Silicon is the story of a remarkable man, a genius, someone whose work has directly affected the lives of almost every human alive today. You have probably not heard of Federico Faggin, but he is the man who developed the silicon chip, the microprocessor at the heart of all electronic devices today such as your computer. He has done more. If you are using a touchpad to scroll through this review, then you owe another debt to him. This is his story told by himself, his autobiography.

Why should you read this book? One reason is that we tend to unthinkingly accept the gifts that technology delivers. But behind every invention there is a human story, and anyone who naively imagines that technology evolves following the cold, relentless logic of science will discover in these pages that this is not how it happens. Rather, every new discovery is the outcome of battles between competing human forces – some good, some bad – and this book provides a first-hand account of this reality. Faggin had to fight hard and with great resolve to create the microprocessor. Then having finally succeeded, the very people who had failed to support him tried to take the credit and airbrush him from history. Knowing the story we can better appreciate what we have been given, and so have the chance to offer proper gratitude for it.

But another and greater reason to read Silicon is to learn what Faggin still has to teach us. For this is a most unusual work. I have struggled to find the right way to describe it and the best I can manage is that this is a trojan horse of a book. But what emerges from this trojan horse are not armed soldiers out to get you: angels coming to your assistance would be a better description. The many people who have heard of the Intel 4004 and Z80 – computer scientists and electronic engineers – and will read Silicon for its insights into the technology, will not suspect when they open the book that it will be leading them into fundamental questions about consciousness and the meaning of life; and, in the final chapter, into a new theory of physics which posits that consciousness, not matter, is the ground of being.

If you have never heard of the Intel 4004 (the name of the first microprocessor silicon chip) or the Z80 (a more advanced chip that Faggin developed and which is still in widespread use), then it is important that you are not put off by the technical details that Faggin necessarily provides in his account of their invention. You do not need to comprehend everything to appreciate that it was genius that recognised the potential of silicon, and heroism that was needed to realise that potential. You will also be given the opportunity to appreciate beauty where you may never have imagined it could be found. As an artist Faggin signed his design of the 4004.

Four Lives

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Born in 1941, Faggin describes himself as having lived four lives. The first was when he was growing up in Northern Italy, studying engineering and starting work in electronics. The second was when he was employed as a product developer, moved to California’s Silicon Valley and came up with the design of the Intel 4004 processor. The third was when he was working as an entrepreneur of new technologies, founding Zilog [/], the first company dedicated to the development of microprocessors, with his colleague Ralph Ungermann. His fourth – and current – life is after his retirement, when he has devoted himself to his new theory of consciousness.

The story of how he reached this fourth stage is fascinating. The novel technologies that he developed brought him great rewards, as you would expect and probably hope. As a man in his forties, he found himself in a situation where he had sufficient wealth to never need to work again. More than this, he had a loving wife, children he was proud of, the esteem of his peers, many good friends and a beautiful home near San Francisco. What he did not have was happiness. Why could he not be happy, he asked himself: why? – when, by all the criteria that contemporary society sets as benchmarks, he should have been one of the happiest of men. In part he recognised that he had for too long been putting work before family: long periods of 80-hour weeks had meant he had not given his wife and children all the love they deserved from him. But this alone did not seem to fully explain the depth of his existential despair. Seeking answers set him off on a spiritual journey.

Alongside this, the work he was engaged in opened up questions he began to feel needed answering. In the 1980s the rapid development of computer technology was not delivering everything that had been expected of it a couple of decades earlier. There had been high hopes for Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the ’60s, but progress was disappointing despite the huge increase in computer power. There was some success in programming computers to recognise patterns, to which Faggin himself was contributing. When shown an apple, a computer could identify it correctly. But could a computer attach any meaning to the identified image? A person might respond with emotion – ‘I like apples’ – and feel a desire for one. Could computers be expected to feel? A professor of neuroscience pointed out that he was asking questions about consciousness: ‘It’s something that happens in the brain and one day we’ll understand it’ he was told (p.153).

