The primordial quantum language

The primordial quantum language

Federico Faggin

Consciousness is the inner reality of the world, governed by the laws of coherent quantum systems, while matter is but an expression of the meaning inherent in this inner reality. The classical world of matter conforms to the statistical properties of a primordial quantum ‘language’ spontaneously used by the inner quantum reality to express itself. That is the reason why quantum events seem to be probabilistic. Living beings straddle these two worlds—the inner, quantum world of experience and meaning, and the outer, classical world of physical entities—by giving physical expression to their conscious inner being. These are the insights of physicist—and inventor of the microprocessor—Federico Faggin in this captivating essay, edited from his recent book, Silicon.

Once I make a choice, my conscious command will affect a subset of the atoms of my body, and these in turn will affect my physical behavior in such a way that the pattern I emit will represent the intended meaning. Said differently, that pattern has both a symbolic content (air vibrations) belonging to the outer reality, and a semantic content, the qualia and meaning that belong to my inner reality. There must be two-way communication between the semantic level of inner experience and the outer informational level, with the semantic level affecting the symbolic level and vice versa.

If we imagine that consciousness and free-will are inner properties of the quantum fields, then the outer state of each field could be changed by the field itself. Therefore, the outer state of the field would reflect its inner semantic reality. Those outer states would then correspond to the vibrations imposed by a conscious entity onto the air molecules in the example of the square previously described. Those vibrations would reflect the meaning that the conscious entity intends to communicate to the other fields since the outer information is correlated with the meaning.