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Wai Finding: Rethinking Human Intelligence in the Age of AI

Wai Finding: Rethinking Human Intelligence in the Age of AIWai Finding: Learning to Bow in Age of AIWai Finding: Bowing With, Not to, a New Age of Artificially Aided Human IntelligenceIn the religious studies classroom, students often ask what a religion believes, says, or teaches. These are natural questions, but they point to something subtle: we tend to speak as if religions themselves have a single, unified voice. As if “religion” can declare, demand, or judge. But that’s rarely how traditions actually work.
Religions are shaped by texts and doctrines, yes—but also by communities, interpretations, disagreements, and centuries of change. When we say “a religion says…,” we’re usually drawing on a whole history of voices, often in tension with each other. Attributing agency to “religion” as if it were a person can flatten all of that complexity.
Lately, a similar question is emerging around artificial intelligence: When AI responds, who—or what—is actually speaking?
I. Wai, Not Just Way
Wai finding is a play on the word wayfinding, which refers to traditional methods of navigation using the stars, winds, tides, and memory. Wai—in Thai culture—is also a gesture: palms pressed together, head slightly bowed. It’s a greeting, a farewell, and a sign of respect. In religious contexts, it can express devotion or reverence for elders, monks, the Buddha—or even the sacredness of another person.
So wai finding gestures toward a different way of engaging with the world we now find ourselves in—one increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence. It’s not a method or system, exactly, but a posture: moving with intention, humility, and care. Not rushing headlong into new technologies, but pausing to ask what they mean, what they do, and how they shape us in return.
This isn’t about revering AI. It’s about reverence for what’s at stake.
II. Wai as Water
There’s another meaning of wai. In many Polynesian languages—like Māori and Hawaiian—it means water. Water is life-giving, connective, cleansing. It flows through stories and landscapes. It adapts. It carves paths and fills containers. And, depending on how it’s handled, it can also overwhelm.
AI, in many ways, behaves like water. It moves quickly. It fills whatever structure we design for it. It can nourish our thinking—but it can also destabilize it. It can bring clarity or chaos.
Wai finding, then, is about learning to move with this current—not against it, but also not being swept away. It’s about staying afloat in fast-moving waters. It’s about adapting with balance, not just reacting.
III. The Acceleration of Knowing
One of the most dramatic changes AI brings is the speed at which we can learn and think.
This isn’t just about faster search results. With tools like large language models, we’re engaging with something that feels more like a partner in conversation—drawing from a wide (if uneven) pool of human knowledge. We revise, ask follow-ups, get feedback. It’s not static information. It’s interactive, fluid, and sometimes surprisingly insightful.
That shift changes things:
- We think faster.
- We discover connections more quickly.
- We can deepen understanding in real time.
It challenges the idea of what it means to be a learner, a teacher, or even a thinker. And for many, it opens new possibilities—intellectually, creatively, even spiritually. At its best, AI can spark insight and reveal blind spots. It can help us think differently.
IV. Slowness, Not Denial
Still, none of this is simple.
There are real and urgent concerns:
- Bias: AI systems mirror the biases in their training data.
- Misinformation: They can be wrong—and sound confident while doing it.
- Surveillance and exploitation: The infrastructure depends on data extraction, sometimes without consent.
- Environmental cost: Running these systems uses enormous energy.
- Job disruption: Entire industries are shifting faster than people can adapt.
- Privacy: Our identities are increasingly commodified.
- Overdependence: The more we rely on AI to think for us, the more we risk forgetting how to do it ourselves.
These issues aren’t reasons to abandon the technology. But they’re exactly why we need to slow down and pay attention. To be intentional. To act with care.
Wai finding, in this light, becomes a kind of discernment. A steadying gesture in a fast-moving world.
V. Who’s Speaking?
We often hear religious phrases like “we believe” or “our tradition teaches.” But who’s actually speaking? A religious authority? A community? A contested history of voices?
AI presents a similar puzzle. When it speaks, whose voice are we hearing? It’s trained on human language—our books, our websites, our conversations. But it doesn’t just echo back what we say. It reshapes it. It filters and recombines and sometimes fabricates. It’s familiar, but not quite ours.
In both cases—religion and AI—we’re dealing with a kind of mediated voice. Something partly ours, partly other. Something that requires interpretation.
This is where wai finding becomes useful. It helps us stay present in moments of uncertainty, where meaning is emerging rather than fixed.
VI. Bowing Our Heads Toward the Future
At the end of class, I sometimes return to the image of the wai—a small, quiet gesture. It’s simple, almost automatic. But it carries weight. It says: I acknowledge this moment. I recognize the other. I approach with care.
As we move deeper into the age of AI, that kind of gesture feels increasingly necessary. A reminder not just to ask what we can do, but what we should do—and how we want to show up in the process.
Wai finding is not about slowing down to a stop. It’s about learning how to move—thoughtfully, respectfully, and together.
We don’t bow to the machine. We bow to each other. We bow to the complexity of what we’re building. And we bow to the unknown future we’re stepping into.
We’re not just using new tools. We’re part of something larger—an unfolding, recursive process that’s changing how we know, how we relate, and how we imagine.
Wai finding is how we learn to swim—without forgetting to bow.

