On AI view from Muslim Perspective and Spatial Intelligence
Alright. It’s been more than a month since my last articles. There’s a lot that I have to do. Juggling between work, studies (currently doing postgraduate research) and building/experimenting with AI. Owh forgot to mention about life there, as everyone else I also have a life.
But here I am now, try to squeeze in some free time that I have ensuring that my Medium/ Substack/ Linkedin newsletter (or wherever you read this on) are not sitting there collecting dust. So this time, I’m writing about something quite simple, not discussing about technical or AI fundamentals. But about philosphical discussion (light philosophical discussion) on the I might say Islamic fundamentalist view on AI (at least one of the view) and what I means to me as a researcher and try to tie that in to what I’m currently thinking.
There’s no apparent flow here in what I’m writing. So just take it as a rambling for now (haha), and hopefully it does make sense to you as readers and might be in some ways beneficial.
So where was I? Ah…the article…
The Article…
I might have understated it here. It’s not a simple article. It’s a fully fledge research articles. Written by two Islamic scholars from Malaysia. Dr Khalif Muammar and Dr Muhammad Ikhwan from UTM.
The article is published by Universiti Malaya, with the title “The Question of Intelligence in the Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence”. You may read the entire article here, for free
The Question of Intelligence in the Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence
Al-Attas, Syed Muhammad Naquib. Islam and Secularism. Kuala Lumpur: ISTAC, 1993. Al-Attas, Syed Muhammad Naquib. Islam…ejournal.um.edu.my
The article itself is beautifully written. I have a lot of fun reading it. The way it was structured thematically with its main thesis, and the way they present their ideas is clear to understand and written in powerful narrative.
I will just simplify it for you here, the main ideas is to challenge the notion of artificial intelligence from the word of intelligence itself. It challenge whether machines can have intelligence. From the western perspective, the part that sticks to me is on the words of Dreyfus who is a vocal critics on AI.
Dreyfus mentions that the pursuit of AI is akin to chasing the philosophers stone. He said that it is impossible for machines to truly think like humans or match the human intellect. The core reason provided for this is that machines fundamentally lack a body and the real-world context necessary for genuine understanding a concept the article identifies as “being-in-the-world”.
The articles added further that, the development of AI stems from the philosophical believe of materialism, which view the world on materialistic believe that devoid from its spiritual part. And that bring us to the Islamic view.
Islamic scholars like Al-Ghazali and Al-Attas hold that true intelligence comes from the soul, which only humans possess. So, when we call AI ‘intelligent,’ it’s just a metaphor. Machines can mimic intelligent behavior, but they don’t have real intellect or consciousness.
From this, the writers went so far to say that AGI (artificial general intelligent) and ASI (artificial super intelligent) simply cannot exist and the development of it might fail. That might bring us to the terminology debate which I kind of don’t want to get into.
But I do want to point out the words of Herbert Dreyfus, on concept of “being-in-the-world”. That brings us to the next topic, “Spatial Intelligence”
Spatial Intelligence
Just a few days ago, Dr Fei Fei Li, the godmother of AI has been invited to speak at Y-combinator, an event for startups. At there she speaks about her company and her pursuit of spatial intelligence.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li is credited as the first person who allowed AI to “see.” Her ImageNet is the groundbreaking dataset that enabled computers to recognize and classify images at scale. By providing millions of labeled images across thousands of categories, ImageNet became the foundation for deep learning breakthroughs in computer vision. This work sparked the modern era of AI image recognition, making possible today’s advances in everything from facial recognition to self-driving cars.
Her spatial intelligence pursuit will allow AI to “being-in-the-world” as criticized by Dreyfus. By putting more contextual understanding, it will teach AI to move beyond recognizing objects in static images, aiming instead for a deeper understanding of the physical world and how things relate in space.
As you can see here, there’s a lot of benefits of reading and understanding the differing views on AI. At least from a philosophical viewpoint. Although we agree with the main themes of the articles, but there are some part of it that can help us to identify the weakness of current AI and allows us to improve it further.
Alright, my head almost to the point of exploding, so that’s all for today. Thanks.
+1
Thank you for highlighting the UM article.
Based on what you shared, our thoughts may be around same vicinity 🙂
As we slowly inched our way to AGI/ASI, at some point we have to reconcile with our own faith and value system. At some threshold as we unlock the ability to build more “intelligent” systems, it’s either we deepen our faith in Allah (i.e. self actualisation) or lose it all together due to ego and arrogance.
Personally, at varying intervals I’ll force myself to reconcile what I’ve unlocked which each philosophical breakthrough 🙂