if information can never be destroyed... what does this say about the Sentient Mind?

Some say the mind is an electromagnetic anomaly. So the mind can be artificially preserved, ie. An AI. Kind of like in the book series for the game Halo. An AI is created by copying a persons brain waves, destroying the brain but preserving the mind. Other than that though, a sentient mind would be converted into energy and put to use elsewhere in the universe.

When a quantum physicist says "information can never be lost or destroyed," they're merely referencing an extension of the mechanical physicist's axiom, "matter can never be lost or destroyed." Quantum theory isn't concerned with higher-order information like human memories (which die with every human who dies) or old manuscripts and movies (many of which have been lost to/destroyed over the ages). It's concerned with quantum-level information, i.e. energy. Forget words or letters or equations or numbers--hell, even binary ones and zeroes are higher-order than quantum packets.

To complicate matters, minor differences in quantum energy fields at the sub-sub-atomic level are SO greatly magnified by the time humans are able to perceive them that, for all intents and purposes, our perception does not matter. To quantum physics, the human mind is irrelevant. To wit, the humanoid perception of visible matter and higher-order information has nothing to do with quantum theory. Sentient beings, being unable to observe matter on the sub-atomic level or information on the quantum level without changing it (per Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle), do not factor into this *whatsoever.*

Hope that clears up any potential existential crises. ;)

An ancient scholar spent years chronicling the history of the commerce along the Nile river and studying how the yearly floods affected local economies. He wrote years worth of information on papyrus scrolls which were stored in the library at Alexandria.

The local scribes mislaid the original scrolls, so no copies were ever made. The original scholar died.

Then, the library burned to the ground and the scrolls were lost.

There. I just showed you how information can be destroyed.

I think you're confusing information with how it is stored. The information that I might have stored in my mind exists both before and after the period that my mind exists. However my mind, my brain, is only an electrochemical storage facility--sort of network attached storage. Once it blinks out, the stored aspect of the information is lost.

The thing about these laws of conservation is that whats typically not stated is that things can change form. for example a swinging pendulum in a grandfather clock needs to be wound up because some of that energy is given off as heat and air pressure changes(noise). energy can't be created or destroyed, so why must you keep winding up that clock? because that energy is being consumed to change air pressure, or transformed into inferred radiation (heat)