Federico Faggin, who did the transistor-level circuit design of the Intel 4004, later argued that classical silicon computation can never produce consciousness

Federico Faggin executed the silicon-gate, transistor-level circuit design of the Intel 4004 (1970–71) — the physical realization of the general-purpose-processor architecture Ted Hoff had proposed (claim-ted-hoff-widrow-phd-student-architected-intel-4004). Decades later, the engineer who built the first microprocessor's circuits arrived at a flatly anti-computationalist theory of mind. With physicist Giacomo Mauro D'Ariano, Faggin co-developed a position he calls "Quantum Information Panpsychism," holding that consciousness and qualia require private, non-reproducible quantum states — something classical computers, built on freely copyable and reproducible information, structurally lack. His 2021 book Irreducible is reported to state the conclusion bluntly: "The electrical signals of silicon will never transmute into qualia."

The claim is not that machines are complicated-but-conscious-someday; it is a structural impossibility argument. Classical computation is defined by reproducible states (any bit can be copied and re-instantiated); on Faggin's account, that very reproducibility is what disqualifies it from bearing subjective experience, which he takes to be intrinsically private and non-clonable — a property he locates in quantum information.

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