Irreducible Paperback – May 31, 2024

Wow! I have been a consciousness junky for most of my life but this book breaks new ground. Science needs measurement data and an idea that subsumes the data into a broad pattern of explanation. For a well-known example look at how the theory of continental drift now explains how Africa and South America look like they could have fit together as if later moved apart. Wegner wrote up his hypothesis a long time ago but the scientists dismissed it as nonsense because nobody could explain how continents with their mountains could move apart. Because of that key problem, the idea was considered balderdash. Today scientists now understand how continental drift is not just a harebrained scheme, but is well explained so the original idea is correct. Today we are in the same situation with consciousness. I saw a book (title and author forgotten) where 50 different consciousness hypotheses are mentioned. Many of them seem to me to be as crazy as shifting continents but this one combines enough pieces to strike me as the best one! The author is a physicist and expert in computers and combines quantum waves with their "collapse of the wave" and "Entanglement" into an idea that includes elements of what is known as spiritual dimensions. Science does not accept the spiritual as having any practical value within science but Federico Faggin sees quantum waves as having the necessary structure to make a logical case for what I call the soul, he makes up some safe names that avoid conflating a science-based theory with accumulated thousands of years of philosophical jargon. Just as Wegener was ahead of the scientific curve and then was saved with new observational data, I see some places today where utterly unexplainable observations suddenly take on a new interpretative meaning and thus serve to strengthen this crazy idea for consciousness. Note that new observations that speak to the future necessarily seem initially crazy. Today we have a data set that meets that characteristic and hence could be a source of information that adds predictive substance to this idea of quantum waves as a unifying spiritual scheme. In physics the "spooky action at a distance" as Einstein put it has no current explanation except in the view offered by Faggin. Also the 90 years of accumulated data by psychiatrists at the University of Virginias Division of Percetual Studies on memories of little children concerning details of a lived life before they were born has the same style as continents fitting together. Today we cannot understand how children could remember a life that clearly did not occur before they were born but with the light of "Quantum Information-based Panpsychism, the accumulated descriptions of a past life take on a new dimension of possibility. His book might be hard to read for those with a very limited understanding of quantum mechanics but he works hard to make it all as understandable as possible. Hard-nosed scientists will find this a difficult pill to swallow but its well worth the effort. I call this book extremely important as do many other reviewers here.

Federico Faggin designed the first Intel processor. Had an axis-shifting spiritual experience or revelation about the world beyond and the oneness of all things, which he describes in the beginning.He goes on to dismantle the current notions of computers eventually becoming conscious along with the reductionistic conflation of information with meaning; and the Claude Shannon model's inability to reckon with meaning or semantics.Breaks down the world into three levels of causation Consciousness / Information / Physical, in which the direction of causation runs in that same order. Which is comparable to the model in the paper "The Role of Quantum Mechanics in Cognition Based Evolution" which says levels of causation are Cognition / Code / Chemicals. Two Electrical Engineers clearly thinking alike.Faggin Defines Quantum Mechanics as a science that is really about the interiority of conscious experience (i.e. only the system can know its own quantum state), rather than the objective measurement of objects. He argues that this new framing can make QM comprehensible for the first time.Identifies evolution as the action of proactive conscious actors (not merely observers) in contrast to the now-obsolete Neo-Darwinian view.He calls a "unit of consciousness" a Seity. The concept is not all that different from a soul. In this beings are eternal. He speaks confidently and not hesitantly from his experiences with the beyond.He avoids "God" terminology. He talks about "the One".The book delivers a lot of great quotations and is a skillful integration of rigorous logic with spiritual and artistic insight.

An inspiring but also challenging book. The author's desire to demonstrate that there is common ground between science and spirituality underlies his work. Sections of the book and its elaboration on both Quantum and Informational Theories can be difficult for someone not familiar with these areas of science. However, between the more technical sections Faggin explains his own understanding of how an underlying unity rather than contradiction exists between Spirituality and Science. He elaborates a well-founded theory on the Unity and "Irreducibility" of All.