Abstract

Contemporary debates on artificial intelligence and consciousness face a foundational dilemma: as AI systems increasingly interact with, infer, and potentially operationalize human mental states, philosophy lacks a stable framework for determining what it means for an artificial system to "measure" or "align with" consciousness. A-CAIS v1.0 (AI–Consciousness Alignment Interface Standard) addresses this gap by introducing the first globally anchored framework that reframes the measurement problem of consciousness as simultaneously an ontological, epistemological, and governance challenge. Rather than treating consciousness measurement as a purely empirical question, the standard recognizes that any measurement architecture embeds philosophical commitments about what consciousness is and how it may be known. Building upon the Conscious Field Energy Plus (CFE⁺) model, A-CAIS establishes a tri-axis energetic decomposition—Objective Environment (OE), Experiential Environment (EE), and Relational Environment (RE)—that preserves consciousness as a fundamentally human domain while permitting AI-mediated interpretation under strict constraints. The framework ensures AI systems remain epistemically and ontologically subordinate to human-defined consciousness structures, preventing autonomous redefinition of consciousness by artificial agents. Philosophically, this work bridges three critical domains: (1) philosophy of mind, by providing a formal structure for the measurement problem; (2) AI ethics and alignment, by establishing normative boundaries for artificial consciousness research; and (3) philosophy of science, by demonstrating how standards can function as both descriptive and prescriptive frameworks. A-CAIS thus offers not merely a technical specification, but a foundational architecture for how philosophy, science, and governance must coordinate when consciousness itself becomes measurable and operationalizable by non-human systems.