June 1, 2025 • 13 mins
My name is Trevor, I'm a clinical neuroscience researcher trying to answer the big questions like "Who are we?" and "Why are we here?"
The podcast will explore these concepts and more from my new book- God's Eye View.
Today's episode highlights some clips from Federico Faggin, inventor of the microprocessor, early AI researcher, physicist, and most recently, quantum field pioneer.We are starting with audio only, but will add video soon.
Buy Trevor's Book: https://a.co/d/1icPBG0
Buy the Audiobook: https://www.audible.com/pd/Gods-Eye-View-Audiobook/B0F55K2GT1?source_code=ASSGB149080119000H&share_location=pdp
Want to publish a book? Check out my publisher’s website @ https://hemisphericpress.com/
Check out our substack: hemisphericpress.substack.com
Original Essentia Foundation Interview with Federico
The podcast will explore these concepts and more from my new book- God's Eye View.
Today's episode highlights some clips from Federico Faggin, inventor of the microprocessor, early AI researcher, physicist, and most recently, quantum field pioneer.We are starting with audio only, but will add video soon.
Buy Trevor's Book: https://a.co/d/1icPBG0
Buy the Audiobook: https://www.audible.com/pd/Gods-Eye-View-Audiobook/B0F55K2GT1?source_code=ASSGB149080119000H&share_location=pdp
Want to publish a book? Check out my publisher’s website @ https://hemisphericpress.com/
Check out our substack: hemisphericpress.substack.com
Original Essentia Foundation Interview with Federico
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:11):
Welcome to the God's Eye View Podcast. This will be
the first of probably about ten episodes exploring my new book,
God's Eye View. My name is Trevor and I am
a clinical neuroscience researcher. By day, I do really you know,
I guess what you would call mainstream neuroscientific research. I
specialize in the processing of neuroimaging data and doing spatial statistics,
(00:36):
so statistics mapped out over the three dimensional volume of
the brain, and so I compare brain volumes, white matter,
injury diffusion tractography, functional neuroimaging volumetrics, on and on and
on to try to elucidate the mechanisms of some really
(00:58):
horrible and really common neurodig diseases. That's what I do
by day. By night, I like to explore some more
of the fringe stuff, nothing too crazy. Nowadays it's fringe
to really believe anything, so it's pretty easy to be
fringe in my case. Fringe means have become very open
(01:20):
minded to the supernatural and the Christian explanation of our
origin and of our existence. And now I'm still a scientist,
so obviously I have questions, I have doubts, but overall
I'm I'm pretty convinced, and so I've written a book
called God's I View that takes us through two hundred
(01:41):
years of research mainstream, pretty mainstream scientific research that I
think supports rather than refutes the existence of God. And
so over these next ten or so episodes, I'm going
to be covering some of those books topics, starting today
with a really cool individual named Federico Figien. Federico is
(02:02):
a physicist, and he recently did an interview with the
Essentia Foundation, which if you guys are into consciousness, you've
probably come across these guys. They are a consciousness philosophy channel,
and they interviewed Frederico, who is both the physicists but
also the inventor of the world's first personal CPU that's
(02:24):
an Intel chip that was invented in the I think
the late sixties in Silicon Valley. He also invented the
touch pad, and he also was one of the early
pioneers of neural networks. So if there's anyone who should
have like a really mainstream, rational reductionist view of consciousness,
(02:45):
it's this guy, because he is one of the big
early mainstream pioneers, except he doesn't have a rationalist reductionist view.
So I'm gonna go ahead and play a couple of
clips and then I'll be back to chat.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
Hey, tell us about a pivotal moment in your life,
namely the experience you had at Lake Tahoe to pronounce
it correctly during your Christmas holidays of nineteen ninety.
Speaker 3 (03:10):
Yeah, I wasn't happy, you know, and I reached everything
that the world says that if you do all this stuff,
you should be happy, and I wasn't. I realized that
I was faking being happy because I needed to because
I was running a company. I had to be enthusiastic
and everything else. But I was dying inside. So what's
(03:32):
going on? Was wrong with this picture? And so consciousness
then was you know, the you know, became center stage
in my life. Understanding that these consciousness somehow was also
connected with feeling you know, desperate inside. So what's going on?
