# The Demon in the Machine - Author: [Paul Davies](https://www.leafyquotes.com/paul-davies.md) - Quotes: 32 - Book page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/paul-davies/the-demon-in-the-machine ## Quotes > [P]article detectors in De Sitter space respond as if they are immersed in a bath of thermal radiation. However, the stress energy momentum tensor in De Sitter space is not that of thermal radiation. It's just a renormalization of the cosmological constant. So there's something a bit funny about the thermal nature of De Sitter space, and I've been interested in whether you can mine that thermal stuff... > [T]here is... not just [some] new physical law, but a new kind of physical law. ...[W]hat kind of physical law? ...[O]ne idea that Sarah Walker and I have flirted with is state-dependent laws of information. ...[T]ake chess as an analogy ...If you had a modified game of chess in which the rules ...could be updated according to the state of play ...this opens the way to new forms of complexity and new forms of configuration. > We want to know the transition zone between this demonic cut... from just [Shannon] bits of information... to this more complex form of global, or contextual, or functional information. ...[H]azarding some guesses ...it might be a transition that would be measured by the integrated information, or... pathway complexity that Lee Cronin toyed with, or the breakdown of unitarity, if you think that this is associated in some way with the quantum classical transition. > [I]f you have a Maxwell demon or something like a Szilard engine in , could you use it, as Maxwell envisaged, to use information to extract energy from De Sitter space and... do... useful work? ...[Perhaps] only if you can create a region of the De Sitter space that is screened out from that horizon... from that thermal nature. If you put a reflective barrier around the demon, you then have De Sitter space, but with the horizon screened out. ...[T]hat's a problem I'm working on now ... > I know of no theorem that tells you... the maximum amount of change that agency can achieve in the universe, and what interests me... is agency at the end of the universe. If you end up in , which has a temperature and a horizon entropy, can you do anything with... those thermal fluctuations? Can you mine them... to extract energy? > If ever you want an example of going from physics to biology, it's the origin of the . > [A]t what point does information, in the physics of matter, cease to just be a thermodynamic issue, and become much more of a control issue? ...[O]ne place ...is the . ...[H]ow did this come into existence? > [C]osmological limits of agency... [W]hat's the best that the universe can do? There's about... 10100k bits of free energy out there. What could be achieved? ... [Egyptian pyramids have] been achieved... Maybe... astro-engineering... [T]ake a galaxy that's rotating clockwise and make it rotate anti-clockwise? ...I suspect ...maybe yes. ...[T]urn the expanding universe into a contracting universe? ...I'm sure the answer is no. > I'm using this term demonic cut by analogy with the Cartesian cut... > [A] is a set of instructions for ribosome to make a protein. If you look at the DNA sequence that codes for a gene, there's nothing that can tell you, at the sequence level, that if you look at a particular , that this is a bit of functional or coding or contextual information, and it's not just junk. > [W]e... need some new physics. ...The attempt to square the circle by starting out with known physics at the atomic level and somehow life emerging at some higher level... I... don't think we're going to be able to do it without new physics. > [I]nformation pervades biology. Your DNA is chock full of encrypted information, and the encryption is really important. But s don't act in isolation. They couple together to form networks, sometimes of great complexity, and information swirls around these networks. It can be stored.... processed... and it can have knock-on effects... beyond individual cells. Even bacteria can signal each other chemically... electrically and mechanically, and so, through physical forces, can exchange information and engage in cooperative behavior, like in s. > [A]nts... have... collective decision-making... a labyrinth of [network] information exchange... which can profoundly affect the outcome of the colony. We see it... in bird flocking. > [W]ith the physics of living matter, have we joined... the world of physics with the world of informational biology? > Seventy-five years ago Erwin Schrödinger published... ... the key point... was whether life can be explained by physics. ...Schrödinger ...said "We must be prepared to find a new kind of physical law prevailing..." > The fundamental problem about trying to define life... If you go to a physics department... you'll be given a definition in terms of matter... force... energy... entropy... free energy, molecular binding affinities, and so on. If you go to a biology department... you'll be given a very different narrative in terms of... instructions, transcription, , translation, coding, signals... > [T]his is something that can't be defined locally. It's got to be defined globally, in the context of the system as a whole. ...[T]hat's a very difficult thing for physicists to cope with because we're used to formulating all our laws of physics as local laws, and not as global laws. > [I]nformation... has been in physics for a long time, in the most obvious way with Maxwell's demon... It was... just a Gedanken-Experiment... in 1867, but just in recent years, engineers (nanotechnologists) have built real Maxwell demons, and this is now something of a cottage industry. > This web of information extends beyond individual organisms and communities of organisms to a planetary scale. ...Andrew Kim and Harrison Smith... looked at over 28,000 genomes and... produced this... plot of information being organized on a... planetary scale. ...[T]he biosphere was the original . > The thing that separates life from non-life is information. > [T]hat great information processing system between our ears... probably ...the grandest example we know of... in the universe. > [B]iologists... define life in terms of its informational qualities... physicists tend to define life in terms of the physical qualities. > s are the way in which... you are thinking and paying attention, because the signals that travel between neurons, down the s, are controlled by the flow of s across the membranes of the axons... [T]hey are, in effect, little demons that sense the incoming signal and open and close the gates; and the ions flow. ...[T]his is so incredibly energy efficient that ...your brain, which is like a megawatt supercomputer, operates with the energy equivalent of a small light bulb. > So in effect, information serves as a fuel, and this leads to the whole concept of information engines. Engines that will run on information power... > It's now commonplace to have an informational term entering into the fundamental laws of physics as a source of free energy. > Perhaps the most exquisite example of information in biology... During embryogenesis there's the most meticulous choreography of organized information, so all the right bits end up in the right place, at the right time. ...[T]he power of information to sculpt [living] physical forms. > Paul Nurse ...in his visionary essay ..."Life, Logic and Information" extols the virtues of thinking in an information, web-based way about life, and how, instead of worrying... about... the molecular level, we should think of life as being a collection of logic modules... with information flowing between them... control systems... [an] engineering approach. > [M]ax Delbrück... expressed it... (to encapsulate)... [A]t the level of atoms it's just known physics, but at the level of the living cell it's some sort of magic. p. 173 > We lack any sort of device that can... detect life. We don't have a life meter. ...We don't have a general purpose life meter that can detect life as we don't know it. > Information in life... amounts to much more than just playing the margins of the , and gaining some... energy advantage. ...I'm calling this a demonic cut. It's much more than just Shannon s at the thermodynamic level. Biological information is... contextual, or functional, or semantic. It depends upon the overall system. > [T]he demon... is transferring heat from a colder region to a warmer region in apparent defiance of the second law of thermodynamics. ...[A] refrigerator... costs energy to run... but the demon is operating using information instead... The demon... runs without any energy expenditure. > Life was onto this... billions of years ago. Life uses many many nano-molecules... in effect, Maxwell demons. Our bodies are full of [them]... doing the business of life. ...not quite perfect ...but they're coming pretty close to the theoretical limit, in terms of energy expenditure.