Irreducible by Federico Faggin

Author:Federico Faggin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781803415109
Publisher: Collective Ink
Published: 2024-05-31T00:00:00+00:00

The Need for a New Paradigm

A very large vision is necessary, and the man who experiences it must follow it as the eagle seeks the deepest blue of the sky.

—Crazy Horse, Sioux chief

We have said that physics solves the problem of creation by postulating the existence of a Field with all the properties necessary to transform itself into matter-energy and spacetime as a result of a fundamental Law, also postulated, which describes the interactions between the emergent “parts” of the Field. In this manner, the problem of order is solved through a Law, which is the second miracle.

According to quantum physics, the Field is ontological, and the immutable Law describes the dynamism inherent in the interacting parts. Thus, the Law regulates the four nested levels described earlier, i.e., inanimate matter, living organisms, conscious organisms, and conscious organisms with free will, by specializing into a number of derivative laws valid under increasingly restrictive conditions. Despite all the recent scientific advances, however, we have not been able to eliminate the need for the four miracles described above. Moreover, physics is still not unified.

I think that to be able to unify physics, we must abandon the current approach and open ourselves to a new vision. New concepts are needed which can only spring from a fundamentally different conception of Field and Law than the materialist presumptions. I believe that if we started with consciousness and free will as properties of the Field, one could postulate only the miracle of creation, eliminating the other four that could then be logically explained starting from that single postulate.

In fact, from the logical point of view, how could free will, consciousness, and life be nested subsets of inanimate matter? It seems obvious to me that freedom cannot emerge as a special case of non-freedom, consciousness cannot emerge from non-consciousness, and, likewise, life cannot emerge from non-life. It is illogical to think that a more general property could emerge from a property that does not contain it. For example, how could free will emerge from determinism? If, on the other hand, the more general behavior were free, one could explain mechanical behavior as a special case of free behavior.

In trying to explain life and consciousness as classical phenomena, we hit a dead end. We need to back off and seriously consider that the classical physical reality may emerge from a deeper and hitherto unsuspected reality. Otherwise we will never get out of this impasse. If we really want to understand how the universe works, we have to stop using the term “illusory properties” for what distinguishes us from inanimate matter. This is a “crime against humanity,” which must be recognized, faced, and solved, because it leads to the elimination of human values, not because we have proved their absence, but because we have dogmatically decided that it must be so.

In an interview on 16 March 2011 that appeared in New Scientist entitled ‘The Mathematics of Being Nice,’ Martin Nowak, Austrian professor of mathematical biology, observes that:

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