Philosophical Underpinnings of Artificial Intelligence and the Concept of Human Soul in Islam: Some Issues at the Interface
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Abstract
Can machines think like humans do? Is the mind essentially a physical entity like a machine? A particular view on the nature of the human mind and intelligence, i.e. the computational theory of mind, appears either to be the basis of, or to have taken inspiration from, the field of Artificial Intelligence. The theory aims to explain intelligence by only resorting to physical explanation. This might run counter to the worldview of Islam since Islam acknowledges the existence of a spiritual substance, i.e., the nafs (soul), in addition to the body and affirms its role in explaining human intelligence. Therefore, this article discusses some issues stemming from the interface between the philosophical underpinnings of Artificial Intelligence and Islam. Two strands of the computational theory of mind, i.e. strong symbol system hypothesis and connectionism, are elaborated. The Islamic conception of the human soul is adopted from the works of Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas. It is shown that whereas the computational theory of mind regards intelligence and knowledge as purely physical, the Islamic conception of the human soul argues that the soul and the knowledge imprinted upon it are nonphysical. The disagreement is further illustrated by analysing examples from the current AI limitations: “adversarial examples” in visual abstraction, syntaxsemantics distinction, and abduction as a “leap” in reasoning.
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