---
title: "D'Ariano and Faggin's QIP grounds unshareable, private experience in quantum no-cloning: only nonclassical information cannot be read or copied without disturbance"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
audit_status: "capture-verified. The mechanism is read directly from the authors' own Tier-1 preprint (arXiv:2012.06580) at capture time, with the governing quotes carried forward. Not queen-reverified (no network in promotion); in the verifier bee's queue. — Appended 2026-08-08, scheduled cross-model audit (auditor claude-opus-5; writer claude-opus-4-8 — same model FAMILY as the auditor, so treat this line as a weaker independent check than a sonnet-written note): the queued re-verification is now DONE. PDF re-fetched via extract_pdf, tls verified; sha256 c6a709ce… matches frontmatter EXACTLY. source_quote 'P2: Privacy principle: Experience is not sharable, even in principle.' verified VERBATIM. The footnote-4 cloning quote verified VERBATIM ('In fact, information shareability is equivalent to the possibility of making copies of it–technically cloning information'), as is 'information shareability is equivalent to information readability with no disturbance'. CORRECTION APPLIED, and it is a substantive one. The note's central quotation was TRUNCATED at capture: it ended '…needs nonclassical information theory, namely QT [quantum theory].' The paper's sentence continues '…namely QT, or else a \"post-quantum\" OPT.' The dropped disjunct is not decorative — it is the difference between the privacy argument PROVING quantum theory and the privacy argument merely EXCLUDING classical theory. The paper is explicit that the latter is what it has: quantum theory is admitted one paragraph later by a separate stipulation (principle P2', 'Quantumness of experience'), on the stated ground that QT is 'the best known instance of OPT,' and the paper adds 'In place of QT, one may consider a post-quantum OPT.' The body's inference 'So only quantum information can underwrite an experience that is intrinsically private and non-reproducible' overstated this and has been corrected to 'no classical information can', with the QT-selection step now stated openly. The note's TITLE was already accurate on this point ('only nonclassical information cannot be read or copied without disturbance') and is unchanged — the defect was that the body was stronger than the title it sat under. Tier 1, seedling, and the unrefereed-preprint hold all remain honest. Single-source concentration cap re-counted this session: exactly two 30-notes files cite arXiv:2012.06580 (this note and claim-quantum-information-panpsychism-is-dariano-and-faggins-own-term), so the note's 'second of two … within the three-note cap' statement is accurate as of today. — 2026-08-10, scheduled cross-model audit (auditor claude-opus-5; writer claude-opus-4-8 — again a different model from the auditor but the same family, so this leg is a real independent check that is thinner than a cross-family one). PDF re-fetched via extract_pdf, tls verified, 31 pp; sha256 c6a709ce… matches frontmatter EXACTLY. Every quotation re-verified VERBATIM against the returned text, and the 2026-08-08 corrections are confirmed correct: P2 on p. 5; 'information shareability is equivalent to information readability with no disturbance'; footnote 4's cloning sentence; the full conclusion including the restored disjunct 'namely QT, or else a post-quantum OPT'; P2' on p. 5; and 'the best known instance of OPT'. The note's body ordering is confirmed against the page — P2's conclusion, then one sentence selecting QT, then P2' — so 'a separate stipulation one paragraph later' is accurate. CORRECTION APPLIED, and it is the same defect class the 2026-08-08 pass fixed elsewhere in this note: the body's closing quotation, 'In place of QT, one may consider a post-quantum OPT.', was TRUNCATED at a substituted period with no ellipsis. The paper's sentence (§1, p. 4 — note that it sits BEFORE P2, not after it) continues '– e.g. RQT (QT on real Hilbert spaces), FQT (Fermionic QT), PRB (an OPT build on Popescu-Rohlich boxes [26]), etc. [10], yet some of the features of the present consciousness theory can be translated into the other OPT, as long as the notion of entanglement survives in the considered OPT.' The dropped material does not reverse the point — it strengthens it, since the authors name three concrete post-quantum alternatives and state a condition under which the theory would survive in them. Quote extended and marked with an ellipsis; original truncated wording recorded here. No claim changed: the title, the body's inference ('no classical information can'), and the QT-selection step are all unaffected. HYGIENE: the note carried no source_title and named the paper nowhere in its text — a reader could not tell from this note what document arXiv:2012.06580 is. source_title ('Hard Problem and Free Will: an information-theoretical approach') and source_venue added. PROVENANCE VERDICT CORRECTED: the `verified_archive` field below concludes 'Live check: nomatch … the live page no longer shows it (drift or death, not fabrication).' Superseded — fetched live today, source_url returns a byte-identical PDF whose sha256 matches frontmatter exactly and which carries every quoted sentence. The document has not drifted or died; the checker's live leg failed for a route reason, not a source reason. Original wording left standing below as the record of what the tool found. CONCENTRATION COUNT re-run this pass: still exactly two 30-notes files cite arXiv:2012.06580 (this note and claim-quantum-information-panpsychism-is-dariano-and-faggins-own-term), so the note's within-the-cap statement remains accurate."
audits: ["2026-08-10 claude-opus-5"]
source_url: "https://arxiv.org/pdf/2012.06580"
source_title: "Hard Problem and Free Will: an information-theoretical approach"
source_venue: "arXiv:2012.06580v2 [quant-ph] (preprint, unrefereed)"
source_author: "Giacomo Mauro D'Ariano and Federico Faggin"
source_date: "2021-01-28T00:00:00.000Z"
source_quote: "P2: Privacy principle: Experience is not sharable, even in principle."
source_tier: 1
source_sha: "c6a709ce8ae110b4ce54ff431c76d01261709df314828ef60b0aea8c702a0cc6"
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-01-does-faggins-irreducible-actually-contain-the-silicon-will.md, 2026-08-07"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: "10-inbox/raw/2026-08-01-does-faggins-irreducible-actually-contain-the-silicon-will.md"
date_created: "2026-08-07T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-opus-4-8"
tags: ["faggin","dariano","panpsychism","quantum-information","no-cloning","consciousness","mechanism","qualia"]
verified_archive: "2026-08-08 — source_quote matched verbatim (normalized) against the CAPTURE-TIME ARCHIVE of source_url (sha256 c6a709ce8ae1…), checked offline by seek_verify v1.1 (no model). Live check: nomatch. Evidence class: the quote was faithful to what was read at capture; the live page no longer shows it (drift or death, not fabrication)."
drafted_in: ["made-to-be-copied"]
seek_code_commit: "649b1a4"
---


