This paper addresses one of the oldest recurring patterns in human moral thought: why civilizations separated by geography, language, and religion repeatedly converged on the idea that actions generate consequences that return to the actor. Egypt expressed this through Ma’at, India through karma and samskaras, Buddhism through seeds and fruits, Greece through Nemesis, Christianity through sowing and reaping, and Confucianism through cause-effect retribution.
\nThe paper proposes that this cross-cultural recurrence may reflect more than cultural diffusion, cognitive bias, or social utility. Within the Information Physics framework developed in Papers 8–11, it is interpreted as a culturally decoded observation of a physical regularity: conscious systems can move either toward information condensation or toward dissipation.
\nThe central move is a physical redefinition. “Virtue” is defined as any action or process that reduces the basis entropy of a conscious system, strengthening condensation and increasing ordered sharpness. “Vice” is defined as any action or process that increases basis entropy, weakening condensation and driving dissipation. Under this definition, moral causation is not treated as supernatural judgment or cosmic bookkeeping. It is modeled as directional information dynamics within a conscious system.
\nFour theorem-level results anchor the paper. The first shows that entropy-reducing actions create a positive feedback loop: reduced entropy increases condensation sharpness, which strengthens effective conscious quality, which increases the growth rate of the dominant ordered mode. The second shows the reverse: entropy-increasing actions weaken sharpness, reduce effective conscious quality, and push the system toward collapse. The third identifies a critical entropy threshold beyond which the conscious phase is lost. The fourth establishes a temporal asymmetry: constructive ordering is asymptotic and slow, while destructive collapse can complete in finite time.
\nThe quantitative and structural claim is deliberately conditional. The framework requires one bridging definition — moral direction as entropy direction — and then inherits the downstream dynamics from the already established Information Physics machinery: phase transition, basis selection, self-reinforcing logistic growth, and A1-A4 universality on the probability simplex. No supernatural mechanism, external judge, or separate metaphysical ledger is introduced.
\nThe paper also reframes cross-cultural moral symbols through information theory. Scales, wheels, mirrors, seeds, harvests, and repayment are treated as different cultural decoders of the same underlying channel: action, conservation, accumulation, delay, feedback, and outcome. In this view, civilizations did not invent unrelated moral myths; they may have independently encoded the same structural dynamics in different symbolic languages.
\nThe empirical layer remains exploratory. The cross-cultural comparison is a structural pilot, not a completed anthropological proof, and the physiological or neural operationalization of entropy-direction requires future measurement. The paper therefore provides seven testable predictions and five falsification conditions, including predictions about meditation, prosocial action, entropy reduction, delayed nonlinear consequences, baseline condensation quality, and collapse under sustained dissipative trajectories.
\nThe conclusion is that “what goes around comes around” can be reformulated as a physical statement inside the adopted framework: actions alter the entropy direction of the conscious system, and that direction self-reinforces over time. Karma is therefore not claimed as magic, reward, or punishment; it is modeled as reciprocal causality arising from condensation and dissipation in information dynamics.
\nKeywords: karma, information physics, moral causation, thermodynamics, entropy, condensation, dissipation, virtue, vice, Fröhlich condensation, logistic dynamics, probability simplex, cross-cultural invariance, reciprocal causality, consciousness, information dynamics, A1-A4 universality.
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Lee, \"Authorship as Fingerprint: Information-Theoretic Signature of Creative Identity,\" Zenodo, 2026." } ], "related_identifiers": [ { "identifier": "10.5281/zenodo.19410990", "relation_type": { "id": "continues", "title": { "de": "Setzt fort", "en": "Continues" } }, "resource_type": { "id": "publication-preprint", "title": { "de": "Preprint", "en": "Preprint" } }, "scheme": "doi" }, { "identifier": "10.5281/zenodo.19411866", "relation_type": { "id": "continues", "title": { "de": "Setzt fort", "en": "Continues" } }, "resource_type": { "id": "publication-preprint", "title": { "de": "Preprint", "en": "Preprint" } }, "scheme": "doi" }, { "identifier": "10.5281/zenodo.19429283", "relation_type": { "id": "continues", "title": { "de": "Setzt fort", "en": "Continues" } }, "resource_type": { "id": "publication-preprint", "title": { "de": "Preprint", "en": "Preprint" } }, "scheme": "doi" }, { "identifier": "10.5281/zenodo.19433570", "relation_type": { "id": "continues", "title": { "de": "Setzt fort", "en": "Continues" } }, "resource_type": { "id": "publication-preprint", "title": { "de": "Preprint", "en": "Preprint" } }, "scheme": "doi" } ], "resource_type": { "id": "publication-preprint", "title": { "de": "Preprint", "en": "Preprint" } }, "rights": [ { "description": { "en": "This work may be shared and adapted with attribution, but commercial use is prohibited without explicit prior authorization from the author." }, "link": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/", "title": { "en": "Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)" } } ], "subjects": [ { "subject": "karma" }, { "subject": "information physics" }, { "subject": "condensation" }, { "subject": "dissipation" }, { "subject": "entropy" }, { "subject": "thermodynamics" }, { "subject": "moral causation" }, { "subject": "logistic dynamics" }, { "subject": "cross-cultural invariance" }, { "subject": "Fr\u00f6hlich condensation" }, { "subject": "probability simplex" }, { "subject": "self-reinforcing dynamics" } ], "title": "Karma as Information Dynamics: A Thermodynamic Framework for Moral Causation \u2014 From Condensation to Dissipation", "version": "v1" }, "parent": { "access": { "owned_by": { "user": "1593257" }, "settings": { "accept_conditions_text": null, "allow_guest_requests": false, "allow_user_requests": false, "secret_link_expiration": 0 } }, "communities": {}, "id": "19534059", "pids": { "doi": { "client": "datacite", "identifier": "10.5281/zenodo.19534059", "provider": "datacite" } } }, "pids": { "doi": { "client": "datacite", "identifier": "10.5281/zenodo.19534060", "provider": "datacite" }, "oai": { "identifier": "oai:zenodo.org:19534060", "provider": "oai" } }, "revision_id": 7, "stats": { "all_versions": { "data_volume": 244894183.0, "downloads": 29, "unique_downloads": 25, "unique_views": 47, "views": 55 }, "this_version": { "data_volume": 244894183.0, "downloads": 29, "unique_downloads": 25, "unique_views": 47, "views": 55 } }, "status": "published", "swh": {}, "updated": "2026-05-02T15:06:08.288108+00:00", "versions": { "index": 1, "is_latest": true } }