Irreducible: Consciousness, Life, Computers, and Human Nature by Federico Faggin
Sundays, 11:00 am-noon (Zoom only)
Meetings begin September 21
Facilitators: Chris Dozier and Paul Glewwe
(Please purchase a book via your favorite book seller.)
This fall the Science and Religion group will be reading Federico Faggin’s book, Irreducible: Consciousness, Life, Computers and Human Nature. Faggin invented the microprocessor as well as MOS gate technology at Intel and received the 2009 National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the highest honor the United States confers for achievements related to technological progress. Faggin had a powerful conversion experience from atheism to belief in God in 1990. In this book Faggin argues that consciousness is an irreducible fundamental force of nature, more fundamental even than electromagnetism or gravity. He argues that consciousness comes from God, is eternal and has the hallmark of love. Faggin makes the case that the meaning (semantics) behind our linguistic expressions of knowledge comes from divinely created human consciousness. Machine generated syntactic representations of knowledge (e.g., generative artificial intelligence) only give the appearance of cognition and are based on training data and algorithms created by humans. Machines themselves can never become conscious. Faggin also asserts that the discoveries of quantum mechanics support the idea of universal consciousness. In his book, Faggin does not tie his ideas to a particular religion. It will be the job of the discussion group to see how well his arguments are congruent with our Christian beliefs.
