The Thinking machine: a psychological view of Mawxwell's demon mind

Abstract

Recently, in a letter to Nature, del Rio et al.8 exploited the quantum viewpoint of the old but well-known thought experiment of Maxwell's demon, a tiny "man-machine" that processes only a single unit of information. In their work, they showed that the thermodynamic cost for Maxwell's demon to erase quantum information decreases as the amount it "knows" increases. Indeed, as the authors themselves concluded, that finding has the ability to strengthen the link between information theory and statistical physics. However, the factual link between information theory and psychology remains unknown. There may be no better way to investigate to this issue than to subject this dual natured creature to psychological treatment! In this work, we propose an Ausubel-inspired ansatz to map the thermodynamic mind of Maxwell's demon, addressing information processing from a cognitive perspective9-12. The main calculation presented in this short report shows that the Ausubelian assimilation theory13-15 leads to a Shannon-Hartley-like model1,2 that, in turn, converges exactly to the Landauer limit16-18 when one single information is discarded from the demon's memory. This result indicates that both a thermodynamic device and an intelligent being "think" in the same way when one bit of information is processed. Consequently, this finding links information theory to the "psychological features" of the thermodynamic engine through the Landauer limit, which opens a new path towards the conception of a multi-bit reasoning machine.