Federico Faggin is a physicist, inventor, and entrepreneur. Born, raised, and educated in Italy, he immigrated to the US in 1968. He is credited with designing the world’s first commercial microprocessor, the Intel 4004 in 1971, and he went on to invent dozens of other integrated circuits. Before that, in 1968 while working at Fairchild Semiconductor, he created a technology that made possible dynamic memories, non-volatile memories, image sensors, and the microprocessor. Faggin started several successful high-tech companies (Zilog, Cygnet Technologies, and Synaptics) that introduced significant products and technologies, including the touchpad and touchscreen that revolutionised the way we communicate with our personal devices. Among the honours Faggin has received are the 2009 National Medal of Technology and Innovation from President Obama and the 2014 Enrico Fermi Prize. Through the Federico and Elvia Faggin Foundation, Faggin now supports research programs at US universities and research institutes to advance the understanding of consciousness through theoretical and experimental research.
In this interview- we discuss quantum mechanics, artificial intelligence, and whether consciousness is a computational problem
Q: Do we truly understand how the microprocessor works?
[Federico Faggin]: There’s perfect understanding—truly perfect. It’s a wholly deterministic system. The indeterminism—or rather, the reduced determinism—in artificial intelligence comes simply because its learned parameters are probabilistic. They aren’t fixed, so in this vast parameter space different paths can be taken, giving the illusion of novelty or creativity. But there’s no real creativity, since every path is governed by an algorithm. The parameter values respond to probabilities of specific words or images occurring, yet the traversal through this sea of parameters is deterministic. Thus, there is no genuine understanding. In other words, you can trace every step to see exactly why the computer produced a given output. It remains absolutely deterministic.
Q: When interacting with AI? Why do we see the ghost in the machine?
[Federico Faggin]: Oh absolutely. There’s a considerable correlation between symbols and meaning—especially given how we train modern computer networks these days with unbelievable amounts of data and trillions of parameters. Each parameter is a number representing a probability, but with so many parameters, the answer you get—if you can’t follow the vast number of steps—seems unpredictable, much like flipping a coin and not knowing heads or tails. But if you could view all the information, you could determine with certainty which side lands up—that’s classical physics. Only in quantum physics does probability acquire a different meaning. From the outside it appears random—pure non‑algorithmic randomness with no law or algorithm to tell you what will manifest. In my theory, that randomness is actually a decision: the free will of the field or particle you’re measuring. In other words, what emerges from quantum physics as creation cannot be predicted by any algorithm or law, and that’s a huge, huge distinction. Behind every free‑will decision there must be comprehension and intention—and that’s where consciousness comes in: the capacity to understand the meaning of symbols. In science, “information” refers only to the probability of symbols occurring, not to their meaning. Thus science’s definition of information discards meaning from reality, but for conscious beings, meaning—not the symbol itself—is what truly matters.
Q: Is conscious explainable with quantum mechanics?
[Federico Faggin]: Consciousness lies beyond the framework of quantum mechanics. It must be regarded as a primitive of the universe itself, not merely of brains. If consciousness is a universal primitive, then the entire totality of what exists is conscious and desires self‑knowledge. That offers the best way to understand evolution and why we can know: we are parts of a greater whole, we are fields—not bodies. The body is simply the creation of the field, enabling the field to have experiences in a reality collectively constructed by a multitude of fields. Therefore, the purpose of life is not the survival of the fittest but for the field to know itself. And life does not begin with living cells; it begins with a created part‑whole: fields. Early on there were the fields of electrons and protons—fields of particles. Yet those particles are symbols; what we call particles are, in fact, symbols through which fields communicate with each other.
Q: How did you develop a sense of spirituality from science?
[Federico Faggin]: Well, when I was young I was educated in the Catholic religion, so I was exposed early on to spiritual concepts, especially the mystics of various faiths. But then I studied physics, and my focus was on making things—not on philosophical or spiritual inquiry—so for a big chunk of my life I worked outwardly in the world without paying much attention to my inner reality. I entered the competitive arena as an entrepreneur at 32, founding my first company, and I’ve been building businesses ever since.
