On the other hand, Landauer argued, there is no thermodynamic objection to a logically reversible operation potentially being achieved in a physically reversible way in the system. It is only logically irreversible operations – for example, the erasing of a bit to a known state, or the merging of two computation paths – which must be accompanied by a corresponding entropy increase. When information is physical, all processing of its representations, i.e. generation, encoding, transmission, decoding and interpretation, are natural processes where entropy increases by consumption of free energy.