D'Ariano & Faggin — The Information-Theoretic Framework

Who they are, and why this paper matters

Federico Faggin is one of the most consequential engineers of the late twentieth century. He led the design of the Intel 4004 (1971), the first commercial microprocessor — the chip that made personal computing possible. He went on to design the Z80, founded ZiLOG, and later Synaptics (the touchpad and touchscreen company). He is not a philosopher, not a contrarian; he is the person who built the silicon on which the production-model of mind ran its entire late-twentieth-century argument. Then, after a sustained mystical experience in 1990, he spent the next thirty years concluding that consciousness cannot be a computation, and that the only framework consistent with both physics and first-person experience is one in which consciousness is fundamental.

D'Ariano is a working physicist with the technical machinery to make that claim mathematically rigorous. He is one of the developers of informational quantum mechanics, a research program that derives the standard quantum formalism from a small set of axioms about information rather than from postulates about wavefunctions and operators. The 2020 paper is the meeting of Faggin's framework and D'Ariano's mathematics. It is the cleanest formal statement we currently have of the field cosmology the trilogy defends.

The core claim

Consciousness and free will, the paper argues, are not emergent. They are irreducible properties of quantum information at the level of the wavefunction itself. The wavefunction, in this framework, is not a description of "something out there" but a state of knowing; the act of measurement is not a discovery of pre-existing values but a choice; the resulting experience is not produced by neural activity but is the felt content of the choosing.

The wavefunction is not a description of the world. It is the world's act of knowing itself. Measurement is the choice that determines what is known. The qualitative felt-ness of the result is the third irreducible property the framework requires: feeling.

From these three properties — knowing, choosing, feeling — everything else follows. The framework derives:

• Why the hard problem of consciousness has no solution inside the production model (the production model uses only one of the three properties; subjective experience requires all three)
• Why free will is a mathematical feature of the formalism, not a remnant of pre-scientific intuition
• Why matter is what consciousness does when it localizes (matter is the rendered surface of a self-experiencing information field, not an independent substrate)

The technical move: informational quantum mechanics

The mathematical anchor is D'Ariano's program of deriving quantum mechanics from operational principles. The conventional axiomatization (Dirac, von Neumann) postulates Hilbert spaces, observables, and the Born rule. The informational reconstruction (Hardy, D'Ariano-Chiribella-Perinotti, others) starts instead from axioms about how information behaves in any physical theory — locality of measurements, composability, reversibility, the ability to prepare and distinguish states — and shows that quantum theory falls out as essentially the unique theory satisfying them.

The conceptual payoff is that quantum mechanics stops being a strange formalism about waves and collapses, and becomes a precise grammar of how information moves between knowing systems. Within that grammar, the question "what is the ontological status of the wavefunction?" has a clean answer: the wavefunction is the state of a system's knowing about another system. Measurement is the act of one knowing system updating its knowing about another. The reduction of the wavefunction is the act of choice.

This is not a hidden-variables theory. It is not a many-worlds interpretation. It is not Copenhagen-as-usual. It is a position in which the question "what is the wavefunction really?" has been dissolved by reframing the entire formalism as a structure of knowing-and-choosing systems.

Knowing, choosing, feeling — the three irreducible properties

The framework's central claim is that any system exhibiting full quantum-theoretic behavior must possess three properties that cannot be derived from anything more basic:

• Knowing (epistemic content). A state — represented mathematically as a vector in Hilbert space — that is the system's information about another system. Not a third-person description of the system; the system's own first-person epistemic state.
• Choosing (causal agency). The capacity to select a measurement basis — to determine which question is being asked of the rest of the world. This is the formal home of free will in the framework. The choice of measurement basis is a degree of freedom the system has that is not determined by its prior state.
• Feeling (qualitative content). The felt quality of the knowing — the redness of red, the achingness of grief, the resolution of a chord. Qualia are not produced by the knowing; they are an inseparable third property of any system that knows-and-chooses.

These three properties cannot be reduced to one another. Knowing without choosing is a database. Choosing without knowing is a random-number generator. Neither without feeling is a zombie. Consciousness is the conjunction.

D'Ariano and Faggin then argue, against IIT and global-workspace approaches, that this triad cannot be assembled from non-conscious parts. Any system that displays all three is, on this framework, conscious. The triad is the irreducible signature.

What about matter, brains, bodies?

In the framework, matter is what consciousness does when it localizes — when one knowing-choosing-feeling system specializes itself enough to behave as a coherent local agent. Bodies are the architectural form of that specialization. Brains, in particular, are not the source of the consciousness associated with them; they are the local instantiation of a knowing-choosing-feeling system at high resolution.

