Few people have done more to build the digital world than Federico Faggin. He led the design of the first commercial microprocessor, the tiny chip at the heart of every computer, phone and smart gadget since. So it surprises many people to hear what he says today: that no computer, however clever, will ever be conscious, because consciousness isn’t something matter produces. In his view, it’s the most basic ingredient of reality.
Why it matters: as AI chatbots sound more and more human, the question “could a machine feel anything?” has left philosophy class and entered everyday life (we looked at how scientists approach it in Can AI be conscious?). Hearing a firm “no” from the engineer who helped start the computer age is worth understanding, along with the reasons many scientists disagree.
The man behind the chip
Faggin was born in Vicenza, Italy, in 1941 and studied physics at the University of Padua. According to the Computer History Museum, his career reads like a history of modern electronics:
- 1968, Fairchild Semiconductor: he created MOS silicon gate technology, which the museum describes as the basis of all modern CMOS chips (the kind inside practically every device you own).
- 1970-1971, Intel: with Masatoshi Shima, he designed the four chips of the MCS-4 family, including the Intel 4004, the world’s first commercial microprocessor: a whole computer “brain” on a fingernail-sized piece of silicon.
- 1974, Zilog: he co-founded the company and conceived the famous Z80 processor, used in countless early home computers and game machines.
- 1986, Synaptics: he co-founded a pioneer of the touchpads and touchscreens we now swipe every day.
Along the way he shared the 1997 Kyoto Prize and the 2009 US National Medal of Technology and Innovation with fellow microprocessor pioneers, the museum notes.
From silicon to the inner life
After decades of building machines that process information, Faggin became fascinated by the one thing they never seem to have: an inner life. When you taste coffee or feel joy, there’s “something it is like” to be you. Philosophers call these felt qualities qualia, and explaining how they could come from neurons firing is known as the hard problem of consciousness.
Faggin put money behind the question too. In 2015 he gave the University of California, Santa Cruz a gift of $500,000, matched to make a $1 million endowed chair, the first in physics at the campus, for research on the physics of information, including links to biophysics and cognitive science.
His theory in plain words
With physicist Giacomo Mauro D’Ariano of the University of Pavia, Faggin set out a theory in a paper titled “Hard Problem and Free Will: an information-theoretical approach”. Its main ideas, simplified:
- Information is experienced. Their starting hypothesis is that information has a basic property: it is felt from the inside by the system that holds it.
- That information must be quantum. Quantum information is private (it can’t be fully copied or read out from outside) and its parts can be bound together by entanglement, which they argue matches how our experiences feel private and unified.
- Consciousness comes first. They propose a ladder: everyday classical physics depends on quantum physics, quantum physics on quantum information, and quantum information on consciousness. This kind of view is called panpsychism, the idea that some form of mind is a basic feature of nature.
- Free will is real. They link the unpredictable outcomes of certain quantum events to genuine free choices, not just randomness.
Faggin developed these ideas for a general audience in his 2024 book Irreducible: Consciousness, Life, Computers, and Human Nature (Essentia). As Philosophy Now summarises it, he argues that consciousness is a fundamental property present from the very beginning of the universe, and that electrical signals in a machine can never turn into felt experience because symbols and qualia belong to different kinds of reality. Hence his “no” to conscious computers: a machine can process symbols brilliantly, but there is nobody inside to feel them.
The sceptics’ view
Faggin’s theory is far from mainstream, and it gets tough reviews:
- Philosophy Now’s reviewer, author Frank S. Robinson, rejects it firmly, arguing that ordinary science explains more with fewer assumptions and that there is no evidence the universe itself is conscious.
- Faggin himself describes a personal experience that shaped his views; critics note that a powerful inner experience, however real to the person, isn’t scientific evidence.
- Most neuroscientists think consciousness emerges from the brain’s activity, even if nobody yet knows exactly how, and the D’Ariano-Faggin paper is a theoretical proposal, not an experimental result.
Faggin is not alone in suspecting that quantum physics and the mind are connected. Nobel laureate Roger Penrose has his own, very different quantum theory of consciousness, built around tiny tubes inside our neurons, which we explore in Penrose’s quantum consciousness: what anaesthesia reveals. Penrose also contributed to the same academic book project as the D’Ariano-Faggin paper.
What to watch next
For now, the D’Ariano-Faggin framework is a theory on paper: no experiment has yet tested it. Meanwhile, the question he raises is becoming more practical every year: as AI grows more convincing, we’ll need clearer ways to tell “acts conscious” from “is conscious”. Whether you find his answer inspiring or unconvincing, it’s striking that the man who helped put a computer on a chip is now one of its most famous voices saying that the mind is something no chip can hold.
Sources
- Federico Faggin – 2009 Fellow – Computer History Museum
- Faggin gift establishes endowed chair in physics of information – UC Santa Cruz News, September 2015
- Hard Problem and Free Will: an information-theoretical approach – G. M. D’Ariano and F. Faggin, arXiv, December 2020 (rev. January 2021)
- Irreducible by Federico Faggin (review) – Frank S. Robinson, Philosophy Now, Issue 170
