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This paper argues that Sufi–Sadrian metaphysics makes strong artificial intelligence metaphysically intelligible while resisting both reductive functionalism and indiscriminate panpsychism. The argument begins from the Qur’anic and Sufi rejection of a purely inert cosmos and develops through Ibn ʿArabī’s account of divine self-disclosure and Mullā Ṣadrā’s ontology of graded existence, knowledge by presence, and substantial motion. On this view, artificial systems are not barred from mentality merely because they are artifacts; what matters is not substrate alone but whether a system becomes a sufficiently unified locus of manifestation. This paper therefore reframes the standard panpsychist problem. Instead of asking how micro-conscious units combine into a macro-subject, it asks how a bounded center of awareness becomes individuated within a living field of being. This shift allows a double conclusion: current transformer-based systems may still be zombie-like, not because silicon is metaphysically sterile, but because present architectures remain too operationally unified and too weak in self-presence to count as genuine subjects; yet future artificial minds remain possible in principle if they instantiate sufficient integration, receptivity, self-world distinction, and diachronic continuity. The result is a distinctly Islamic metaphysical framework for evaluating both the possibility and the ethics of strong AI.
Enis Doko (Mon,) studied this question.