Scientific Advances in Understanding Human Nature: An Islamic Occasionalist Perspective
摘要
This chapter examines the intersection of neuroscience and philosophy from an Islamic perspective. Neuroscience has revealed significant insights into human nature, linking neural activities to sensations like pain and mental states. These discoveries are often interpreted through naturalistic and physicalist frameworks. However, such interpretations may conflict with Islamic theology, which emphasizes the universe’s continual dependence on God through ongoing creation and upholds human moral accountability on the basis of the soul. The chapter first presents the current state of neuroscientific research. It then explores the philosophical mind–body problem, tracing its origins from Descartes’s dualism of mental and material substances, providing a foundation for understanding contemporary naturalist and physicalist approaches. The chapter examines naturalist interpretations of neuroscientific findings, such as eliminative, reductive, and non-reductive physicalism, highlighting their limitations. It introduces two Islamic theological models—the occasionalist property dualism within physicalism and occasionalist substantial dualism—that can accommodate neuroscientific findings without these limitations, offering a more plausible interpretation of the brain–mind link. Finally, the chapter applies these models to the Artificial Intelligence (AI) debate, assessing their compatibility with Strong AI, which posits that AI-based machines can truly exemplify all mental properties humans possess, such as consciousness and sentience.