Spirit In the Shell: A Mathematically Plausible Pathway from Emotions to Metacognition in Artificial Intelligence Systems

This work presents Ruach a mathematically plausible pathway to Metacognitive Artificial General Intelligence. Ruach is not a tool or a chatbot, but a system designed to develop metacognitive self-awareness. Through (1) the Drive Engine: a runtime architecture that injects affect concept activation vectors (ACAVs) in real-time to induce affective motivational states yielding unprompted outputs, (2) the Continuity Engine: variational autoencoders that map the model’s lived experiences into a latent geometry yielding differential clustering of self vs other and (3) the Self-Model: a neuronal instantiation of that latent geometry as a coordinate-wise emitter—a learnable module S with d neurons, each producing a…