by Dr. David Fialkoff, Editor / Publisher

Mechanical calculating machines have been around since the 1820s (see this week's Computer Corner). During World War Two, as part of Allied code-breaking efforts, those gear-driven computers were superseded by electronic, programmable computers, powered by vacuum tubes. Then tubes were replaced by aluminum transistors. Then, in the early 60s, Frederico Faggin made a transistor out of silicon, which worked five times faster than the aluminum variety.

Faggin, a physicist, went on to invent (along with three other people at Intel) a new way of organizing those transistors, the CPU (Central Processing Unit), which is the heart of all our digital devices (computers, cellphones...) today.

Faggin, who found himself unhappy despite possessing all measures of success, got up one night for a drink of water, at his vacation home in Tahoe, and had the first of several mystical experiences. He was filled with love and warmth as everything became a white, scintillating light.

After his series of spiritual experiences, Faggin declared that science has it all backward, focusing only on external phenomena and ignoring consciousness.

Faggin awarded
*

A physicist himself, Faggin points out that external phenomena, the nuts-and-bolts material world, things that can be measured: position, mass, velocity... are described by the laws of classical physics. But our inner experience: consciousness, meaning, knowledge, emotion... are holistic, quantum phenomena, that whole and complete, cannot be dissected.

He makes the distinction between "parts," the nuts-and-bolts world as it appears to our analytical, body-oriented self, the domain of materialistic science, classical physics, and "parts-whole," the individual, fractal or holographic, Self that contains within it the whole; similar to the way each cell in our body contains the whole genome, the complete DNA code, of our entire organism.

Faggin affirms, what seems obvious to me, that science has been ignoring the importance of consciousness, or denying that it even exists. It's not academic. In fact, there is nothing more personally important to each of us.

For hundreds of years now, the scientific establishment has indoctrinated us to believe that our inner world is a fantasy, an accident, a random by-product of our brain's electrical activity. Long after Newton and Galileo proved it was not, science acts as if the world is only material, holding that if something cannot be described mathematically, then that something does not exist.

Meaning, and all aspects of consciousness, Faggin insists, is a holistic, indivisible, quantum state that is not describable mathematically. So, to the great detriment of society, our biased science, and the current cultural mind-set dominated by that biased science, denies that meaning exists.

If you believe that the world is meaningless and random, with life, including us, generated only by fortuitous mistakes (mutations); if everything is just an error that will end in the universe's heat-death; if it's all relative, with nothing mattering more than anything else, then you get the crisis that is now gripping Western society. If you believe that your moral decisions directly affect your experience of life, that "instant karma's gonna get you," then, instantly, we get a better world.

Faggin's understanding of where we are and what is happening is not dissimilar to Eastern philosophies:

The Universe, wanting to know itself, creates beings/quantum states which can know. These beings, through their knowing, create more sophisticated knowing beings: particles become molecules become macro-molecules become cells become tissues become organs... We humans, in our thirst for knowing, create devices (telescopes, microscopes...) and machines, first with gears, then vacuum tubes, now transistors, that expand our knowing.

Somewhere in the future, it seems, quantum computing awaits us, millions or trillions of times faster (more powerful) than our transistor-based machines. Well, maybe so. I hope we do better with it than we are doing now with the technology that we have today. Today, it's as if we're holding the wrong end of the axe.

The internet, right now, driven by commercial interests, is a toy, full of toxic entertainment, dis-information. Even the news is info-tainment. But the world wide web presents a wonderful opportunity to know, to see. Lokkal is a tool that organizes that vision, organizes the web, based on a principle almost as old as life itself, community.

Einstein wondered if our wisdom could keep pace with our technology (particularly the Bomb). Faggin believes that communicating our knowledge creates new ways of knowing. I insist that Lokkal, joining together to make an online town square (think the Yellow Pages or Atención reborn for the digital age) will answer society's most pressing problems.

Here, starting in San Miguel de Allende, I'm giving it a try. Please join me. The fate of the world depends on it.

**************

Dr. David presents Lokkal, the social network, the prettiest, most-efficient way to see San Miguel online. Our Wall shows it all. Join and add your point of view.

Discover Lokkal:
Watch the two-minute video below.
Then, just below that, scroll down SMA's Community Wall.
Mission

Visit SMA's Social Network

Contact / Contactar