(03:53):
So I wanted to understand what consciousness is. So that's when,
you know, and I wanted to understand, and that for
my own sake for not to do something about it,
not to monetize, not to make a new technology, because
before I was all about you know, doing something, you know,
and now all of a sudden, I turned my attention
(04:13):
inside because of the suffering. And it was in this
climate that I had this extraordinary experience of consciousness. Now
I can go to this Tahoe night. You know, in
nineteen ninety during the the Christmas holidays, we had a
home up in Tahoe, which is a lake. Tahoe is
a beautiful lake, twenty five hundred meters and there are
(04:37):
mountains and skin is great, and so you know, one
night I woke up midnight, you know, I was thirsty
when to get a glass of water and went back
to bed and but just you know, just waiting for
you know, go back to sleep and thinking nothing, and
(04:58):
all of a sudden, out of the chest just you know,
just energy was coming out of my chest. But it
was love, and it was love there was never felt before.
It was it was love that was coming from me.
How can love come from me? I mean, you know,
it was unthinkable that love could come from me, you know.
(05:22):
And it was ten thousand times more powerful than any
love that I felt before. I mean, in fact, never
felt that love because it was unconditional love. Now I
have a name for it. It was love, period. It
was yes, it was coming from me, but it was love,
and it was light. It was a white light, scintillating.
(05:42):
It was, you know, like it like sparkles, you know,
and it was coming out and then it's it explodes,
and it's everywhere. But it's everywhere, but my consciousness is
there too, So not only my consciousness is within me,
but it's also outside of me. And all of a
(06:04):
sudden I realized I am that. So I am the
observer and the observer simultaneously. But I retain my point
of view, I retain my identity. I was still the
same kid of five years old or three years old,
kid that I that I was then and so that
(06:25):
I am now. So that identity so the only thing
on me that remained was that point of view.
Speaker 1 (06:32):
Well how about that? You know, it's kind of weird.
He's taking a risk here because this is a pretty
mainstream guy, although he's you know, financially independent, so he
can take career risks, I suppose. But he's a pretty
mainstream guy sharing a very personal experience that's out there.
It's fringe, right, this this light that bursts out of
(06:53):
his chest and was unconditional love, and it's cool. It is.
It's always shocking to me, though, how reluctant these guys
are to use supernatural vocabulary, you know, because if that
happened to me, I might call that, you know, spirit,
or I might use the word God, or I don't know.
(07:15):
I just I'm not sure I would describe it in
these terms. And so that's I would say. Really the
basis of the book God's I view is that physicists
weren't always like this. Physicists used to be pretty metaphysical.
Many of them were Christians. I mean, some of the
early pioneers of quantum mechanics, like Max Planck and Verner
(07:37):
Heisenberg were Lutherans, and they believed they were studying God,
no questions asked. They thought that their work was unraveling
the mysteries of creation. And I think Federico think said too,
It's just we've kind of adapted new words, we use
new terminology, probably because we're afraid of being ridiculed. I
(08:00):
get that, you know, working in mainstream science, it's I
hate to say it, but it's kind of embarrassing to
be a believer because you're the only one, or at
least it feels like you're the only one anyway, So
I liked this this guy Federico. He features prominently, I
think in chapter fifteen where we really get into the
nuts and bolts of what consciousness is, what it isn't
(08:23):
y Ai can't be conscious, and that really consciousness is
something unique that our society has done a really bad
job of describing. We kind of mix it in with
intellect and morality and all these different things, and it's
none of those. It's something special. I think it's what's
(08:43):
you know, described biblically as the spirit. Anyway, I'm gonna
go ahead and play another quick clip and then we'll
wrap up.
Speaker 4 (08:52):
Imagine.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
Sorry for the background music.
Speaker 3 (08:56):
By the way, the drome looks at that reality where
it is, sends me information and I get the conscious
experience of what the drone is saying. That conscious experience
is not in my body, is in my consciousness.
Speaker 5 (09:15):
A scientific theory that basically states that our body is
operated like a drawn from a conscious quantum field, which
would mean that experience qualitia is not in your head.
