I have known Federico Faggin for a long time, long enough to see the arc of a life that refuses to remain confined within a single identity. Inventor of the microprocessor, pioneer of the touchscreen, architect of Silicon Valley’s original grammar, he could have remained forever enclosed in the mythology of technological triumph. Instead, at the apex of measurable success, he chose to cross a threshold that few dare to approach. He turned inward.
Our paths have intersected repeatedly, between California and Italy, through shared friends, shared questions, shared silences. What has always struck me about Federico is not only the rigor of his mind, but the courage with which he allowed that mind to fracture its own certainties. He comes from a world where reductionism was not merely a method but a creed, a world in which interiority did not exist because it could not be measured. And yet, it was precisely within that world that something essential broke.
He has spoken openly about the paradox that followed his greatest achievements. He had everything that the technological universe promised, and yet he was not content. At the time, he did not yet have the language to understand why. Science did not allow interior states to exist. Unhappiness had no equation, no physical unit, no place in the accepted ontology. And so it was dismissed. He later understood that, in believing exclusively in physics and technology, he had lost himself. He had confused doing with being, function with meaning, performance with existence.
Then came the experience that altered everything. An experience that defies metaphor without collapsing into mysticism. He describes it as a state in which observer and observed became one, immersed in a field of white light saturated with love. Not an emotion, not a belief, but a total state of being. Consciousness expanded beyond the boundaries of the body and recognized itself as the world looking at itself. Whatever name one gives to such an event, it had a precise consequence. It reopened a door that science had sealed shut.
From that moment on, Federico began asking forbidden questions. What is consciousness. What is free will. Why does experience exist at all. Questions that physics had delegated to philosophy, art, or religion, not because they were trivial, but because they were inconvenient. For decades, science had operated under the assumption that reality is fundamentally material, and that consciousness somehow emerges from complexity. But quantum physics had already undermined that narrative. It speaks not of objects, but of probabilities. Not of certainties, but of possibilities. At its deepest level, reality is not made of things, but of potential.
Together with Giacomo Mauro D’Ariano, Federico articulated a framework that finally gave scientific dignity to what had long been exiled. Their work proposes that the most fundamental layer of reality is informational, not material. Physics emerges from information, not the other way around. And information, in its quantum form, has an intrinsic interior dimension. Consciousness is not an accident of matter. It is what information is like from within.
This is where their solution to the hard problem of consciousness becomes decisive. Experience cannot be explained by function, because experience is not a function. It is a state. In their framework, conscious experience corresponds to a pure quantum state, ontic and private. What we observe from the outside, what we measure, what we predict, are epistemic shadows. Knowledge is always partial. Experience is always whole.
Qualia, those irreducible textures of experience that science once abandoned to poets and painters, re-enter the scientific picture as pure quantum states. Their structure, their richness, their unity arise through superposition and entanglement. Thought itself becomes a multidimensional quantum object. And free will, so often dismissed as illusion or randomness, acquires a precise meaning. A choice is free when its unpredictability cannot be reduced to ignorance. Quantum outcomes satisfy this condition. Free will is not noise. It is the classical trace of an ontic quantum transition, experienced from within and observed from without.
Memory, too, finds its place. Consciousness does not store experiences. It lives them. Long-term memory is classical, approximate, reconstructive. This explains a paradox we all know intimately. Experience feels vast, luminous, dense. Memory feels thin. Nothing is missing. They belong to different domains.
When I encountered these ideas, they resonated deeply with something I had been building intuitively for years. Emotitech was never meant to be another technology company. It was born from the conviction that emotions are not data points to be extracted, optimized, or manipulated. They are gateways. To enter the domain of emotion is to enter unmapped territory, territory that is not merely psychological, but existential. Emotional data, when treated with reductionist tools, becomes violence. When treated with respect, it becomes dialogue.
Knowing Federico, watching his journey unfold across continents and decades, gave that intuition a foundation. He showed that bridging technology and the human universe does not mean humanizing machines. It means rehumanizing our understanding of reality. It means acknowledging that interiority is not a bug in the system, but the system itself. That consciousness is not an output, but an origin.
Today, as artificial intelligence accelerates with ferocious confidence, his voice has become unexpectedly viral. Not because it flatters the present, but because it challenges it. People sense that something essential is being erased under the promise of efficiency. They intuit that intelligence without consciousness is not evolution, but amputation. Machines can simulate meaning, but they do not live it. They have no interiority, no will, no self. They are mirrors of whoever holds the keys.
Federico often quotes Dante, not as rhetoric, but as physics. “The love that moves the sun and the other stars.” In his vision, love is not sentiment. It is the fundamental drive of being to know itself. The universe evolves not by accident, but by self-recognition. Consciousness, free will, identity are not anomalies. They are expressions of that drive.
I have crossed paths with many brilliant minds in my life. Few have had the courage to abandon the safety of their own success to pursue truth where maps end. Federico Faggin did. And in doing so, he helped illuminate a direction that Emotitech continues to explore. A direction where technology does not replace humanity, but opens space for it. Where entering the domain of emotions is not a commercial strategy, but a spiritual responsibility. Where science and love are no longer opposites, but two languages describing the same, indivisible reality.
Once you see this, it is difficult to unsee it. And perhaps that is the most life-changing aspect of all.
Faggin was ahead when he invented the CPU, before computers mattered. And my perception is that he is ahead again today, while the world builds ‘intelligent’ machines and neglects consciousness. His (and ours) horizon is not artificial intelligence, but a networked awakening of human interiority.
