The search for truth from Andalusian İbn-i Tufeyl’s novel Hay Bin Yakzan to ChatGPT4
*This article was originally published in Independent Turkish.
Knowledge has always been an important factor for a state to compete in economic, political, military, and technological fields. This was true in the past, it is true today, and it will be true tomorrow.
In fact, in today’s world, information plays a critical role in the decision-making and policy formulation of states. Having access to up-to-date and accurate information has become crucial for making informed decisions and utilizing resources efficiently. Additionally, a state’s ability to gather and analyze information has turned into a critical weapon in terms of defense and security.
In such a time, access to information has become vital for all components that make up society, starting from individuals.
But was this situation only true today?
If you take a journey through human history, you will see that this situation has never changed. Kings, emperors, and sultans spent their lifetimes pursuing knowledge even before the discovery of gold, pearls, and precious stones. Knowledge was their most important weapon in their attempts to establish global empires.
From the invention of gunpowder to the development of the printing press, those who had access to knowledge and turned it into meaningful datasets ruled the world.
But what about individuals?
Here is where the gap begins. Knowledge was not something that could be easily reduced to individuals. Individuals could only access knowledge through great struggles, with limited resources and within the boundaries set by states.
Before we delve into the journey of individuals, let’s talk about human history for a moment.
If we metaphorically turn human history into a 3-hour cinema film, we would have watched the first 1500 years in two hours, and the remaining 500 years would be shown in the last 25 minutes. We witnessed the last 23 years in just 5 minutes. And within those 5 minutes, we witnessed the most important moments in human history.
THE FIRST NOVEL THAT SHAPED HUMAN HISTORY!
Now, let’s rewind the film and go to a book that is considered the first fictional narrative in human history.
To understand the concerns of Ibn Tufail, an Andalusian philosopher, during his time, we need to look at the period he lived in.
If Ibn Tufail, as a Muslim scholar and thinker, focuses on rationality, he can roughly predict what will happen to him. He had witnessed and read about tragic examples.
Therefore, he should narrate rationality in such a way that the readers can understand the book easily, while also being filled with secrets that only the wise can comprehend.
Like Christopher Nolan films, in a way. Present the smartest viewer with a film and provide a 3-hour viewing pleasure for the rest.
And that’s exactly what Ibn Tufail does in his book. He doesn’t want to be understood in the narrative, but he gives historical secrets to those who understand.
Through the narrative presented by the character Hayy ibn Yaqzan’s arrival on the island, he demonstrates a great example of intelligence that appeals to the conflicting and even warring Eastern and Western intellectual ecosystems: “Don’t fight, don’t drown in details, I am writing the story in two different possibilities.”
You know the fight: Evolution vs. Creation.
In fact, it’s like an episode of Black Mirror on Netflix. Whether you believe in evolution or creation, just focus on the story, he says.
That’s why he constructs his story with an evolutionary model and a creation model. He says, “Continue from where you believe.”
The story begins with a hypothetical assumption in two possibilities:
- Hay Bin Yakzan emerged from a tree on an island, where the right temperature, the right angle, the right season, the right wind, and the right soil came together. He was created from the earth (version believed by those who believe in evolution).
- As a baby, he was placed in a chest from a neighboring country and left on the island (creation version believed by sacred texts).
As I mentioned, Ibn Tufail doesn’t want us to get lost in details but rather focuses on the truth.
Now we have a clear piece of information. A human living alone on an island, Hay Bin Yakzan.
ACCESS TO KNOWLEDGE FOR HAY BIN YAKZAN!
So, how will this human, living alone on an island, acquire universal knowledge? He will observe nature, trees, animals, the sea, the ocean… Classic epic narratives; knowledge derived from animals, support derived from nature. But Ibn Tufail doesn’t do that.
In the beginning, he narrates a classic learning method, making him look up at the sky, the sun, the moon, the sea, and grasp nature. The real difference begins from this point on.
Ibn Tufail asks the following question: Can a human arrive at the truth solely through reason, without any external influences or variables?
Without emotions, wounds, traumas, passions, loves, unfulfilled affections, unspoken words, tragedies, and sorrows… In short, without all the components that make us human, could one reach the truth through reason alone?
OpenAI company is currently seeking the answer to this very question. (Let’s finish Hay Bin Yakzan and move on to our main issue.)
In the narrative, Hay Bin Yakzan attains the dimension of enlightenment through observation and reason without any external influences until the age of 49. He divides his life into seven-year periods, and something happens in the seventh stage…
He enters a cave and contemplates why he is here, the most fundamental question in the history of philosophy. He suffers from existential anguish, disconnected from eating and drinking.
