Human knowledge is divided into necessary and speculative or deductive. Necessary knowledge is knowledge that cannot be doubted and speculative knowledge is ‘acquired’ by deduction from necessary knowledge and sense perception. The Islamic theologian ‘Adud al-Din al- ‘Iji (d. 756/1355) stated that humans are gifted with innate reason, necessary knowledge and the capacity for speculation and deductive reasoning. The purpose of these faculties is to reflect on revelation and creation to come to the realisation of the existence of God and they extend beyond the realm of sense perception to the metaphysical or spiritual realm, as well as the microcosmic and macrocosmic, as mentioned in Qur’an 41:53, which states: “We shall show them Our portents on the horizons and within themselves.”
Reason and rationality thus have a cosmological dimension and are related to the very nature of the universe, which was created with an intrinsic order and intelligibility. This view of reason and rationality stands in contrast to the reductive logic of means–ends forms of rationality that instrumentalise means in the pursuit of narrow utilitarian ends and is the type of rationality that is embodied by computers, and especially AI systems, which are trained to optimise their parameters based on ‘reward functions’ given by their designers.
It is important to note that a bifurcation between discursive and intuitive modes of thinking never occurred in Islamic thought as it did in Western metaphysics. Instead, the intellect comprises both functions of logical analysis and intuitive knowledge. Empirical, rational, conceptual, moral and spiritual modes of thought are all united in Islamic thought.
There is, therefore, a correspondence between reality and the intellect in terms of the intelligibility of reality and the registration of signs in the intellect and their signification. Hence, rather than meaning being superimposed by the mind, as in the case of a Kantian agent, the function of the intellect is to discover the universal principles and intrinsic intelligibility of the cosmos, and to participate in this intelligible order itself by doing so.
This opens the question of whether the multidimensional nature of the human mind and intelligence in Islamic thought implies a limit to what can be achieved in the quest for artificial general intelligence (AGI). From an Islamic perspective, AI research takes place in a context that is twice removed from reality as it is. The first veil is materialism or physicalism, which circumscribe what can be known about reality to what can be described quantitatively in mathematical terms. The second is that AI agents exist in a digital realm that is a further abstraction of the material world into a digital format. AI research works from behind this second veil and problems such as common sense and abstraction with limited data remain insurmountable challenges.
There are various attempts to provide a formal definition of intelligence in mathematical terms. In contrast to the interrelation between intelligence, consciousness and life in Islamic thought, a significant and often unstated presupposition held by AI researchers is that intelligence can be decoupled from consciousness, and indeed the phenomenon of life. In Islamic thought, on the other hand, intelligence, consciousness and life are unified through the existence of the soul.
The modern word ‘algorithm’ is derived from the Latinisation of al-Khwarizmi (c. 780–850 ce) whose work on algebra in the early ninth century influenced the development of European algebra. Al-Khwarizmi produced his mathematical works with the aim of aiding legal scholars in issues such as property relations, trade, calculating inheritance and wills according to Islamic law. It is an ironic turn of history that today’s algorithms are more often associated with surveillance, discrimination and dispossession in the logic of surveillance capitalism.
The vast Islamic intellectual tradition, which remains relatively unexplored in relation to AI, can be the source of crucial insights to resist the dehumanising tendencies of a mechanistic, materialistic and techno-scientific study of the mind and intelligence.
- Taken from Dr. Yaqoub Chaudhary’s article entitled "Islam and Artificial Intelligence" published in ‘The Cambridge Companion to Religion and Artificial Intelligence’
