Jinho Lee (Salpida Institute Consciousness Science (SICS)) has posted “Why AI Governance Fails Without a Legal and Scientific Definition of Consciousness” on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Artificial intelligence governance is widely recognized as one of the most urgent challenges of the twenty-first century. Governments, international organizations, and technology institutions have proposed ethical guidelines, legal frameworks, and safety principles intended to regulate increasingly autonomous AI systems. Yet despite unprecedented attention, AI governance continues to fail in practice. This paper argues that these failures are not primarily technological, political, or ethical in nature. Rather, AI governance fails because it is constructed upon an undefined and scientifically ungrounded concept of consciousness. Current legal and ethical frameworks implicitly rely on assumptions about intention, agency, responsibility, alignment, and decision-making-concepts that presuppose consciousness-while refusing to define consciousness in any measurable, operational, or legally interoperable manner. As a result, AI governance collapses into abstraction, cultural conflict, and non-enforceable norms. This paper reframes AI governance failure as a definition failure rather than a policy failure, and demonstrates why no durable AI governance system can exist without a shared legal and scientific definition of consciousness. This work functions as a diagnostic and connective document. It does not introduce new measurement models or governance mechanisms. Instead, it explains why such models are structurally required, and situates AI governance within a broader civilizational transition toward operationally defined consciousness systems already established in the Consciousness Civilization Framework (CCF) and its constitutional and operational records.