Entropy has been introduced in [5] as a vehicle for
expressing four laws that can govern the minimal level of morality of an action:
0. entropy ought not to be caused in the infosphere (null law)
1. entropy ought to be prevented in the infosphere
2. entropy ought to be removed from the infosphere
3. information welfare ought to be promoted by extending (information quantity), improving
(information quality) and enriching (information variety) the infosphere.
Here we limit our interest to Cyberspace (not the whole Infosphere) and investigate possible formalisations of that idea and how it may be used in judging actions to be evil.
In thermodynamics and communication theory entropy has an absolute definition, reflecting the variety of possible states . However in order to use that idea in Cyberspace modularity and soundness require us to provide a definition that is flexible enough to describe an action as entropy-increasing in one situation but not another. Someone regarded as a valid recipient of email in one situation is regarded in another as an eavesdropper. A change to our filestore is regarded as beneficial in one situation but viral in another. Although the contents of Cyberspace are themselves entirely objective, our evaluation of them is naturally subjective. Indeed without an a priori view of what constitutes good and bad structure in Cyberspace, the notion of entropy and entropy-increasing action is in danger of becoming circular. Our proposal is to capture such a view mathematically in a concept called an entropy structure with respect to which evil actions are entropy increasing and good actions entropy decreasing.
Subsections