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Word Gems 

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Quantum Mechanics

Dr. Frederico Faggin 

The One seeks to know itself

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from https://besharamagazine.org/science-technology/consciousness-as-the-ground-of-being/

Richard: Recently you have begun to make public some of the results of your research, which you describe as a new model of reality – a new conceptual framework. What distinguishes this from the current model or other models which attempt to describe reality?

Federico: There are of course many models that try to explain reality. Many of them are philosophical or metaphysical, but they are not generally connected with physics. But I’m a physicist, and so whatever model I come up with, I think it must also accommodate what we know about physics. So that is the main difference.

In the Big Bang cosmology the universe has emerged from what physicists call ‘the quantum vacuum’, which is in itself deeply mysterious. The idea is that out of this vacuum come fluctuations which are unpredictable, and one of these unpredictable events created the universe. But in my model, everything emerged from this scintillating, white energy which I saw so clearly in my first experience. That energy has an inner reality – a conscious, semantic reality – and an outer symbolic reality made of matter, just like all humans have, and, I believe, all living organisms.

What is the essence of matter? Physicists are now pretty much agreed that it is information. We have found that essentially the particles – the atoms and molecules – that we thought constituted ‘stuff’ don’t exist as objects at all. They exist only as states of fields – the fundamental quantum fields – which interact with each other and then create everything else.

The main point here is that these elementary particles are not separate from the quantum fields. We think we live in a world where there are objects – separate entities – which interact with each other in space and time. That has been the traditional worldview of science. But nowadays we have to think of objects as states of fields; they interact with each other, but at the same time they are not separate from the field. In the model I am proposing these quantum fields are conscious.

Richard: So in your model, the fundamental energy can know itself as interiority, and it can also know itself as information, that is, as matter, so that when another entity like itself looks at it, it seems to be a separate individual thing.

Federico: Yes. But to understand the overall situation, we have to imagine that everything is made of an undivided energy that has the desire and the capacity to experience and know itself. I call this unified field ‘One’. One exists ‘before’ the physical universe, though what physicists call the ‘physical universe’ is the informational aspect of reality. The semantic aspect of reality is the inner experience and knowing of One, which current physics does not recognise. Moreover, One exists in a vaster reality that contains the space–time reality we experience.

Out of One emerge conscious entities that, like One, have the desire and capacity to know themselves. Imagine each entity as a point of view or perspective that One has about itself. They are not separate from One, though their conscious experience is private. To know each other, these entities need to communicate, and to communicate they need symbols, like the words we use. Each entity is like a quantum field and the symbols are like the states of the quantum field, what we call physical particles.

So, the entities are the conscious fields, and they shape symbols within their own fields to communicate with other fields – other entities. The crucial difference with contemporary physics is that these fields have an inner semantic and conscious experience, just like we do. The symbols have meaning that are understood by the conscious fields.