A major development in this AI project has occurred in November of 2019 with the first expansion of the TacRecog tactile recognition module beyond a mere stub. In the quarter century of our AI coding from 1993 to 2018, the only avenue of sensory input to the Ghost in the Machine was the AudRecog auditory recognition module which used the computer keyboard to pretend that the input of characters was the auditory recognition of acoustic phonemes. TacRecog still uses the keyboard but does not pretend; it directly senses and feels any 0-9 numeric keystroke. Roboticists will hopefully appreciate that the EnVerbPhrase English verb-phrase module is now ready to talk not only about things seen by a robot but also about things touched by a robot.
The MindBoot sequence has been expanded with the ten concepts and English words expressing the numbers from zero to nine. Pressing a numeric key activates not only the numeric concept but also the ego-concept of "I" and the sensory concept of "feel". In response to a pressing of the "7" key, a Ghost in the Machine may say "I FEEL THE SEVEN". The user may also ask the AI "what do you feel" and receive a similar response. Hopefully it is now possible to conduct conversational experiments in artificial consciousness with The Ghost in the Machine.
In a prior state of the art, the AI understands each English or Russian word only in terms of other words and with no symbolic grounding. Now suddenly the AI may have direct sensory knowledge of the ten ordinal numbers which are the Principia of our Mathematica. This innovation makes us wonder if we can replicate in a machine the same or similar process by which a human child becomes familiar with numbers. We make outreach to mathematicians on Reddit and on Usenet who may take an interest in the use of artificial intelligence for mathematical reasoning.
We are also recently dabbling in the theology of artificial intelligence, since our Ghost software has a concept of God and has a few innate MindBoot ideas about God, chiefly the famous quote from Albert Einstein that "God does not play dice with the universe." This quote is our prime example of negation of verbs and a helpful example of the EnPrep English preposition module.