Speaker 4 (09:25):
The qualitia do not exist in the body. The exist
in the field.
Speaker 5 (09:29):
Okay, people will find this crazy idea.
Speaker 4 (09:33):
It is crazy, but it is much closer to the truth.
Speaker 5 (09:38):
Fiedrigo Fushin invented the first CPU, the touch pad, and
worked on the first neural nets, which gave him the
hope of creating conscious AI.
Speaker 3 (09:47):
Took me thirty years to figure out that mathematics is
created by consciousness, and therefore I cannot explain consciousness with mathematics.
People many physicists think that there is emerging emerging properties
in the purely classical world. It cannot be Emergentism requires quantumness.
Speaker 1 (10:10):
All right, So man, doesn't that just sound spiritual? I mean,
I know they the two people in that interview would
never say that, but come on, what's a conscious quantum
feel that animates our flesh? What is that? It's clearly
spirit right, I mean how else would you describe that
to people two thousand years ago or three thousand years
(10:31):
ago and these texts were written. It's fascinating, which is
why I think you can be both into science and
religion at the same time. Although I know that's not
a popular take. You know what's fascinating about Federico is
you know, he invented the CPU, and while he was
doing that work in California at Intel, across the country
(10:53):
in Massachusetts. At MIT, this individual named Doc I forget
his first name, but his last name was Weisenbaum invented
the first AI chatbot in the sixties and he was horrified.
He was horrified by how easy it was to convince
people that this simple software script, which was absurdly simple,
(11:18):
really was able to convince people that it was conscious.
And I think that just goes to show you, you know,
these the pioneers of a lot of these amazing technologies
and theories. You don't come up with this stuff unless
you're truly inspired by something. You know, you need to
(11:39):
be incredibly creative, You need to be tapped in, you know,
you need to be jacked into whatever that force is,
that creative force, and then it just gets hijacked. And
that's definitely you see that with the AI story, with
the Weisenbaum story. He invented AI and then it just
completely got hijacked by MIT and by this guy named
McCarthy and by military interests, and they basically ran him
(12:02):
out of the school when he tried to explain, like, no, no, no, no,
this isn't impressive. You know, this should tell us more
about our own human psychology than anything else, because machines
can't be conscious. So this is what the foundational thinkers
thought on this topic, but you would never know it nowadays. Nowadays,
everyone is so excited for AI consciousness for some reason.
(12:27):
They're either excited or afraid. But in both cases I
think they're wrong, because I don't think consciousness is something
we'll ever see in anything created by man. I think
you got to be the architect to do that. Anyway,
I hope you guys enjoyed this. Please buy the book
God's Eye View or recover this and many other topics
(12:51):
about consciousness, reality, the early really spooky experiments, and quantum
physics and much more. The book is available on Amazon.
I'll put links to the book and the audiobook and
the show description. Thanks everybody,
Welcome to the God's Eye View Podcast. This will be
the first of probably about ten episodes exploring my new book,
God's Eye View. My name is Trevor and I am
a clinical neuroscience researcher. By day, I do really you know,
I guess what you would call mainstream neuroscientific research. I
specialize in the processing of neuroimaging data and doing spatial statistics,
(00:36):
so statistics mapped out over the three dimensional volume of
the brain, and so I compare brain volumes, white matter,
injury diffusion tractography, functional neuroimaging volumetrics, on and on and
on to try to elucidate the mechanisms of some really
(00:58):
horrible and really common neurodig diseases. That's what I do
by day. By night, I like to explore some more
of the fringe stuff, nothing too crazy. Nowadays it's fringe
to really believe anything, so it's pretty easy to be
fringe in my case. Fringe means have become very open
(01:20):
minded to the supernatural and the Christian explanation of our
origin and of our existence. And now I'm still a scientist,
so obviously I have questions, I have doubts, but overall
I'm I'm pretty convinced, and so I've written a book
called God's I View that takes us through two hundred
(01:41):
years of research mainstream, pretty mainstream scientific research that I
think supports rather than refutes the existence of God. And
so over these next ten or so episodes, I'm going
to be covering some of those books topics, starting today
with a really cool individual named Federico Figien. Federico is
(02:02):
a physicist, and he recently did an interview with the
Essentia Foundation, which if you guys are into consciousness, you've
probably come across these guys. They are a consciousness philosophy channel,
and they interviewed Frederico, who is both the physicists but
also the inventor of the world's first personal CPU that's
(02:24):
an Intel chip that was invented in the I think
the late sixties in Silicon Valley. He also invented the
touch pad, and he also was one of the early
pioneers of neural networks. So if there's anyone who should
have like a really mainstream, rational reductionist view of consciousness,
(02:45):
it's this guy, because he is one of the big
early mainstream pioneers, except he doesn't have a rationalist reductionist view.