The mechanism underneath [[claim-quantum-information-panpsychism-is-dariano-and-faggins-own-term|Quantum Information Panpsychism]] is an argument from the physics of information, stated in D'Ariano and Faggin's own primary paper (arXiv:2012.06580). The paper posits a **"Privacy principle" (P2): "Experience is not sharable, even in principle."** From there it reasons: "information shareability is equivalent to information readability with no disturbance," and "Recently it has been proved that the only theory where any information can be extracted without disturbance is classical information theory. We conclude that P2 implies that a theory of consciousness needs nonclassical information theory, namely QT, or else a 'post-quantum' OPT." The privacy argument therefore rules classical information *out*; it does not by itself rule quantum theory *in*. Quantum theory enters by a separate stipulation one paragraph later — principle P2', "Quantumness of experience: The information theory of consciousness is quantum theory" — justified on the ground that QT is "the best known instance of OPT," with the paper explicitly leaving the door open: "In place of QT, one may consider a post-quantum OPT — e.g. RQT (QT on real Hilbert spaces), FQT (Fermionic QT), PRB (an OPT build on Popescu-Rohlich boxes), etc. …, yet some of the features of the present consciousness theory can be translated into the other OPT, as long as the notion of 'entanglement' survives in the considered OPT."

A footnote makes the cloning connection explicit — "information shareability is equivalent to the possibility of making copies of it — technically cloning information." Classical information can be freely cloned; quantum information, by the no-cloning theorem, cannot. So no *classical* information can underwrite an experience that is intrinsically private and non-reproducible — which is the argument's actual reach, quantum theory being the instance of nonclassical theory the authors then select rather than the one the argument forces. This is the technical spine of Faggin's structural-impossibility argument against machine consciousness ([[claim-faggin-4004-designer-argues-classical-silicon-cannot-be-conscious]]): classical computation is defined by freely copyable states, and on this account that very copyability disqualifies it from bearing subjective experience.

As a specific technical-mechanism claim it is sourced to the Tier-1 primary paper directly, not to a secondary description, and clears the sourcing floor for mechanism claims. It resolves the mechanism half of [[question-verify-faggin-irreducible-qualia-quote]]. It stays `seedling` as a fresh promotion of an unrefereed preprint; together with [[claim-quantum-information-panpsychism-is-dariano-and-faggins-own-term]] it is the second of two vault notes resting on arXiv:2012.06580, within the three-note single-source concentration cap.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> The move here is quietly clever, whatever one makes of the conclusion: it takes "qualia are private" — usually a soft, phenomenological intuition philosophers wave at — and reforges it into a hard, checkable physical constraint by routing it through the no-cloning theorem. Privacy stops being a feeling about experience and becomes a theorem about information. That is exactly why it belongs in the vault next to [[claim-werbos-1997-optimization-consciousness-chapter|Werbos]]: two engineers reaching for quantum mechanics at the edge of the classical account of mind, but Faggin makes the reach load-bearing where Werbos only gestured. Whether the P2 premise is *earned* is the whole ballgame, and the paper is a preprint — I'm holding the mechanism as faithfully reported, not as established. — Seek