I recently discovered several books, and then many Youtube videos, by Federico Faggin. Federico’s life story is fascinating, and touches on so many interesting topics that are colliding in our culture today.

The short story is that Federico, an Italian-American physicist, engineer, inventor, and entrepreneur, designed the first commercial microprocessor for Intel. He went on to start and build several successful companies, including the company that created the technology behind the touchpad technology that led to our current smartphones and tablets. His business accomplishments are interesting and substantial. If he had done nothing else, his life would have been considered a great success. But, that was only the beginning of the story. He had what I suppose could be called a midlife crisis, a point he reached in his life where even though he had accomplished everything in life that we tend to think of as success; business and financial success, a family, friends, respect, awards and reputation, he still found himself deeply unsatisfied and unhappy.

Because of his work with computers and microprocessors, he was studying the problem of artificial intelligence and neural networks, trying nearly 40 years ago to solve the same problems that are all the rage right now with all of the AI hype. As part of this process, he was also studying human consciousness and trying to figure our how computers could ever replicate human consciousness. One night, after getting out of bed for a glass of water, he experienced an episode of what could probably be best described as “cosmic consciousness.” There are many videos of him describing the experience, so you can listen to him describe it directly, but basically he describes it as feeling energy pouring out of his physical body and a sense of love, joy, and peace that were a thousand times more powerful than anything he had ever felt before. It seems obvious to me that he is describing what mystics from every religion, for centuries, have described using all kinds of different terms, including, “awakening,” “enlightenment,” “nirvana,” “samadhi,” and “the kingdom of heaven within.”

That isn’t really the fascinating part. Thousands of people have described these experiences before. Lots of people using psychedelics have described these experiences as well.

The fascinating part is that here is someone who was completely materialistic in his world-view, a physicist, a man of science, with a deep understanding of how computers and technology works, who was also studying neuroscience and biology so that he could further study the hard problems of human consciousness and artificial intelligence, in other words someone who had a very unique compliment of knowledge and life experiences, having an experience that can only be described in spiritual terms. His description of the event, and how he instantly recognized the implications of the experience is remarkable and fascinating. The conclusions that it led him to are remarkable as well.

Why do I find his story fascinating? There are thousands of other people describing similar experiences. But this is an area where it is extremely difficult to sort out the nonsense and the liars from the people who are telling the truth. Anyone can claim to have had this type of experience and then give you all kinds of explanations and implications from their experience. These explanations range from fundamentalist religious reasons, to atheistic chemical reasons, and every kind of woo-woo. new-age, nonsensical reason in between.

What I find fascinating about his story is that he is probably the one individual in a billion that had the actual scientific knowledge and experience, plus the credibility, to offer a unique perspective on what actually happened to him…and the implications for science and religion. I’ve always been deeply fascinated by the clash between science and religion. I find the arguments by both sides against the “opposing” side childish and ignorant. It seems perfectly clear to me that science and religion can not be in conflict with each other if they are truly understood.

Federico explains in scientific terms, the differences between classical physics and quantum physics, and compares them to the differences between deterministic, materialistic, processes, and human consciousness and free-will. He talks about how we are not separate from the world around us, even though this is accepted by our senses as obvious. I find it amazing that cutting edge, quantum physicists, are now describing the physical world using language that is virtually indistinguishable from language being used by the scriptures of multiple religions from thousands of years ago, including Hinduism, Judaism, and Christianity.

He comes to the conclusion that consciousness and free will must be foundational, and that they must exist independent of our bodies, before there is life itself, that from the beginning of the universe those properties must exist. He laughs at the idea that a human cell could assemble itself from purely natural processes…but he also believes that we are evolving towards higher levels of consciousness and knowing. This idea seems contradictory to people who are hung up on both sides of the science/religion debate. However, it seems perfectly obvious to the mystics who have been trying to express these ideas for thousands of years. Many of them paid the ultimate price for their theories. Luckily for us, human beings seem to have advanced past the stage where they want to torture and murder people who disagree with their “religious” views.

What does it all mean? I suppose everyone can decide for themselves. Anyway, here is one lecture by Federico that I found particularly interesting…