The Prayer the Machine Cannot Pray

Adnan Abbasi uses medieval metaphysics to understand modern Al.

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"Subhan Allah!” (“Glory to God!”) The words escaped my lips as I watched Replit AI transform my half-coherent rambles into a functioning application. Twenty minutes earlier, I had been thinking aloud: “I want to track reading habits, link quotes to themes, maybe build some databases?” And now there was an app. A beautiful app. Complete with structured databases, state management, and search functionality I hadn’t requested but obviously needed. The code was elegant. Better than I would have written in that time. The AI had taken my ambiguous natural language, inferred intent, made architectural decisions, anticipated edge cases, and ironically, exhibited what my teachers call ‘understanding’. As a Muslim, I’ve uttered ‘Subhan Allah’ thousands of times. But this instance struck differently. I had just witnessed what looked like genuine comprehension. Replit uses Claude, Anthropic’s language model, as its basic underlying AI. So I thought: did Claude feel anything? When it generated that schema, was there ‘something it was like’ to be Claude at that moment? Or was it merely ‘pushing symbols around’, as John Searle would say — without any inner life? But in this situation, the questions stopped being abstract. Because, if I am praising God for AI, I need to know what I am praising Him for: Is it conscious machines, or nonconscious intelligence so sophisticated it mimics consciousness?

The answer requires understanding consciousness itself. And here, I believe, medieval Islamic philosophy offers something that contemporary cognitive science desperately needs.

The Hard Problem

Can something be intelligent (that is, behave intelligently) without being conscious? And what if consciousness isn’t something that emerges from smart information processing, but is something else entirely?