Faggin’s Quantum Information-Based Panpsychism

Physicist/inventor Federico Faggin postulates “with high confidence” that “consciousness and free will are properties of quantum systems in pure quantum states” because they depend on quantum entanglement, a nonlocal property that cannot exist in any classical, deterministic universe (Faggin, 2023). The kind of information involved in consciousness needs to be quantum for multiple reasons, he says, “including its intrinsic privacy and its power of building up thoughts by entangling qualia states.” As a result, Faggin comes to a “Quantum-Information-based Panpsychism” (QIP) (D'Ariano & Faggin, 2022).

Quantum Information and Conscious Experience

The essence of QIP is that “a quantum system that is in a pure quantum state is conscious of its own state, that is, it has a qualia experience of its state.” Faggin calls this “a highly plausible postulate” because “a qualia experience is definite (integrated, not made of a mixture of separable parts) and private since it can only be known by the experiencer.”

More formally, the theory says that a quantum state is an effective mathematical representation of a conscious experience because it possesses the same crucial characteristics of what it represents: the definiteness and privacy of the experience. “Within QIP, quantum information describes the subjective inner reality of quantum systems, a reality that is private for each system” (Faggin, 2023).

But this mathematical description of an experience (a vector in Hilbert space), Faggin stresses, is not the experience itself. Quantum information is non-cloneable and thus can be only partially objectified with classical information. Moreover, “the nature of that private knowing is not numeric but qualitative and subjective, because a conscious system ‘knows’ its own state by feeling it through qualia.”

Faggin says his hypothesis has creative possibilities, which are the foundation of imagination, intuition, vision, creativity, comprehension, and inventiveness, emerging “from the quantum level of reality, since a classical world is deterministic, that is, algorithmic and predictable, and thus incapable of real creativity.” True creativity, Faggin says, like free will and consciousness, “are non-algorithmic properties that can only exist in a fundamental layer of the universe ruled by quantum physics.” Because quantum consciousness is not reproducible, Faggin predicts that no machine can ever have it or create it (it is not reducible to mechanisms) and, he says, it could continue to exist after the death of the body (Faggin, 2023).

Irreducible Consciousness and Ontology

In his comprehensive book, Irreducible, Faggin presents his QIP theory—consciousness explained as a “Quantum Information-based Panpsychism.” The arc of his argument is clear. His first principle is that consciousness isn’t an emergent byproduct of matter, but rather is an irreducible property of nature. He leverages quantum properties—uncertainty, entanglement, superposition—to show that classical reductionism fails and that reality includes an “inner” experiential dimension. “The real world outclasses any attempt to completely describe it” (Faggin, 2024).

Central to Irreducible is Faggin’s ontology. His hypothesis is that “the holistic Whole contains not only the seeds of the inanimate universe but also those of free will, consciousness, and life.” He calls this Whole, “One, to distinguish it from the unified field of physics, because from One emerge the conscious fields with free will, the elementary seities that I call consciousness units (CUs), rather than the inanimate fields of the elementary particles of physics that interact in accordance with pre-established laws.” In this new conception, Faggin posits, “the CUs communicate with each other, and from their interactions emerge both the laws of physics and new fields (higher-order seities) that are quantum combinations of CUs like atoms are combinations of elementary particles.”

Seities and Spiritual Perspective

Faggin’s core concept is “seities”—fundamental quantum-conscious agents that existed prior to the existence of spacetime and which form reality via interaction between two spaces: C-space, the “private conscious experiences of the seities that collectively make up the subjective inner world of experience,” and I-space, “the symbolic space of live information constituting the objective vibrational space shared by all seities.” C-space and I-space, Faggin says, “are indivisible and represent the two subjective-objective, semantic-symbolic, and inner-outer aspects of the basic reality of the communicating seities. These spaces are extra-physical and do not need to be tridimensional.”

Starting with seities, Faggin says, “constitutes a monumental difference from the standard description of contemporary physics in which the emergence of consciousness and free will has been placed many billions of years after the Big Bang rather than at the beginning of the universe.”

Faggin is not shy to express his personal disposition: “we are spiritual beings temporarily imprisoned in a physical structure similar to a highly sophisticated drone… we are seities who temporarily ‘inhabit’ our bodies. We are eternal, conscious beings rather than perishable bodies. And we are here to learn crucial aspects of ourselves by interacting with each other in the physical universe that we have co-created for this very purpose” (Faggin, 2024).