Where is the information stored?

[Alex K]

When I was a sophomore physics student, I was lucky enough to attend a surprise lecture by Richard Feynman.

1. Man you're old
2. Lucky bastard!!!

At one point in the lecture, I thought I understood something profound, and Feynman made eye contact and smiled kind of knowingly. But it was like a slippery fish that got away.

I've had that quite often - very good speakers can completely wrap you in their narrative and make you feel like a genius, and after you leave the talk you're all hyped but then you think - wait a minute, what exactly did I take away from this???

Basically Feynman was showing how computation and physics are connected through thermodynamics. He was showing how the efficiency of computer chips was limited by the coding of the computation regardless of the realization of that computer physically. I believe reversible transformations were preferable.

Yes, that's a very exciting connection. Information entropy and thermodynamic entropy are indeed related at some point, and just like thermodynamically reversible processes do not raise entropy and allow energy to be used more efficiently before it gets converted into heat, I've heard that the same may be true for entropy increase through information loss whenever irreversible logical operations are performed. Fascinating stuff...

It seems like the idea was related to the "mind-body" problem possibly. Maybe somebody here will have a thought? I feel like it was important, and maybe it was the point of the lecture. (It's almost like I owe it to Feynman to understand what he was trying to tell me... silly I guess.)

I don't know how it would be related to the mind-body problem, but maybe you can give a hint? Except that as above I tried to motivate that information can be viewed as a physical quantity like energy.

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Well, if that were the case, they'd be an example how knowing everything leaves you with zero room to act - they don't *do* anything to influence events in any particular direction apart from mindlessly enforcing a simple set of rules.

Quantum field theory describes an electron as just an excitation in the electron field.....correct?

More or less. Although I'd rather say an excitation of the vacuum state which corresponds to the quantum field.

These fields have the ability to form representations of things which are not themselves.

You're sneaking in the notion of fields as agents here. Let's say that in nature, representations are formed which corresponds to these fields.

They have intentionality(not to be confused with intentions) like a mind. They might be closer to minds then you realize.

They have no more intentionality to form particles than a mold has to form a cast.