Faggin, and the second research program
Every researcher I take seriously is running a second, invisible research program. Nobody puts it on the CV.
Faggin, and the second research program
Facebook Reels, end of a long day. Not proud of the source. But that's where I found this.
An interview with Federico Faggin. What stayed with me wasn't his theory of consciousness. It was one throwaway detail: a researcher can run two research programs at once.
One visible — the work everyone knows you for. One private — years of it, often nothing to do with your job, quietly rewriting how you think about everything else.
Faggin gave hours a day to the second one. Kept it walled off from his professional life. Couldn't even tell his wife.
I've been trying to do the same thing for years. Can confirm the hard part is not the research. It's the wife.
Who he is
First commercial microprocessor at Intel. Founded Synaptics. Early neural networks. A pile of patents. Then he turned to consciousness — books, interviews, the questions mainstream computer science files under not our problem.
Whether he's right is beside the point.
What the interview covers
Dissatisfaction with purely material accounts of consciousness. The hard problem. Qualia. The personal experiences that set him off. Quantum physics. And — the only one I actually care about — a scientific career running alongside an independent, unfunded, unpublished inquiry.
The claim
Research is not exhausted by your discipline. Not even close.
Everyone I take seriously is running something underneath. Slower. Philosophical, contemplative, spiritual, pick your word. No funding, no peer review, no CV line. And it's the thread that motivates everything downstream.
Two directions:
- Outward — problems in the world. Runs on the cognitive system.
- Inward — the self. Runs on the cardiocirculatory system.
Nobody talks about the second because it's hard to do, impossible to formalise, and unmeasurable in any way a hiring committee recognises. Hours a day, for years, no guarantee of anything, plenty of frustration.
And then one day the visible work starts drawing from it.
You can't separate Faggin the engineer from Faggin the man running the other program. Agree with his conclusions or not — without the second one, the first doesn't make sense.