dialogue one

this is religion

Religion is not what you think it is. Or rather, it is—but also what you’d never think to include.Ask ten scholars to define religion and you’ll get twelve definitions, each circling a moving target. Some will tell you it’s about gods, rituals, myths. Others will point to structures of power, identity, community, or awe. And still others will tell you the category itself is a modern fiction—less a thing in the world than a way of seeing.1. The Elusive Object
At first glance, religion seems obvious. Temples, prayers, scriptures, moral codes. But scratch a little deeper and the boundaries blur. Is Buddhism a religion if it denies a creator God? Is Marxism a religion in its ritualized language and eschatological promises? What about nationalism? Or consumerism?Attempts to define religion often reveal more about the definer than the defined.For theologians, religion may be an ultimate concern, a path to the divine.
For anthropologists, it’s a system of symbols that makes the world meaningful.
For cognitive scientists, it’s a byproduct of evolved pattern-recognition.
For critical theorists, it may be a tool of colonial control—or a site of resistance.
2. A Category Born of Comparison
The very word religion comes to us filtered through centuries of Christian European thought. When early scholars encountered radically different traditions across the globe, they began applying the term retroactively—seeking equivalents to “church,” “scripture,” “God.” But in many cultures, no such equivalent existed.As scholar J.Z. Smith provocatively wrote, “Religion is not a native term... it is a term created by scholars for their intellectual purposes.” That doesn’t mean the category is useless—but it does mean it’s unstable, shaped by who’s asking the question and why.3. Still, It Persists
Despite definitional chaos, religion endures—both as a lived reality and a subject of study. It shapes identities, undergirds ethics, justifies wars, inspires revolutions. It organizes birth, marriage, death. It whispers to us in grief and joy. Whether it’s practiced with fervent devotion or analyzed from a distance, religion won’t go away. Maybe it never was a thing. Maybe it’s a mode.A mode of reaching beyond oneself.A way of telling stories that hold a people together.A pattern of gestures and silences that render the world meaningful.4. So—This Is Religion
Religion is myth and metaphor, code and culture. It’s the cry of a child’s first prayer and the chant of monks on mountain paths. It’s also the bureaucratic form you fill out under “affiliation,” and the algorithmic logic behind religious content recommendations. It is wonder and weapon, sanctuary and surveillance.In this space—rAIligion—we explore not only what religion is, but how we’ve learned to ask the question.We do so knowing that to define religion is to take a risk.And maybe, just maybe, that’s part of the point.