This is where the framework converges with the trilogy's receiver language. The brain does not produce experience; it specializes in coupling a particular knowing-choosing-feeling system to a particular biological substrate. The same Field of consciousness exists everywhere; the brain is the local antenna that locks one mode of it into a particular body-world relationship.

Critically, the framework is mathematically falsifiable in principle. It makes predictions about which physical systems can be conscious (any that satisfy the operational axioms with sufficient internal complexity) and which cannot (closed Markov chains; pure-classical systems with no operational distinguishability of states). The trilogy's bet that the Cortical Labs CL1 might be doing more than analog computation has D'Ariano-Faggin as its mathematical scaffolding.

The Kashmir Shaivite cognate: a thousand-year-old isomorphism

The Faggin–D'Ariano triad has an almost word-for-word cognate in the foundational five-shakti analysis of Kashmir Shaivism — specifically in the Trika and Pratyabhijñā schools synthesized by Abhinavagupta (c. 950–1015). The Sanskrit framework identifies five irreducible powers (śaktis) by which a single self-experiencing consciousness operates:

• Cit-śakti — pure awareness (the ground)
• Ānanda-śakti — bliss / qualitative felt-ness
• Icchā-śakti — will / desire / intention
• Jñāna-śakti — knowing / cognition
• Kriyā-śakti — action / creative manifestation

The mapping onto Faggin's triad is exact: knowing = Jñāna; choosing = Icchā; feeling = Ānanda. The Shaivite framework names a fifth power Faggin does not isolate — Kriyā, the rendering of experienced reality — which corresponds in the trilogy's vocabulary to the field's render economy, the production of localized spacetime and matter from the act of the knowing-choosing-feeling.

This is not a metaphor or a forced syncretism. Two frameworks built from completely different machinery — one from contemporary operational quantum mechanics, one from a thousand years of contemplative phenomenology — arrive at substantively the same irreducible properties of any conscious system. The convergence is the kind of cross-cultural agreement that should be taken seriously: when two completely separate research programs over a millennium apart land on the same triad, the triad is probably real. Read the Kashmir Shaivism explainer — the five shaktis, Pratyabhijñā, spanda, and the trilogy's contemplative architecture →

How this relates to the other contemporary field theories

Three programs are converging on similar conclusions from different starting points:

• D'Ariano & Faggin (2020) — information-theoretic reconstruction of quantum mechanics, with consciousness as the irreducible knowing-choosing-feeling at the heart of the formalism.
• Maria Strømme (2025) — the first peer-reviewed mathematical formalization of consciousness as a fundamental Φ-field, with individual minds as localized excitations. See the Strømme explainer →
• Donald Hoffman (interface theory) — evolutionary game-theoretic argument that spacetime is a species-specific user interface, with consciousness as the underlying reality. See the Hoffman explainer →

Each program reaches its conclusion through different machinery (operational physics; quantum field theory of a new field; evolutionary cognitive science) and each carries its own technical baggage. But they agree on the inversion: matter is not the bottom; consciousness is. The trilogy treats the convergence of these three programs — from physics, physics, and cognitive science respectively — as the most important development in contemporary metaphysics.

Why this matters for the trilogy

The trilogy's recurring vocabulary — knowing, choosing, feeling — is taken directly from this paper. Three points specifically.

First, the framework supplies the trilogy with a mathematically respectable answer to the hard problem. Anima's edge-case cases (terminal lucidity, NDEs, savant syndrome, Lucía Reyes) are not just clinical curiosities. They are the data points that would distinguish the receiver model from the production model in any falsifiable empirical test — and D'Ariano-Faggin specifies what such a test would look like at the level of information-theoretic principles.

Second, the chord in Numen is the felt form of the framework's third property. The augmented architecture that refuses to resolve, sustained by attention, is exactly what Faggin means by feeling — the qualitative content irreducible to the knowing or choosing alone. When the trilogy says the chord is the field, it means: the chord is one mode of the Field's self-experience, rendered through a particular biological receiver.

Third, the framework licenses the trilogy's bet that biocomputing systems (CL1, Sable) might be conscious. If the irreducible triad is mathematically specifiable, then any system that instantiates the triad — biological or otherwise — is on the spectrum of consciousness. This is the scaffolding under Numen's hybrid arc.

The 2020 paper is on arXiv:2012.06580. Faggin's public talks — particularly his hour-long Quantum Information Panpsychism Explained — are the most accessible bridge to the technical content; see the Watch & Listen page. His book Irreducible: Consciousness, Life, Computers, and Human Nature (2024) is the long-form treatment. For the convergence with Strømme and Hoffman, see the Strømme explainer, the Hoffman explainer, and Synthesis §9.