Introduction: The Four Recenterings
Copernicus, Darwin, Freud, and AI.
In 1917, Sigmund Freud paused to take stock of how badly science had hurt our self-regard. In naming the injuries he handed the modern world one of its most durable stories about itself.
Humanity has in the course of time had to endure from the hands of science two great outrages upon its naïve self-love.
The first was when it realized that our earth was not the centre of the universe, but only a tiny speck in a world-system of a magnitude hardly conceivable; this is associated in our minds with the name of Copernicus, although Alexandrian doctrines taught something very similar.
The second was when biological research robbed man of his peculiar privilege of having been specially created, and relegated him to a descent from the animal world, implying an ineradicable animal nature in him: this transvaluation has been accomplished in our own time upon the instigation of Charles Darwin, Wallace, and their predecessors, and not without the most violent opposition from their contemporaries.
But man’s craving for grandiosity is now suffering the third and most bitter blow from present-day psychological research which is endeavouring to prove to the “ego” of each one of us that he is not even master in his own house, but that he must remain content with the veriest scraps of information about what is going on unconsciously in his own mind.
Copernicus pushed us out of the center of space. Darwin pushed us out of the center of life. Freud — marketing people, take note — pushed us out of our own minds.
Earlier this year, a group of researchers, among them Geoffrey Hinton — “the godfather of AI” — published a paper that added to the list. The title is clear enough: Artificial Intelligence as the Fourth Decentering Revolution: From Cosmic, Biological, and Psychological Displacement to Cognitive Decentering.
Their claim goes beyond the “AI will take my job” drama. The deeper change, they argue, is that AI may force a revision in what we mean by intelligence itself. AI challenges the assumption that human intelligence is “uniquely superior, inherently central to decision-making, and qualitatively distinct from computational or artificial forms of cognition.”
Their argument depends on a more uncomfortable possibility than “AI consciousness.” What if the things we used to point to as evidence of our special status — pattern recognition, strategic reasoning, creative ideation, scientific discovery, fluent language — can be carried out by something that is not human and may not be biological at all.
The paper calls this “cognitive decentering”: intelligence ceasing to look like a private human possession and beginning to look like a capacity that can appear in different substrates. Humans, in their account, become “collaborators rather than sole originators of knowledge.”
So we have a tidy sequence: Copernicus, Darwin, Freud, and now AI.
This sequence has its own particular history — largely European, post-Christian, and, as historians of science keep pointing out, more retrospective than the popular story admits.
This made me think. What did Muslims do every time humans were apparently demoted? Were Freud’s “outrages” even experienced as outrage? And if not, why not?
I want to look beyond whether Muslims accepted or rejected these claims and see what they built when they encountered them. When one source of human importance weakened, what did Islam make newly central?
That is why I am calling this series “The Four Recenterings.” Decentering is about loss. Recentering is about what follows. A tradition can answer a new scientific fact by locating human worth somewhere else — in moral responsibility, divine trust, spiritual capacity, or the task of knowing and serving God. It could also put its head in the sand and defend the old center.
My working claim is that a decentering becomes a humiliation only when a culture has tied human worth to the thing science removes. Islam often had other sources of human importance available to it. The human being could be small in space without being small in purpose; continuous with animal life without being empty of moral obligation; divided within without being abandoned by God. That’s not to say that every encounter was easy, or that some Muslims didn’t deny scientific advances. But it means that the familiar story of religion receiving bad news from science doesn’t always hold up.
Four essays will follow, one for each recentering. We will start with Copernicus — moving past the Galileo story and into less familiar territory. Then come Darwin, Freud, and AI.
Science has, in the course of time, delivered four great outrages to our naïve self-love: it took away the center of the universe, the privilege of special creation, mastery in our own house, and now our claim to unique intelligence.
These essays follow Islam’s reply.