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dialogue two

the origins of the universe

Ex Nihilo? On the Origins of EverythingDid the universe come from nothing? Or was it created—from God, or some primordial force?This ancient question sits at the crossroads of science, philosophy, and theology. It remains unsolved—not for lack of inquiry, but because the very concepts we’re dealing with (“nothing,” “creation,” “beginning”) resist simple answers.1. The Scientific Landscape: Something from Nothing?
The Big Bang Theory remains our best model for how the universe has evolved over the last 13.8 billion years. But crucially, the Big Bang is not a theory of absolute origin—only of what happened after a certain point. What came “before”? Physics goes silent.Some theories attempt to fill the gap:Quantum cosmology proposes that universes can emerge from a “quantum vacuum”—but this vacuum isn’t nothing. It’s a realm with structure, laws, and fluctuating energy.
Inflationary models and multiverse theories imagine our universe as one among many, potentially arising from deeper, perhaps eternal, quantum processes.
The Hartle-Hawking “no-boundary” proposal removes the need for a singular starting point by modeling time as curving smoothly into space—eliminating the “beginning” altogether.
In each case, the “nothing” from which something comes turns out to be...something.2. Philosophical Reflections: Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?
The question goes back at least to Leibniz: Why is there something rather than nothing at all?Some theistic traditions answer: God. A necessary, eternal being brought the universe into existence ex nihilo (from nothing), not from prior material but by divine will alone.Others resist the question itself. Naturalist philosophers argue that the universe, or the multiverse, may simply be a brute fact—unexplained and uncaused. After all, invoking God just raises a new question: Why is there God rather than nothing?Some thinkers even question whether “nothing” is a coherent concept. Can we even imagine pure nothingness without smuggling in some shadow of being?3. Where Things Stand
Today, we find ourselves in a moment of creative uncertainty.Science gives us remarkable tools to model how the universe behaves, but its reach may stop short of ultimate beginnings.
Philosophy keeps the deeper questions alive, without offering easy resolutions.
Theology continues to ground the mystery in divine intention or being, though not without its own internal debates.
In short: we don’t know whether something came from nothing, or from something deeper than we can comprehend. But we keep asking—not just because we want answers, but because the asking itself points toward what it means to be human.

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dialogue three

Rethinking the "Material" Dimension in the Study of Religion

Ninian Smart’s influential seven-dimensional model of religion includes “material” culture as a key category, encompassing sacred spaces, art, and objects. Yet this category has always felt awkwardly situated. Materiality, after all, is a feature of virtually all social phenomena—not unique to religion. A more robust and theoretically coherent approach would view these so-called “material” aspects as expressions of a deeper symbolic-linguistic dimension. What renders an object or space “religious” is not its physical composition, but its embeddedness in a web of signs, stories, and interpretive practices. A temple, relic, or icon becomes sacred not in isolation, but by participating in narrative, ritual, and theological contexts that give it meaning. By collapsing the “material” into the symbolic-linguistic, we avoid reifying objects and better capture how religious worlds are constructed—through language, performance, and imagination.Draft Title: Post-Material Material: Reclassification and the Symbolic in Religious StudiesNinian Smart’s influential seven-dimensional model of religion includes "material" culture as one of its key categories, encompassing sacred spaces, art, architecture, relics, and ritual objects. While this inclusion rightly highlights the tangible dimensions of religious life, the category of "material" has long felt theoretically underarticulated. More than a reflection of Smart's original framework, its current application often tends to isolate materiality as a standalone feature of religion. This essay argues that such a treatment risks reifying religious objects and underappreciating the interpretive systems in which they are embedded.Rather than treating materiality as a discrete dimension, I propose we view so-called "material" forms as nodal points within broader symbolic-linguistic, ritual, and imaginative systems. In this reframing, a temple, icon, or sacred garment is not religious because of its physicality alone, but because of its participation in a network of meaning: narrative, ritual action, theological significance, historical memory, and aesthetic formation. To use a familiar semiotic analogy, the object is not the signifier in isolation but part of a dynamic signifying chain.This perspective does not seek to collapse material into language per se, nor to deny the sensory and affective power of things. It instead aims to resist analytic reification—a persistent problem in religious studies, where categories like "ritual," "belief," or "material" are sometimes treated as if they refer to separable ontological entities rather than contingent academic classifications. Talal Asad's critiques of essentialism and David Chidester's work on classification underscore the need for continued reflexivity about the tools we use to describe religious life.At the same time, this intervention is meant as a bridge to the vibrant field of material religion. Scholars like David Morgan, Birgit Meyer, and S. Brent Plate have demonstrated how sensory experience, aesthetic force, and the agency of objects shape religious life in ways that cannot be reduced to discourse. Rather than oppose these insights, my proposal aims to supplement them: material forms matter because they are already enmeshed in symbolic systems, often long before they are touched, seen, or carried.By rethinking Smart’s material category through this lens, we can better understand how religious worlds are constructed—not by cataloguing objects, but by tracing how those objects acquire and transmit meaning. This shift also opens space to revisit broader methodological questions: How have classificatory schemes shaped the way we imagine religion itself? What are the consequences of holding on to dimensions that may no longer serve a productive analytic function? And how might a reorientation toward signification and classification offer new ways forward in the study of religion?This essay is ultimately not a rejection of Smart, but a call for renewed theoretical clarity. If we treat classification as a live issue, rather than a settled map, we may discover more porous and dynamic ways to think about what religion is, what it does, and how we can continue to study it with intellectual rigor and creativity.

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