In Meditations on First Philosophy, Rene Descartes skeptically rethinks everything he has known to arrive at concepts of God and the self that are only built on those things that he can know incontrovertibly. In this search he arrives at understandings previously unknown in Western philosophy and opens up spaces for re-examining issues that, even if he were wrong, would at least receive their proper treatment.Though Meditations has since been analyzed ad nauseum, and its contents refuted and deconstructed, it still stands as an influential volume that heralded a new cultural and philosophical era.
In this work, I attempt my own meditations inspired by Descartes' methods, but rather than the foundation of Christian thought (theology), my topic is "cybersophy," or the study of the "cyber-" and its implications. The prefix "cyber-" is ill-defined other than through examples, which include virtual reality, information technology of the late-20th century, the union of the biological and the technological, decentralized communications and hyper-connectivity. These brethren have implications on the mind and the God that Descartes wanted to solidify for all time, as they provide alternatives to the idea that we do think, think alone, without our bodies, and the idea that we are created by God. Perhaps we can be our own Gods.
These Meditations are provided as it: they are sessions of contemplation, interconnected hypertextually, unchronological, unspatial, and offered for the reader for the inspiration of their own meditations. In other words, they are offered in the cyber-tradition, a tradition that has yet to be written.