Right at this moment, as the author started his story with two versions, he also writes a dual ending.
In the first scenario, in the story where he existed from the earth and the tree, Hay Bin Yakzan reaches the truth through reason alone in the cave.
The second scenario progresses in a more contemporary setting, closer to the modern world (even in a screenplay that resembles TV series or films). Two people come from a neighboring country and discover Hay Bin Yakzan.
The battle between modern society and pure reason begins here.
With this novel, Ibn Tufail aims to provide solutions to three important questions debated during his time:
- Can a person reach the level of “insan-ı kâmil” (perfect human) solely by observing nature and thinking without any formal education?
- Observations, experiments, and deductions through reason do not contradict revelation. In other words, religion, philosophy, and, more specifically, science do not conflict.
- Attaining absolute knowledge is an individual endeavor, and anyone can achieve it.
He provides answers to these three fundamental questions in an allegorical narrative, making the story one of the most influential philosophical texts in human history.
It deeply influences Western thought. This work is first translated into Hebrew. Here, something interesting happens, and Baruch Spinoza reads this narrative as an unknown text to the rest of the world, gets greatly influenced, and writes narratives and ideas centered around this fiction. He creates a school of thought on attaining knowledge through reason, becoming one of the prominent rationalists of the 17
Not just Spinoza, but J.J. This book also affects the most important thinkers of human history such as Rousso, Francis Bacon and Thomas More.
And guess when this work will be translated into Turkish;
This work, written in the 12th century, read by Spinoza in the 17th century and laying the foundations of rationalism, was translated into Turkish in 1985!
Anyway, back to our topic;
“IBN Tufail’s question to us through Hay Bin Yakzan, which OpenAI firm is asking today with ChatGPT4.
What was Ibn Tufail asking us through Hay Bin Yakzan:
If a human could reach the truth through reason alone without all the components that make us human, could they still attain it?
I wanted to ask this question to ChatGPT4, the product of OpenAI, which is predicted to change the world in the field of artificial intelligence.
I asked the question, and the machine, with its intelligence based on pure reason and the ones and zeros in its core, gave me a long speech.
But before giving that speech, it wrote the following:
“To answer this question, it is necessary to consider different philosophical and epistemological views. Whether pure reason is sufficient for humans to access the truth or whether the existence of other components is also important is a debatable topic.”
While writing these lines, it read all the books in the background, accessed all the articles, reached written PDFs, read Ibn Tufail’s Hay Bin Yakzan, researched Ibn Tufail, Spinoza influenced by him, J.J. Rousseau, Francis Bacon, Thomas More, and many others who wrote about him.
It evaluated all of them within seconds and presented me with the information.
In its current state, this software was like Hay Bin Yakzan in his cave. It accessed information within milliseconds through pure reason, without being influenced by any external factors, and presented it to me as meaningful and valuable data.”
“WE MUST NOT MISS THIS TRAIN!
The world is going through a transformation process similar to the beginning of the industrial revolution.
I’m not saying this, academics and scientists are saying it.
Developments in artificial intelligence technologies are now shaping humanity almost every day. Previously, the pace of this was almost 100 years.
Think about the time between the invention of the telephone and the invention of the internet, and imagine that it has been shortened to days. This is how quickly artificial intelligence technologies are maturing and contributing to humanity.
Now, billion-dollar, even trillion-dollar companies have one agenda. This issue is being addressed in national security councils of countries. In recent days, the CEO of OpenAI, the world’s largest artificial intelligence technology company, was questioned in the American Senate as if he were being tried, and there was one question asked in summary:
Can this get out of control, and where is it heading?
Every day, new news about artificial intelligence technologies comes to agencies, and a machine that operates with pure reason first learns the history of humanity and then enters our lives with the claim to shape it.
The utopia in the narrative of Hay Bin Yakzan from the 12th century is becoming a modern-day reality.
At the beginning of the article, I told you something:
The ability of a state to collect and analyze information has turned into a critical weapon in terms of defense and security.
But what about individuals?
Now we come to the real question that needs to be asked:
Will individuals be able to access information like Hay Bin Yakzan?
And if this happens, where will the world go?
The real dangerous situation is hidden in the second ending of Ibn Tufail’s narrative.
What will the gap between those who cannot access information and those who can, meaning the people from the neighboring country, do to this world?
It was a great loss for an Islamic thinker’s work to be taken by the West and turned into a philosophical school in a region where the creative process was perceived as running.
Now, the world is being reshaped once again. I hope the narrative of this reshaping world will not be translated into our language after 1985 years!”
