Gödel and the Cyberspace: Rethinking Cyberethics

Document Type : Original article

Authors

1 Department of Communication and Cyberspace Studies, Institute for Social and Cultural Studies, Ministry of Science, Research and Technology, Iran.

2 Department of Political Scient, Payame Noor University of Markazi Province, Tehran, Iran.

10.22059/jcss.2024.371183.1099

Abstract

One of the epistemological debates on Cyberethics is the ethical implications of indeterminacy in cyberspace which results from its inherent zero-infinity binary logic. Since this logic is both of linguistic and mathematical nature, we contend that it can be discursively problematized. The central question here is: how can cyberethics be talked about in light of the fact that the zero-one binary in the cyberspace is regenerated endlessly and infinitely despite our invariant situation? The second question to be touch upon is: How can the problem of indeterminacy in the cyberspace leads to a crisis in our real -world cognitive schemas? Given that the indeterminacy in the cyberspace originates from a syntactic shift in its verification-falsification logic, we argue that this logic can be problematized by Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem together with Cantor’s continuum hypothesis. To this end, the present paper situates itself within the axiomatic apparatus of these two scholars to rethink the cyberethics. It is an exploratory qualitative research, based on deductive approach, seeking to unearth an underresearched problem based on existing hypotheses. Methodologically, it is subsumed under library research for its drawing on books and theories that are directly relevant to the research problem at hand.

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