I am a great fan of David Deutsch. His expositions on Popper and Turing and the interconnection to quantum computing are eye opening.

Especially his insistence that science is about finding the best explanation has to be put under the pillow of every scientist. It is not about predicting, it is not about describing, it is not about the “what”. Rather science is about the “how”.

We make models and describe those with math. Yes. Important is that the models are used to (not merely describe but) explain the phenomena.

To say that “we search for the best description” is ludicrous. What does “best description” even mean? The model that fits the data best? Well, friends, you certainly can choose to like that and leave it at that. Maybe you do not want to search at all, but then I propose to just take any description that works for your purpose. Thomson plum pudding on flat earth. Why bother?

I bother because I want explanations. Which implies that I postulate that consciousness exists and that I am a conscious being. For deciding between two proposed descriptive models, a well programmed machine is sufficient. But to assess and discuss two proposed explanations takes consciousness.

As an example I might mention the two opposing explanations of the black body radiation by Planck and Einstein. The formula describing the radiation was never in doubt. The dispute was whether only the solid body is made of granular atoms or also light is made of photon particles. Two explanations leading to the same math formula. That got things going.

If you now insist that Planck and Einstein merely provided descriptions, well then please accept that what you denote with the word “description” I denote as “explanation”. Because I cannot accept that people were merely discussing “descriptions” for twenty years. What those geniuses discussed, that I prefer to call “explanations”.

There are of course explanations which from todays point of view are ridiculous. Take Maxwells explanation of the electromagnetic field as mechanical ball bearings. Nonetheless he desperately tried to (not merely describe but) explain how it all comes about. Einstein (him again) superseded this by postulating the invariance of the speed of light and explaining it all by the workings of a “light clock” (to me, a light clock with bouncing light-particles looks like a ball bearing, but it’s still the best we have).

Noticeable is that the widely accepted ban of supraluminal signals only follows from said speed-invariance if a free will is assumed. Without this - in physics always preassumed - free will, there are no contradictions arising from the possibility to send signals into the past.

There is one sentence in David Deutsch’s book “The Fabric of Reality”, p331: “The possibility of artificial intelligence is bitterly contested by eminent philosophers (including, alas, Popper) scientists and mathematicians and by at least one prominent computer scientist”.

I am pretty sure that Deutsch means Frederico Faggin, the inventor of the MOS-SGT a.k.a silicon microchip. I firmly declare that despite my admiration for Deutsch, I am on the side of Popper and Faggin.

Faggin does not believe in free will on silicon, consciousness and free will being the same (I agree). He believes that the expression of free will on a macroscopical level takes living cells that carry a DNA and have a metabolism.

As he cannot deduce the impossibility of free will on silicon, he proposes the new postulate that already on the microscopical level free will is present in the quantum field of the electron (ditto for the photon). He then goes on to assume that every atom, being it Helium or Iron, is a field quantum of the according self-conscious field. There is a pan-universe Helium field, a pan-universe Iron field and so on. Also there are fields for molecules, e.g. the field of all C60 fullerenes.

Also there is one self-conscious field for silicon crystals. A microchip is not self-conscious, because a microchip is silicon doped with boron and thus composed of two fields whose respective free will is uncoordinated and thus in sum leads to classical deterministic behaviour. In fact, the engineer dopes the silicon exactly because he wants to have classical circuits, switches which are either on or off even before you interact with them.

One might think of the postulates of Faggin whatever one wants (free will again). I am willing to accept them because I also think that atoms are field quanta and I have no other thought through model that leads to that conclusion.

I do not buy into that generally accepted view that the whole of reality consists of a minimal number of parts, i.e. I do not buy into that belief called Reductionism. I’d like to mention my feeling that Reductionism is seen by many scientist not as a belief but a necessary postulate to do science. And yet, no-one ever constructed a model (hence an explanation!) of C60 bucky balls out of Quarks and Electrons. The double slit interference pattern of C60 molecules is to this day only explained by a wave of C60 molecules, not using the several waves of the particles of our standard model of particle physics.

Most scientists understandably oppose to anything that smacks of holism because indeed since Descartes proposed the separation of matter and spirit, the western world has seen unprecedented progress.

But there was also Leibnitz who might not have invented infinitesimal calculus without him trying to explain the world with the help of his Monads. And Faggin’s fields closely resemble Leibnitz Monads. Just because Descates brought us far does not mean he is the end of all wisdom. I am glad a figure of the stature of Faggin reminds us of that.