A Review Deferred, an Essay Unfolding: The Changing Rhythm of My Toyin Falola Studies: The​ Money Guzzling Seductions of ChatGPT and a Meeting Between Eshu and Al-Gahazali: News from the Toyin Falola Studies Review 2

[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

                                                                      A Review Deferred, an Essay Unfolding

 

                                                                  The Changing Rhythm of My Toyin Falola Studies

 

                                                                     The Money Guzzling Seductions of ChatGPT 

 

                                                                                                    and a 

 

                                                                      Meeting Between  Eshu and Al-Ghazali

                                                                News  from the Toyin Falola Studies Review 2

 

         

                               Prepared Manuscripts and an Unfolding Horizon of Thought in the Form of an Emerging Tree of Knowledge

 

                                                                                         Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
                                                                                                        Compcros

                                                                                Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems

                                                                                            Abstract

An explanation for delays in publishing the Toyin Falola Studies Review in terms of changing work rhythms emerging from my adjustment to the usage limits of ChatGPT’s richer settings and the unexpected expansion of an essay on Falola’s metaphysics, epistemology and spirituality. Theory texts for the Review are ready and automated weekly surveys for the Review remain in place. For now, I am following the essay’s developing possibilities, which may lead to a significant contribution to Falola Studies and related fields. Illustrated with images by ChatGPT.

The Toyin Falola Studies Review for last week is yet unpublished. That for this week might also be late.This is because I am learning how to navigate the usage management strategy of ChatGPT which produces the Review. This strategy involves various levels of sophistication even within the Plus level of usage I am subscribed to. Also, I am held in the grip  of a particular Falola essay I'm working on, its seductions promising possibilities emerging on the horizon as the composition proceeds.

ChatGPT's  survey of the preceding week's Falola related activities  which was to be published last week,  my essay on theory generation using Chat, an essay by Chat developing the theoretical framework it subsequently  used in further analysing the survey  and the application of that framework to the survey, as well as the survey of last week's activities are all ready. 

Navigating ChatGPT's Usage Levels

Those aspects of the  processes involving Chat have taken longer than they have previously done because of my running into Chat's usage management strategies on Astra 6-max, the most sophisticated tier available in Plus, the plan I am subscribed to. 

A few minutes of work using Astra 6-max   in relation to such complex tasks as asking the AI to apply a theoretical model to analyzing an information structure and vivifying it using its own self created images, could lead to the AI shutting down, asking you to buy credits or upgrade to the next level, Pro, because such complex work using  Astra 6-max   computing power uses up in a few minutes the five hour work allocation on Plus,   or you wait for some hours for the system to reset itself so you have access to another five hours.

Having repeatedly encountered this circumscription, I have reset my usage of Chat to Astra 6 medium, close to the most sophisticated level but more economical with use of the time allocated by the AI.Even with this, however, my experience suggests I might need to recalibrate the settings to even lower levels if I am not to keep coming up against Chat's usage restrictions.

 Having downgraded my requirements of the AI to a lower level than GPT6-Astra, the AI suggested I ask it to suggest a website project to me so it could build the site. I asked it to make the suggestion. It did so in one line then informed me that ''You’re out of Work usage for now: Upgrade or add credits to keep using Work now, or wait for your usage to reset on Saturday''.

Responding to the only task it has performed for me today, on a Tuesday, a very basic task the AI suggested it perform for me, and having tantalized me with the possibilities involved in that task, the AI is informing me that I have used up my work allowance for the day and would need to wait until Saturday to use the platform again after my work access has reset. The waiting time has now stretched from five hours in the same day to more than three days. Is this an effort to manipulate me?

                

                    

                                                       The Hourglass of Access and the Search for a Sustainable Rhythm of Inquiry

                    

The Seductive Emergence of a New Essay

While navigating this new discovery, I updated ''The Scholar at the Threshold of Mystery: Gratitude, Scholarship, and the African Quest for the Ultimate: Transforming Gratitude into Prayer from Toyin Falola's Acknowledgements in Ifa Priestcraft: Ifayemi Elebuibon and Yoruba Ancestral Knowledge Systems'', expanding its introduction and central body content.

After that,   I commenced an essay partly inspired by the expansions to that piece,  ''Between Eshu and Al-Ghazali:From the Threshold to the Crossroads and the Cosmos: Intersections of Spirit and Intellect in Toyin Falola’s Metaphysics, Epistemology and Spirituality within Yoruba Religious Plurality''.

The essay's preliminary statement of vision:

This essay is motivated by the convergences between Falola’s memoirs and his acknowledgements in Ifa Priestcraft as demonstrating a multi-religious spirituality and metaphysics as a lived reality, a way of life amplified by his private correspondence describing relationships between his inward spiritual universe and his scholarship.

This convergence between spiritual subjectivity and intellectual expression is complemented by his purely intellectual work, where he ranges across the breadth of spiritualities in Africa, focusing particularly on the indigenous spirituality of his  Yoruba people.

Falola’s multi-religious culture and scholarship is correlative with his pluriversalist epistemology in such works as "Ritual Archives" and ''Pluriversalism''  where he argues for varied but complementary ways and standpoints of knowing, rooted in the intersections of diverse civilizations.

A crossroads epistemology, it may be called, evoking Eshu, the Yoruba cosmology deity of the crossroads, of hermeneutic, spiritual and general life intersections, correlative with Islamic thinker Al Ghazali's image of the "dihliz", the threshold space from which one may see into and interact with various cognitive possibilities.

One may refer, therefore, to Falola's “Pluriversalist Metaphysics and Epistemology’’ integrating various windows on the meaning of the universe and how to explore this meaning, a metaphysical and epistemic unity that is for him both subjective and objective, spiritual and intellectual, inward and outward, as it oscillates between various expressive forms and even combines them within one unit, as in integrating the essay and poetry or autobiographical narrative and poetry.

This essay continues to expand as it holds me in its delicious grip. I intend to work on the Review and the essay concurrently.  The essay has  potential I'm only beginning to glimpse, which could make  significant contributions to Falola Studies and ancillary fields. 

The essay's reference to the Eshu and Al-Ghazali correlation first emerged in one paragraph and I did not intend to expand the conjunction beyond that brief reference. However, when I asked DeepSeek and Chat to suggest titles for the essay, DeepSeek produced a suggestion which placed the Eshu and Al-Ghazali conjunction at the beginning of the title, intriguing me with the possibility of developing that correlation in a substantial way in the essay, thereby giving birth to a new structure of knowledge weaving together two civilizations, two metaphoric standpoints from two different worlds-classical Yoruba thought and Islam.

Such a development would dramatise the essay's subject through a structure of knowledge that goes beyond the essay, introducing each universe to readers already familiar with the other-the Eshu universe and the Al Ghazali cosmos-developing a theoretical framework applicable beyond the essay in which it is  formulated. I could begin with an introductory essay and develop the idea further in other compositions.

I could ask Chat to develop the theory, as I have already done did with the Uli/Nsibidi hermeneutic, yet unpublished, but I prefer to take on this task and thereby enrich my own creative powers in the process, becoming a creator not simply a consumer of AI generated knowledge. In the light of such a growing sensitivity, I am considering developing the Uli/Nsibidi hermeneutic by myself as the primary creator, using Chat as consultant and editor.

           

                        

                                     From the Threshold to the Crossroads and the Cosmos: An Essay Opening Into Further Possibilities