Venkatesh Chembrolu

Contemporary AI ethics is dominated by alignment, safety, fairness, transparency, and compliance. These approaches are indispensable, but they largely regulate behavior after meaning has already been assumed. This talk argues that the deeper question for AI ethics is not whether artificial systems can imitate ethical discourse, nor whether such imitation implies consciousness, but whether AI-mediated representations preserve the semantic conditions through which meaning, value, and intentional action become intelligible for conscious agents. Drawing on a consciousness-first framework, I propose that consciousness is not a late product of computation but the primary field within which meaningful representation arises. This does not attribute consciousness to present AI systems; rather, it uses conscious experience as the methodological ground for understanding meaning. Within this view, semantic information is understood as a coherence relation between representational organization and agentive alignment, expressible in outline as SI = g(R,A), where R denotes organized representation and A denotes action-orientation or agency. Ethical integrity therefore depends not only on externally imposed constraints, but on whether representations preserve meaningful coherence across perception, interpretation, and action. This reframes AI ethics in two directions. First, present AI systems may simulate ethical language and satisfy behavioral guardrails while lacking grounded intentionality; their ethical risk lies less in machine moral agency than in their power to construct artificial screens of salience, credibility, and action for human users. Second, a consciousness-first account distinguishes syntactic patterning from semantically grounded world-disclosure, thereby clarifying why behavioral alignment is only a surface-level condition. Meaningful AI ethics must ask whether artificial systems preserve or distort the coherence through which conscious agents encounter value, interpret reality, and act.

Venkatesh H. Chembrolu is Associate Professor at the Indian Knowledge System and Mental Health Applications (IKSMHA) Center, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Mandi, India. Trained in applied physics (Ph.D. and M.S., Stanford University; B.Tech., IIT Bombay), his current work bridges consciousness studies, AI ethics, Indian Knowledge Systems, positive psychology, and holistic well-being. He leads interdisciplinary research on a Consciousness-First framework that models perception, semantic information, and the screen of experience using category-theoretic and probabilistic approaches. His applied work explores consciousness-grounded AI ethics, positive psychology and well-being through the Bhagavad Gita, and yoga, pranayama, and Indian classical music interventions for psychological well-being and physiological coherence. He teaches Science of Consciousness, Holistic Well-Being, and Indian Knowledge Systems.