# Quote — Paul Davies, The Demon in the Machine

> [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.

- Author: [Paul Davies](https://www.leafyquotes.com/paul-davies.md)
- Book: [The Demon in the Machine](https://www.leafyquotes.com/paul-davies/the-demon-in-the-machine.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Paul_Davies#The_Demon_in_the_Machine_(Sep._7,_2019)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/paul-davies/the-demon-in-the-machine/t-here-is-not

## More from this book

> [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...

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/paul-davies/the-demon-in-the-machine/p-article-detectors-in-de-sitter.md)

> 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.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/paul-davies/the-demon-in-the-machine/we-want-to-know.md)

> [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 ...

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/paul-davies/the-demon-in-the-machine/i-f-you-have.md)