In the following some quotes from Federico Faggin’s “irreducible”:

Any new meaning must first occur within our consciousness and then it can be communicated by creating new symbols, just as it happens for a book whose content can only be written after the author has comprehended what he will symbolically express.

The best example is Shakespeare who basically had to invent the English language for expressing himself.

The notion of authorship and the belief in the act of creation contradicts the possibility for sending signals into the past. If I were able to send my copy of Hamlet into the past, no one would have written Hamlet. Who would have comprehended its meaning? Certainly not me. Comprehension gives time its arrow.

With the additional assumption that the the speed of light is invariant, the ban to send signals into the past is equivalent to banning signals faster than the speed of light. This guarantees locality. And this generates my understanding of space.

Shakespeare created a

symbol that never existed before, in which case an external observer could not have assigned a probability prior to measuring it.

Shakespeare created words that no reader could ever have expected. No reader could ever “assign a probability” prior to reading the word “fashionable”. The word “fashionable” could not have been probed before because it hadn’t existed before. This word was not probe - able.

There are Bayesianists who say that one can “just reserve some amount of probability for the totally unexpected”. With Popper, I insist that one cannot assign a probability to the appearance of a new theory that replaces, say, Thermodynamics. Probabilities can be assigned only after the set of all possible events is stated. Before being able to assign probabilities, all possible events have to have in common some property, some meaning, which can be expressed as a number. The hight of a person is an example of such a number which captures one and the same property pertaining to any human being.

unitarity is equivalent to eliminating creativity and free will from the universe, since a creative state, prior to its creation for the first time, cannot even be known by its creator.

I like the idea of

a more general quantum theory … that … allows the existence of irreversible non-unitary transformations.

Concerning standard Quantum Mechanics:

The probabilistic physical laws describing the behaviour of the states of the quantum fields [are] statistical laws similar to those of the letters of the alphabet of our languages.

So, most of the time quantum states behave in a tame “unitary” way. Just like in most books the letter e appears 150 times more often than the letter z. But there should be, and that is Faggin’s prediction, “non-unitary” exceptions. I am not sure whether this is the same as Zeilinger’s opinion: “Objective chance is a possibility which God sometimes maybe uses to act incognito” “God acts in a way which is not scientifically detectable” “It is a matter of faith, this is my personal opinion”.

I’d like to add a quote from Gödel, Escher, Bach, p61

Can all of reality be turned into a formal system? In a very broad sense, the answer might appear to be yes. One could suggest, for instance, that reality is itself nothing but one very complicated formal system. Its symbols do not move around on paper, but rather in a three-dimensional vacuum (space); they are the elementary particles of which everything is composed.

About formal systems, Hofstadter says:

This is so grandiose a conception, however, that it has only the most theoretical interest; and besides, quantum mechanics (and other parts of physics) casts at least some doubt on even the theoretical worth of this idea. Basically, we are asking if the universe operates deterministically, which is an open question.

In a formal system, the meaning must remain passive; we can read each string according to the meanings of its constituent symbols, but we do not have the right to create new theorems purely on the basis of the meanings we’ve assigned the symbols.

Faggin asserts that the answer to determinism is clearly: NO! But the whole point in Hofstadter’s book is to show that in pure logic, a given formal system transcends itself and that indeed we need to agree on new theorems to make progress. Illustrative is a quote from Wikipedia: “Von Neumann–Bernays–Gödel set theory (NBG) is a commonly used conservative extension of Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory that does allow explicit treatment of proper classes.” I do not know (either?) what that statement means, but it shows that extensions need to be agreed upon. That is the whole point.

But it is uncommon, to say the least, for someone to be in the position of “decoding” a formal system turned up in the excavations of a ruined civilization! The idea of these people [Mathematicians] is to set up a formal system whose Theorems reflect some portion of reality isomorphically.

Faggin would say that Hofstadter’s coception is not too grandiose to be taken at face value. Physicists are exactly in the position of “decoding” a formal system, namely that of nature, by setting up isometric symbolic equations on paper. And this leads to new symbols even in nature, namely technical innovations like the MOS microchip he invented. This chip’s full meaning we are only about to discover.

symbols of a formal system, though initially without meaning, cannot avoid taking on “meaning” of sorts at least if an isomorphism is found. The difference between meaning in formal systems and in a language is a very important one, however. It is this:
in a language, when we have learned a meaning for a word, we then make new statements based on the meaning of the word. In a sense the meaning becomes active, since it brings into being a new rule for creating sentences. This means that our command of language is not like a finished product: the rules for making sentences increase when we learn new meanings. On the other hand, in a formal system, the theorems are predefined.

Faggin insists that during the creation of the universe, starting from the big bang and still ongoing, the meaning of the physical particles has been an active one ever since. He insists that the universe is not a finished product.

To keep things in proportion, I’d like to quote Thomas Metzinger who, in the “Furche Podcast” on 3.6.24, does not want to take panpsychism too far:

Conscious experience, in contrast to knowledge, is a decidedly local physical phenomenon. When the brain dies, one cannot see colours, because the seeing of colours is something that occurs in the brain. One cannot hear sounds, one cannot think a thought without a functioning brain. One cannot be awake for example. And being awake has a lot to do with pure consciousness. So, in contrast to many traditions of mankind, … I believe that consciousness will be revealed as a physical phenomenon that is extremely rare in this physical universe, that appears only locally in a few places.

Still, Metzinger closes in on Faggin when he immediately says:

But it [pure consciousness] is so interesting, when we take it seriously, that it will revolutionise our whole understanding of physics and the nature of the universe.