate nature of consciousness. Maybe that is too much to expect - I think this is probably fundamentally unknowable to humans. Is that something like "mysterianism" in philosophy? Not terribly important, but Part 6 says "self-knowing" is a capacity originating, being learned and evolving through consciousness being embodied in matter, but Part 4 says self awareness is an inherent capacity of the primordial energy.

There are a lot of problems with panpsychism, and for that matter with monism. The "What's wrong with panpsychism" thread under Philosophical Discussions goes into this. Some of these difficulties with panpsychism identified there by Titus Rivas can be summarized as:

- Panpsychism seems incompatible with a substantial personal self or soul.
- Panpsychism leads to parallelism.
- Panpsychism seems incompatible with data from research into psi and survival (empirical objection).

The Universe comprises an incredibly complex interdependent system of natural laws following many beautiful mathematical constructions, that is also incredibly fine tuned for life as we know it. This gives at least the strong appearance of design by a focused, sentient superintelligence that creatively invents. By analogy, in our experience the only source of highly complex specified information (in the form of intricate machines and mechanisms or for that matter works of literature) is focused sentient human intelligence. This sort of conscious intelligence just doesn't look to me like Faggin's concept of consciousness in the Universe. 

Some sort of "evolution" of consciousness into matter is assumed as a given, but that only opens up a host of questions. What does that really mean? Its process is not examined or described. Is this In his writings it appears to be evolution like a modified Darwinian process involving semi-random heritable changes combined with natural selection. Cosmologically, what is the mechanism of inheritance and how does the selection work? Darwinism has a lot of problems when it comes to things like the origin of life (doesn't even apply), the Cambrian Explosion, and macroevolution in general. What about a sort of Lamarkian inheritance of acquired characteristics? Does consciousness somehow directly change itself, its own nature and capabilities, in response to experience? Evolution of consciousness would seem to need a mechanism of some sort - why does our reality happen to incorporate that mechanism?

Another problem with Faggin's speculations:

It is evident from astronomy and astrophysics that the present laws of physics applied in the early Universe probably starting with the Big Bang. The supremely creative acts of what seems to have been a sentient superintelligence seem to have already taken place. However, according to panpsychist and monistic speculation, this was an era when some form of proto-consciousness was just then "evolving", complexifying  and becoming more sophisticated, slowly creating and embodying into matter. So this speculation does not fit the astrophysics evidence. Then, as already mentioned earlier, there is also the evidence from parapsychology. Empirical evidence from PSI, afterlife communication and reincarnation research also conflicts.

Concerning the evolution issue previously brought up, I subsequently did find that this is addressed to a limited extent in article no. 5, Consciousness and Matter Co-evolve, and have edited the paragraph. 

"...It simply means that there is a gradually increasing element of intelligence added to the evolutionary process that helps it overcome the combinatorial-explosion barrier that is the major unanswered criticism to the current evolutionary theory. This hypothesis takes the same experimental evidence that strongly supports Darwinian evolution, and adds a sorely needed non-random feedback element to speed up the process that otherwise would be impossibly slow with purely feed-forward random variations.

The claim here is that, as natural selection progresses, the mix of variations that need to be selected contains at least the same percentage of variations with the potential to improve fitness that was present for a much less complex system; the primary source of these variations coming from the increased self-knowing of consciousness. Otherwise new structures whose probability of existence is infinitesimally small could not come into existence in the relatively short time that has been observed."

Faggin evidently accepts a highly modified form of Darwinian processes as being what is solely behind the evolution of consciousness including the embodiment of consciousness, even at the cosmological level. It is evident that generating the precise and intricately designed DNA changes necessary to achieve particular adaptive changes to body structure and organismal development, or even just particular different adaptive protein structures like enzymes would require a very powerful focused sentient superintelligence. Faggin just vaguely envisions a proto-consciousness slowly developing self-awareness through some sort of undefined pseudo-Darwinian process during which this proto-consciousness slowly creates and embodies into matter. All quite lyrically and elegantly described, but too vague in the details to get much of a handle on it.

I must say I am finding this guy’s writing very interesting and accessible.