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by svnt 1021 days ago
It is clickbait. ABC transporters are not Maxwell (sic) Demons but billion-year-old electrochemical-mechanical one-way valves. Would you click on that?
1 comments

All a Maxwell's Demon is is a one-way valve.
It's a selective one-way valve, that's why you need a demon there to check each molecule.
I've always seen this thought experiment as implying that the key to decreasing entropy is a quantum of consciousness, whatever that may be.
Interesting! I saw it as illustrating that computation (or some act of "deciding" in the abstract) takes energy and is subject to thermodynamics. But then as consciousness and computation have some kind of relationship, there must be thermodynamic implications of consciousness.