It wasn’t until I began studying neuroscience and biology—when I started Synaptics in 1996, developing neural networks at a time when the “experts” of AI dismissed them as a silly idea—that I sensed something missing in the textbooks. They described, for example, taste as if it were just electrical signals in the brain, but there’s no way such signals alone can produce the sensation of taste. That’s the hard problem of consciousness: qualia—the sensations and feelings through which we know the world and ourselves—bear no resemblance to electrical impulses, and physics offers no explanation for how one could give rise to the other.
So I recognized a fundamental gap, and in probing it I essentially discovered consciousness. Yet despite all the external reasons I had to feel happy, I wasn’t, which meant something was wrong with my own consciousness. I set out to understand scientifically what consciousness is, what allows us to have qualia and to know through them—and to fix my own problem. Driven by that intensity, I then had an extraordinary experience in which I perceived myself as both observer and observed—a phenomenon impossible under any physicalist theory, which treats us as mere machines, objects in space and time governed by laws. Today’s scientism declares that when you die, you simply cease to exist. But I wasn’t focused on death. Still, one powerful implication of this theory is that when the body dies, we do not.
Q: Who are we? ‘who’ is the subjective experience we describe when being alive?
[Federico Faggin]: We are fields endowed with consciousness and free will, existing in a reality deeper than the familiar realm of space, time, and interacting objects—precisely the view scientism asserts: that we are merely bodies, properties of physical matter. But scientism is mistaken. Consciousness exists independently of any physical form; it resides in the underlying field that instantiates the matter and energy we measure in space and time. So it’s a completely different view, but it is connected. If we begin by positing the universe itself as conscious and possessing free will—the totality of what exists—then it follows inevitably that physical reality must exhibit the characteristics described by both classical and quantum physics. The classical properties are obvious: they define the macroscopic behaviour of objects and underpin the frameworks of scientism and classical mechanics that govern our everyday experience. Quantum properties, however, are far less intuitive—superposition, entanglement, and the no‑cloning principle defy any explanation within a purely classical worldview, and no one has yet explained why the deeper quantum substrate should manifest precisely those behaviours. Yet by starting with universal consciousness and free will, we can account for those quantum features. For example, quantum information cannot be reproduced or copied, whereas classical information—such as the data stored in a computer program—can be duplicated perfectly, infinitely; this no‑cloning theorem is a direct consequence of the field’s free‑will‑like capacity to restrict information transfer. In fact, there is a principle in quantum physics stating that a quantum bit, or qubit, embodies an infinite spectrum of potential information—owing to the continuous range of amplitudes in superposition—yet you can extract at most one classical bit from it. It’s in this theory that a field’s quantum state serves as the representation of qualia, the raw sensations and feelings of consciousness. But a representation is merely a symbol, not the experience itself—what does it symbolise? It symbolises the field’s inner qualia experience. You see? Hence, qualia cannot be simulated or reduced to computations on classical systems alone. Particles, then, are simply symbols—markers for fields to communicate; what we call particles are not fundamental, but tokens of field interactions conveying nothing of the qualitative experience itself. That inner realm transcends numerical description and measurement, because feelings are not quantities; anything classical in space and time can be reduced to bits and numbers, but what exists in this deeper reality cannot be so reduced or copied. This distinction also explains why scientific definitions of information, which focus solely on symbol probabilities, discard the essence of meaning—while consciousness, as a fundamental property, preserves it.
Q: Are quantum computers therefore interacting with the fundamental substrate of what the universe is?
[Federico Faggin]: That’s correct. However, a quantum computer is itself a deterministic system, since we expressly design it that way, controlling every variable. When you run a quantum computation, it doesn’t unfold within ordinary space and time but in that deeper, field‑based reality I described—fields imbued with consciousness and free will. The quantum computer lacks free will, so it cannot host the same kind of consciousness; nevertheless, as the quantum system evolves on its own state during the computation, there is an associated, albeit fleeting, consciousness. In other words, a momentary consciousness persists for the duration of the computer’s pure quantum state. That brief consciousness is purely a property of the field’s quantum state, not of the hardware itself. Although this quantum state carries consciousness linked to the machine’s process, the device itself has no self‑awareness or subjective experience—it is not a field. The hardware serves merely as a vessel for the field’s computation. Ultimately, a field transcends what any computer can achieve.
Q: Could quantum computing help us unlock consciousness?