With these words consciousness became, and remains, a primary interest and concern for Faggin. He realised that he was encountering what has been called ‘the hard problem of consciousness’: how can matter possibly give rise to self-awareness? Consciousness, he came to recognise with increasing clarity and conviction, is the fundamental difference between human and artificial intelligence. (Faggin’s extended thoughts into this are found in Appendix 4, which is also available on line [/].

The latter years of his forties saw Faggin wrestling with unhappiness and beginning to seek answers to fundamental questions about what it is to be human. And then when he had just turned 50, he was granted an epiphany, an astonishing spiritual experience as brief as it was intense. Returning to bed after getting up in the night for a glass of water, he was overwhelmed by ‘a powerful rush of energy’ which emerged from his chest as ‘a broad beam of shimmering white light, alive and beatific’ which exploded ‘to embrace the whole universe’. He tells us that he:

… knew, without a shadow of a doubt that this was the substance from which all that exists is made. This is what created the universe out of itself. Then, with immense surprise, I knew that I was that light. … The essence of reality was revealed to be a substance that knows itself in its self-reflection, and its self-knowing feels like an irrepressible and dynamic love.’ (p.160, original italics).

Although Faggin describes himself as having had four lives, in actuality he has had just two which were separated by less than a minute: one before this intense encounter, and the other his life since. Before he was a materialist; ever since he has been an idealist (to use the terms used by Bernardo Kastrup). He grew up, as most westerners do, believing the world, including the human, to be made up of and explained by material matter and energy. Following his experience he understood himself to be:

… that unique point of view with which One – All that is, the totality of what exists – observes and knows itself. I am a point of view of One, a portion of One indivisible from it. (p.161)

The Physics of Consciousness

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Faggin understands that what he describes will be treated sceptically by many, and he has sympathy with them because he too would once have been such a sceptic. He quotes Nietzsche: ‘And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music’ (p.161, just one of many apposite and inspiring quotes with which he introduces new sections throughout the book, and which can also be accessed online [/]). So how to help the sceptics, the materialists, to see the error of their belief?

First, they need to be prepared to listen. With this book Faggin will introduce many hardened materialists to ideas they would not otherwise encounter. He is a respected figure in the world of electronics and computer science, and his credentials cannot be doubted. So if someone of Faggin’s rank can raise questions about the nature of reality perhaps, at the very least, he deserves being listened to.

Secondly, having got people’s attention, it needs to be explained (convincingly) how material reality is not all there is. There is an essential problem here because, as Pascal – whom Faggin quotes – has said, ‘The last step of reason is to recognise that there are so many things that surpass it’ (p.162). But Faggin, as he has demonstrated again and again in his life, is not a man to shirk a challenge. Having come to the conclusion that consciousness is the sole ground of being, he has dedicated his energy and intellect to

… developing a model of reality based on the assumption that consciousness is irreducible… a vision of reality in which the engine of evolution is the desire of a conscious universe to know itself. (p.192)

The final chapter of the book outlines his model and in addition, just as he offered appendices with more technical details for those interested in microelectronics, he provides more detail of his theory of consciousness in the freely available Appendix 5 [/].

I am not going to present a detailed explanation of his theory here; we will be interviewing Faggin for the Beshara Magazine next month and will explore it in greater depth then. For the moment, I will limit myself to a few observations. Firstly, the fundamental difference between Faggin’s model of reality and the standard materialist one is that it recognises two distinct forms of reality rather than one. For Faggin there is both an inner reality, an interiority, as well as an exterior reality. The inner reality includes consciousness, but for science there is only the outer reality, and so consciousness appears to it simply as an aspect of the material world.

