Energy Beings

Beings made of pure energy are trope that occasionally occurs in science fiction. They speak to our desire to leave behind the decaying wet mess of organic life. I also think they appear only occasionally for good reasons.

Energy in real physics appears to me to be more of an accounting device than a thing in itself. The closest thing in real life to fictional energy beings in real physics is electromagnetic radiation. Could an intelligence be made of this? Not really. There is no internal structure to hang a brain on. Now I confess that I haven't studied quantum electrodynamics, but nothing I've ever seen in written about suggests electromagnetic fields are capable, by themselves, of the kind of complex interactions that brain cells engage in.

I also think that their may be good story reasons not to over-use energy beings or other immaterial forms in fiction. An energy being's invulnerability, while a pleasant fantasy, distances it from us. We have both the physical intuition that they are not real and a certain emotional distance from them based on the fact that they do not share the difficulties of our form of life. I think this is why when energy beings are seen in fiction, they are almost always depicted as falling into or leaving our matter bound form of existence. The circumstances where they touch are realm are more interesting to us than the idea of their existence.