Interview with Maxwell's demon about CP law

Seeing how child pornography is the ultimate something for nothing in criminal law, a perpetual punishment machine that can just keep going and going with no fresh input, I thought who better than Maxwell's demon to consult about this strange phenomenon of information crime? So I conjured up the demon in my imagination and conducted an interview.

Eivind Berge: Greetings, Maxwell's demon! Perhaps our readers would first like to know, if they aren't so well versed in physics already, who you are and why you don't work. How come you never stepped out of the realm of thought experiments and into our technology? Although it would surely get us into another mess with different pollutants or shortages before long, it would be good to have a way to produce unlimited energy without carbon emissions at this point.

Maxwell's demon: Yes, be careful what you wish for. It is probably for the best that I can't exist in the material world, so your eventual doom at least gets somewhat contained and survivable by a few. The idea, conceived by James Clerk Maxwell in 1867, is that I would control a small door between two chambers of gas. As individual gas molecules approach the door, I would quickly open and shut the door so that only fast molecules pass into one of the chambers, while only slow molecules go into the other. Because faster molecules amount to more heat, my behavior would cause one chamber to warm up and the other to cool down, thereby decreasing entropy and violating the second law of thermodynamics, in effect creating a perpetual motion machine that can be used to perform whatever work you want.

I can't exist though because my brain would need to keep track of the moving gas molecules, which might work for a while, but since I don't have infinite working memory (because the universe or at least our light cone is finite), sooner or later I would need to erase information in my brain, and that would require more energy than I produce by my behavior! Either that or I would need to be replaced by a fresh demon, which also takes energy to create. It is always the case that in order to reliably decrease entropy locally, you must produce more entropy elsewhere, so the second law is never violated and I can't help that.

EB: I see. It took me years to grok this part about erasure rather than recording of information being the limitation, but it's clear that you can't work.

And just like you would be a way to get energy for nothing, child porn laws are ways to get incrimination for nothing.

Md: Yes, that is eerily similar. And they do exist!

EB: But is information really nothing though? Doesn't it always have to be embedded in a medium?

Md: Perhaps it becomes clearer if you consider the formerly used medium of punch cards, where the information consists of nothing but holes.

EB: What about the air in the holes?

Md: The air would be there anyway without the punched cards. We are familiar with the concept of sinister pixels, but you can also have sinister thin air or even a vacuum if you like. Yes, you do eventually run out of people to incriminate because of other problems having to do with a finite world, but you can easily conduct entire holocausts based on this nothing.

EB: I see. Information really is the reaction of an observer to something perceived, a measure of how surprised you are at seeing something. It has no independent existence, except perhaps in some platonic realm if you believe in that. Due to the real consequences of some of those perceptions though, I can understand criminalizing certain communications such as threats and frauds, but simply possessing information?

Md: Sadly, laws aren't subject to the laws of physics the way technology is. Nothing prevents legislators from passing laws designed to put people in prison for gobbledygook reasons. Why should the way I arrange information on my private storage media be criminally relevant as long as it just stays there?

EB: No, it doesn't make sense. So why do you think it happens?

Md: Child porn law is truly weird, I agree. It involves multiple absurdities and superstitions and draconian exceptions to how information is otherwise handled by law. The most "charitable" way to look at it is a labeling exercise to identify pedophiles. But this breaks down when you consider that the law puts the boundary for "child" at 18, which means the cases can involve 17-year-olds for all the justice system cares and have nothing whatsoever to do with sexual deviancy. It also isn't very charitable or true to assume that all pedophiles are likely abusers even if you could identify them with some accuracy, which the laws obviously aren't designed to do in any event.

EB: Yes, identification of (statistically likely) sexual abusers can't be the whole explanation, and if it were I wish the justice system would be honest about it rather than claim intrinsic harm.

Md: Another angle, which is more in line with how these laws are actually written, is a metaphysical belief that such material constitutes a real harmful crime in itself, a sort of voodoo theory that "victims" are "revictimized" by the transfer of information that they know nothing about. This is sheer superstition.

EB: Indeed.

Md: A third argument is that child porn somehow creates a demand for abuse and therefore must be eradicated, but in practice such eradication creates more demand for actual abuse because the porn more often needs to be produced anew instead of copied.

EB: The antisex bigots don't look good no matter how you slice it, do they?

Md: Well, let's at least give them a sound hearing. A fourth way to look at it, which is most accurate in my view, is that the child porn laws are actually blasphemy laws which enforce the quasi-religious belief that "children" are asexual, the myth of the innocence of the child which now has status of state religion in feminist countries. This is undeniable when the laws also apply to fictional representations in text and drawings and cartoons and sculpture and spoken words as they do in for example Norway and Canada and Australia.

EB: Yes, I am right in the most deranged jurisdictions. I shiver just writing this because who knows when they will step up the persecutions to the next meta-level such as philosophical musing that we are engaged in here.

Md: A fifth way to justify child porn law is to claim that pornography somehow causes more sexual behavior in the viewers (other than masturbation, which would rather fit the metaphysical point). This claim is the diatmetric opposite of the truth, since pornography actually suppresses real sexual behavior in men as Gary Wilson so helpfully teaches. I abstain from all porn and masturbation in order to increase my testosterone and drive to pursue women and teen girls as well as my performance with them, and I am quite certain that I would do the same in order to better abuse children if I were a pedophile!

EB: Yeah, just look at the Amish. If there is a group of men who abstain from porn and masturbation, or at least view a lot less Internet porn it must be them, and their sexual behavior mocks the idea that cracking down on child pornography does what our feminist society naively imagines.

But oh well, there is nothing we can do besides pointing out the absurdities and extolling positive virtues until they crack down on this too. That's my demon for supporting nofap and still be chasing pussy at 153 years of age! You can be an honorary male sexualist demon too. It was good talking to you and perhaps we'll meet again.

Md: So long!