A second significant feature of his model is the role he awards to free will. Free will is a tricky subject for a materialist. The simplest way for the them to deal with it is to deny its existence. After all, if consciousness is a product of material forces, then it is these forces which produce our thoughts and actions rather than ‘us’ – although this is not to say that materialism holds that in principle everything can be predicted; there are many so-called chaotic systems whose behaviour cannot be determined even though they obey physical laws (e.g. weather systems). This denial of free will is at variance with our own subjective experience, as well as bringing in its wake awkward questions concerning moral responsibility. However, in Faggin’s model free will is real and vital.

An even more fundamental problem for materialists is the disappearance of the material from their universe. Scientific probing of atoms over the past century has led to the understanding that matter as conventionally understood (and commonly experienced) is not the basis of physical reality. For physics, ontology, as Faggin states, has moved from particles to quantum fields – fields of energy analogous (and related) to the fields of magnetic forces, or the fields which allow our smart phones to communicate wirelessly. These quantum fields are troubling for a materialist. How are they to be understood? They give rise to waves which when observed – and only when observed – manifest as particles, though where the particle will manifest cannot be predicted.

By contrast, Faggin’s model explains the strangeness of the quantum world. More than that, it accords with our own experiences. We know ourselves to be conscious; we believe we make free choices and can express ourselves creatively; we see and experience a world which seems solid. And one more very important thing – unlike computers, we recognise meaning: we understand when a friend says that they like roses, that actually they mean, I’d really like you to buy some for me.

A Co-operative Future

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Faggin acknowledges that his ‘ideas are clearly speculative’ (p.275) but they are also not unfounded. They accord with his own extraordinary epiphany, and may well ‘solve’ the hard problem of consciousness. His model offers explanations for the peculiar features of quantum theory, our belief in free will and the wonder of our abilities of imagination and creativity. The intelligence Merlin Sheldrake has discovered in the behaviour of fungi and lichen (see the Beshara Magazine interview) ceases to be a mystery within Faggin’s system. The work of Merlin’s father, Rupert Sheldrake, on morphic resonance is consistent with it also (see the Beshara Magazine interview).

Faggin acknowledges that he has drawn on the ideas of perennial philosophy. Students of Vedanta or the Islamic tradition of Ibn ‘Arabi will recognise many correspondences, such as his belief that ‘the driver of evolution is the urge of One to know itself’ (p.231, original italics).

But, also clearly, the theory warrants further elaboration and, in so far as it can be, further evidence if it is to persuade sufficient scientists and philosophers to adopt it. He has recently presented a much fuller and more technical account [/] which uses a novel form of mathematics which he and his co-author Giacomo Mauro D’Ariano claim ‘represents a new Galilean revolution for the scientific method’ (op.cit, p.21). It would be a delightful irony if Faggin, as a graduate of the university where Galileo taught (Padua), were to succeed in undoing Galileo’s ‘error’ (see my Beshara Magazine article) that led to science ignoring consciousness.

Faggin recognises that ‘the “system” will forcefully defend the status quo’ (p.231), so this will not be easy to change the current scientific paradigm. To this end, together with his wife Elvia (the great woman behind a great man), he has established the Faggin Foundation [/] to support academic understanding of consciousness through theoretical and experimental research.

This is a relatively short book but, mirroring his life, Faggin covers a lot of territory. It begins in the land of his birth, an Italy which he describes as pre-industrial: oxen still dragged the peasant farmer’s plough. It concludes with a vision of a post-materialist future – a future in which the Baconian imperative to master nature has been abandoned. Instead, cooperation will be its hallmark. It is a future where we are not slaves to technology but where technology serves to enhance our potential. In between, he offers us the chance to better appreciate the technological world we live in, and offers us keys to better understanding ourselves.

Silicon is a truly inspiring book, one written by and telling of a great man – a man with an extraordinary mind and a big heart; a man who wishes us all well – and who we, in turn, should thank, and whose hopes we should share.

Silicon: From the Invention of the Microprocessor to the New Science of Consciousness by Federico Faggin, was published by Waterside Productions in 2021.