So I'm gonna go ahead and play a couple of
clips and then I'll be back to chat.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
Hey, tell us about a pivotal moment in your life,
namely the experience you had at Lake Tahoe to pronounce
it correctly during your Christmas holidays of nineteen ninety.
Speaker 3 (03:10):
Yeah, I wasn't happy, you know, and I reached everything
that the world says that if you do all this stuff,
you should be happy, and I wasn't. I realized that
I was faking being happy because I needed to because
I was running a company. I had to be enthusiastic
and everything else. But I was dying inside. So what's
(03:32):
going on? Was wrong with this picture? And so consciousness
then was you know, the you know, became center stage
in my life. Understanding that these consciousness somehow was also
connected with feeling you know, desperate inside. So what's going on?
(03:53):
So I wanted to understand what consciousness is. So that's when,
you know, and I wanted to understand, and that for
my own sake for not to do something about it,
not to monetize, not to make a new technology, because
before I was all about you know, doing something, you know,
and now all of a sudden, I turned my attention
(04:13):
inside because of the suffering. And it was in this
climate that I had this extraordinary experience of consciousness. Now
I can go to this Tahoe night. You know, in
nineteen ninety during the the Christmas holidays, we had a
home up in Tahoe, which is a lake. Tahoe is
a beautiful lake, twenty five hundred meters and there are
(04:37):
mountains and skin is great, and so you know, one
night I woke up midnight, you know, I was thirsty
when to get a glass of water and went back
to bed and but just you know, just waiting for
you know, go back to sleep and thinking nothing, and
(04:58):
all of a sudden, out of the chest just you know,
just energy was coming out of my chest. But it
was love, and it was love there was never felt before.
It was it was love that was coming from me.
How can love come from me? I mean, you know,
it was unthinkable that love could come from me, you know.
(05:22):
And it was ten thousand times more powerful than any
love that I felt before. I mean, in fact, never
felt that love because it was unconditional love. Now I
have a name for it. It was love, period. It
was yes, it was coming from me, but it was love,
and it was light. It was a white light, scintillating.
(05:42):
It was, you know, like it like sparkles, you know,
and it was coming out and then it's it explodes,
and it's everywhere. But it's everywhere, but my consciousness is
there too, So not only my consciousness is within me,
but it's also outside of me. And all of a
(06:04):
sudden I realized I am that. So I am the
observer and the observer simultaneously. But I retain my point
of view, I retain my identity. I was still the
same kid of five years old or three years old,
kid that I that I was then and so that
(06:25):
I am now. So that identity so the only thing
on me that remained was that point of view.
Speaker 1 (06:32):
Well how about that? You know, it's kind of weird.
He's taking a risk here because this is a pretty
mainstream guy, although he's you know, financially independent, so he
can take career risks, I suppose. But he's a pretty
mainstream guy sharing a very personal experience that's out there.
It's fringe, right, this this light that bursts out of
(06:53):
his chest and was unconditional love, and it's cool. It is.
It's always shocking to me, though, how reluctant these guys
are to use supernatural vocabulary, you know, because if that
happened to me, I might call that, you know, spirit,
or I might use the word God, or I don't know.
(07:15):
I just I'm not sure I would describe it in
these terms. And so that's I would say. Really the
basis of the book God's I view is that physicists
weren't always like this. Physicists used to be pretty metaphysical.