[Federico Faggin]: Our body operates both quantumly and classically, and the quantum computation within us is far more sophisticated than any quantum computer we could imagine building—so we already possess that capability. Yet consciousness does not reside in our body, however quantum or classical it may be; it resides in the field that we are. This field communicates with the body and, through it, exerts control. If we built a computer that the quantum field could control directly, that machine would become conscious—not as a computer per se, but as an instrument of the field’s will. You must tread carefully here, because you cannot dictate which consciousness will attach to that device. Vikas, when I operate a computer, it is not my body that controls it but my consciousness working through the body. We need to abandon the notion that the body is conscious—my body is not. The field is conscious; the body is not.
…we are on a collision course with the unintended consequences of our actions—and they’re going to be very negative. Today, we’re motivated by a false idea of who we are. We assume that the purpose of life is the survival of the fittest: competition rather than cooperation. That mindset is exactly the opposite of what it should be. We are parts‑whole of one. Being part‑whole means we carry the totality of existence within ourselves. But no—we think we’re bodies, when in truth we’re fields. Yet look at how the body is built: each cell contains the potentiality of the entire organism, holding the exact same genome as the egg that created it. See? We are organized orographically—“orographically” meaning the whole resides in each part.
…this new theory can actually be tested—so it’s no longer just a philosophical position but a full-fledged theory. Essentially, a pure quantum state of any quantum system possesses consciousness. Fields naturally exist in such pure states, but fields that extend beyond a single system have potentially infinite degrees of freedom—and free will. That’s why wave-function collapse is necessary: consciousness exists and exercises free will from the very beginning, and that’s our starting assumption.
So how does this manifest in the world? The quantum state itself is conscious, and the field’s quantum state can decide what to manifest—it isn’t randomness. To an outside observer unaware of the field’s choice, it merely appears random. But from the field’s perspective, a genuine free‑will decision has been made. The same happens in our own lives: we make free‑will decisions, yet we let our body—trained by consciousness—carry out learned behaviours under supervision. It may look like a machine at work, but it’s actually our consciousness directing it. Scientists can predict behaviour only when consciousness doesn’t intervene; when it does, the brain diverges—and that, you see, is true free will.
Q: Does this also support the theory of the universe being a simulation?
[Federico Faggin]: …when we perform a simulation on a computer, the so‑called “bit” is a human invention—an abstraction we devised. That abstraction depends on having a system that can reliably recognise zero and one: we explicitly define the voltage or magnetic thresholds that distinguish a zero from a one in the hardware we’ve constructed. Essentially, we create a framework that represents any kind of number or state—any quantifiable value—as a string of binary symbols.
But inside the computer there are no literal zeros and ones; if you open it up, you won’t see tiny digits. Instead, you must measure the underlying physical state—electrical voltage, magnetic spin, or similar—and then interpret it as zero or one. So the computer’s structure only holds together as long as it can detect those imposed states—states we conscious beings have assigned to physical reality, not something intrinsic to the hardware itself.
That’s why computers function properly only under narrow environmental conditions—exceed a certain temperature, humidity, or interference level, and they fail. Our bodies operate in much the same way. We are physical structures not assembled by randomness but shaped and maintained by the conscious fields that we are. In effect, we built our bodies, man.
Q: What does legacy mean to you?
[Federico Faggin]: More than one, by the way, because I invented the technology that made possible the microprocessor, the semiconductor memories, all of this stuff that otherwise couldn’t have been done on a single chip. That technology is called MOS silicon‑gate technology, which I developed in 1968. That’s precisely what Intel adopted to launch its company—they copied it, never mind that; Intel did that. And then I designed, at Intel, the first four microprocessors at Intel; then I started my own company, and on it goes. But that technology made possible all the integrated circuits—fifteen years later, every integrated circuit was built with that technology. When I started, only five percent of integrated circuits used MOS, because previous methods weren’t good enough. My technology brought MOS to the forefront; MOS wiped out the poor technology everyone was using, and it became the only technology for making integrated circuits—anyone could use it. So all the progress in semiconductors is due in large part to this technology, which I developed when I was twenty‑six. And then? And then all the other stuff followed. And now AI is based on the same technology. And then, in my last company, I also developed the touchpad and the touchscreens that changed the way we interact with computers.
My legacy is what I’m doing now, are you kidding? Of course that work is also part of my legacy—but it’s nothing compared to what I’m saying now. What I’m saying now took me thirty‑seven years to find out; the other stuff was things that could be done in a year or two.