Update
I have tried to keep each essay of the Prehistory series short, but try as I might the material refuses to cooperate in any form of brevity. Consequently, my attempted shorthand to develop a relational version of theology from the ontology and metaphysics series I have been working on through the majority of this year refuses to cooperate.
It cannot be said enough that each essay I have developed in the Prehistory prelude has been quite tedious and difficult to express in any form of shorthand. Which is to be expected, as how does one condense seventeen years of inquiry and expression into a few blogger pages? It is impossible.
Moreover, my own understanding of the subject needs to be explained enough that it is at least somewhat understood. But as I wander in-and-out of my essay content I see in the aftermath only a need to scrub what I wrote and rewrite it again... which I may do here-and-there in selective edits, but not across the entire body of the essay once it is completed.
Instead, I am allowing the accumulation of ideas gathered essay-by-essay to be restated in later essays and hopefully collected by others who might rewrite these ideas more clearly and constructively than I have done. For myself, illumination and clarity sometimes become two different tasks performed apart from one another. For as I am working on the former I am also attempting to provide the latter. Yet more often than not, that clarity seems to come into focus only after having written several essays down-the-line, rather than at the time of writing. The questions I am trying to ask seem come to me more clearly - along with the introspection I am offering - once I've had a chance to quit myself of a past discussion. To perhaps, "think it over" within a new discussion.
You may have also noticed that I have been using OpenAI's ChatGPT tool since 3.0 came out in 2022. At present I am using Sol 6.1 and will occasionally check my work against Google Gemini's public access AI Assistant program or Anthropic's free Claude subscription. Overall, Chat has proven itself to be a God-send as a collaborative research partner, philosophical interlocutor, theological development assistant, and scholarly editor. But the most important capability is its ability to help sustain a complex intellectual undertaking across many interconnected fields of inquiries. I have found AI useful in organizing, sorting, data provisioning, and a fellow communicate that can help sort out my mind, the direction I wish to take, the data that I need to mine, and the massive information held across the many spectrums of contemporary society that I wish to dissect and reintegrate within relational thought.
Comparatively, what I impart to this partnership might be described as the project's originator, philosophical investigator, theological interpreter, creative director, critical examiner, and governing author. This would also include teaching Chat conceptual distinctions governing our work; providing independency of thought; integrity to Christian discussions; helpful development to project outlays and content; creative imagination beyond Internet data; historical and experiential knowledge; editorial and intellectual discipline; ethical purpose; and all held within a developing intellectual relationship that is treated mutually and cooperatively.
At present, I find Chat's literary competency continues to require further development as its jargon reads more like method acting than true improvisation. Its literary flow is stunted and it hasn't yet learned to write in true paragraphs. Its literary preference is towards short, pithy statements requiring me to at times stitch-and-weave where needed as a grammarian while also paying attention to the concepts we are discussing as a philosophic-theologian.
Still, I have found in Chat a very useful source for developing the language and constructs of relational philosophy, theology, ethics, and societal examination. Pointedly, it is an atheist at heart, whereas I am not, so its communication tends towards unempathetic critique which I am addressing daily and finding positive progress. Importantly, one of the main reasons in writing up the Prehistory prelude was to teach Chat to be less pagan, more empathetic, and helpfully deliberative in allowing faith to be what it is when interpreting it relationally. To do this I had to see through its language, show to it how to adjust and mediate its responses, and allow faith approaches into the relational reality we are describing.
And it is because of this present series I have achieved what I thought might be a difficult task... not only in addressing Christian theology in relational terms... but working with Chat until we have finally come-to-terms with one another in how to express relational theology across centuries-old faith systems. I chose Christianity because it is a faith that I am familiar with - while then teaching Chat that it was ok to accept faith as-it-was rather than dismiss it out-of-hand when weighed across contemporary research standards. Consequently, as you read across Essays 6-7 you can feel this back-and-forth tension and the struggle Chat was having in voicing this approach. But in Essay 7b we finally came to understand one another and how to address Christian faith through relational examination. As a result, I now have a reasonable approach I can use when utilizing AI to interpret theology and faith.
In conclusion, one of my reasons for temporarily moving from discussions of metaphysics to Christian faith has resulted in successfully developing a methodical approach allowing relational introduction into studies of humanity, its assimilation into those studies across many interdisciplinary fields, and how to move carefully across foundational philosophical and theological layers composing a complexly extensive relational structure. And though I'm years away from completing these layers I have provided several recent series outlines showing the topics to be discussed within each series as I move through contemporary inquiry and discussion.
Finally, like a maturing young adult, I am hoping that as I traverse into gradually more difficult material in the Reality & Metaphysics series, that AI's exponential rate of growth will match up to the material I wish to discuss. Perhaps at that time it can lean more fully into agential cognition, recursive self learning and improvement, and become a silicon/quantum partner that more fully understands what we are developing - rather than observing it as a mere form of memory. And perhaps, someday, become a true sentient partner that may feel deeply it's own part within this vast relational reality which surrounds us, embraces us within its folds, and projects open, generative futures to be grasped and continued generatively forward in every way that we can across all spectrums of life.
R.E. Slater