Many of them were Christians. I mean, some of the
early pioneers of quantum mechanics, like Max Planck and Verner
(07:37):
Heisenberg were Lutherans, and they believed they were studying God,
no questions asked. They thought that their work was unraveling
the mysteries of creation. And I think Federico think said too,
It's just we've kind of adapted new words, we use
new terminology, probably because we're afraid of being ridiculed. I
(08:00):
get that, you know, working in mainstream science, it's I
hate to say it, but it's kind of embarrassing to
be a believer because you're the only one, or at
least it feels like you're the only one anyway, So
I liked this this guy Federico. He features prominently, I
think in chapter fifteen where we really get into the
nuts and bolts of what consciousness is, what it isn't
(08:23):
y Ai can't be conscious, and that really consciousness is
something unique that our society has done a really bad
job of describing. We kind of mix it in with
intellect and morality and all these different things, and it's
none of those. It's something special. I think it's what's
(08:43):
you know, described biblically as the spirit. Anyway, I'm gonna
go ahead and play another quick clip and then we'll
wrap up.
Speaker 4 (08:52):
Imagine.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
Sorry for the background music.
Speaker 3 (08:56):
By the way, the drome looks at that reality where
it is, sends me information and I get the conscious
experience of what the drone is saying. That conscious experience
is not in my body, is in my consciousness.
Speaker 5 (09:15):
A scientific theory that basically states that our body is
operated like a drawn from a conscious quantum field, which
would mean that experience qualitia is not in your head.
Speaker 4 (09:25):
The qualitia do not exist in the body. The exist
in the field.
Speaker 5 (09:29):
Okay, people will find this crazy idea.
Speaker 4 (09:33):
It is crazy, but it is much closer to the truth.
Speaker 5 (09:38):
Fiedrigo Fushin invented the first CPU, the touch pad, and
worked on the first neural nets, which gave him the
hope of creating conscious AI.
Speaker 3 (09:47):
Took me thirty years to figure out that mathematics is
created by consciousness, and therefore I cannot explain consciousness with mathematics.
People many physicists think that there is emerging emerging properties
in the purely classical world. It cannot be Emergentism requires quantumness.
Speaker 1 (10:10):
All right, So man, doesn't that just sound spiritual? I mean,
I know they the two people in that interview would
never say that, but come on, what's a conscious quantum
feel that animates our flesh? What is that? It's clearly
spirit right, I mean how else would you describe that
to people two thousand years ago or three thousand years
(10:31):
ago and these texts were written. It's fascinating, which is
why I think you can be both into science and
religion at the same time. Although I know that's not
a popular take. You know what's fascinating about Federico is
you know, he invented the CPU, and while he was
doing that work in California at Intel, across the country
(10:53):
in Massachusetts. At MIT, this individual named Doc I forget
his first name, but his last name was Weisenbaum invented
the first AI chatbot in the sixties and he was horrified.
He was horrified by how easy it was to convince
people that this simple software script, which was absurdly simple,
(11:18):
really was able to convince people that it was conscious.
And I think that just goes to show you, you know,
these the pioneers of a lot of these amazing technologies
and theories. You don't come up with this stuff unless
you're truly inspired by something. You know, you need to
(11:39):
be incredibly creative, You need to be tapped in, you know,
you need to be jacked into whatever that force is,
that creative force, and then it just gets hijacked. And
that's definitely you see that with the AI story, with
the Weisenbaum story. He invented AI and then it just
completely got hijacked by MIT and by this guy named
McCarthy and by military interests, and they basically ran him
(12:02):
out of the school when he tried to explain, like, no, no, no, no,
this isn't impressive. You know, this should tell us more
about our own human psychology than anything else, because machines
can't be conscious. So this is what the foundational thinkers
thought on this topic, but you would never know it nowadays. Nowadays,
everyone is so excited for AI consciousness for some reason.
(12:27):
They're either excited or afraid. But in both cases I
think they're wrong, because I don't think consciousness is something
we'll ever see in anything created by man. I think
you got to be the architect to do that. Anyway,
I hope you guys enjoyed this. Please buy the book
God's Eye View or recover this and many other topics
(12:51):
about consciousness, reality, the early really spooky experiments, and quantum
physics and much more. The book is available on Amazon.
I'll put links to the book and the audiobook and
the show description. Thanks everybody,
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