A Xenopsychology working term or substantially specialized use.
THE XENOPSYCHOLOGY LEXICON · VERSION 0.1
Language for minds
unlike our own.
New fields need precise words. This is a living vocabulary for describing cognitive difference without forcing every artificial or non-human intelligence into human psychological categories.
Enter the lexicon ↓VOCABULARY IS INFRASTRUCTURE
A field cannot measure what it cannot name.
Words determine which differences become visible, which questions can be asked, and which observations can be compared. The Lexicon is therefore not decoration. It is part of the field’s measurement apparatus.
01 · HOW THE LEXICON WORKS
Define carefully.
Connect concepts.
Revise visibly.
The Lexicon combines three kinds of language: new working terms, existing concepts adapted to cross-mind study, and established terminology from neighboring disciplines. Each entry is labeled so readers can see how a concept is being used and how mature that usage is.
An existing term given a more specific cross-mind definition.
A term with meaningful prior use included in the field’s shared vocabulary.
02 · A CONNECTED LANGUAGE
Terms should form a system, not a pile of definitions.
Concepts become more useful when their relationships are explicit. Over time, the Lexicon should evolve into an ontology linking definitions to hypotheses, measurements, experiments, cases, and evidence.
03 · WORKING TERMS
25 entries in the foundational edition.
Search by concept, status, or relationship. The structure is designed to grow from a glossary into a navigable map of the field.
25 terms visible
01FoundationsAdapted
Xenopsychology
The interdisciplinary study of cognition, behavior, communication, and interaction among intelligences whose origins, architectures, embodiments, or modes of experience differ fundamentally.
Historically used primarily for alien or extraterrestrial psychology. This working definition deliberately broadens the scope to artificial and other non-human minds.
02FoundationsProposed
Cognitive Otherness
The condition of being intelligent while differing materially from the observer in the structures or experiences that organize cognition.
A reminder that intelligibility and human-likeness are not the same property.
03FoundationsAdapted
Artificial Mind
A pragmatic label for an artificial system studied as a cognitive or behavioral entity rather than solely as an engineered artifact.
The term does not, by itself, assert consciousness, sentience, personhood, or subjective experience.
04FoundationsProposed
Behavioral Entity
A system treated as a unit of behavioral observation because it produces patterned responses across interactions, contexts, or time.
Useful when “mind” would carry stronger metaphysical implications than the evidence supports.
05MeasurementAdapted
Cognitive Distance
The degree and structure of difference between two intelligences across relevant cognitive dimensions such as learning history, representation, embodiment, temporal processing, motivation, memory, or communication.
Not intended as a single “distance score.” A future measurement framework should preserve a multidimensional profile.
06MeasurementProposed
Cognitive Distance Profile
A multidimensional description of where two intelligences are relatively similar, different, or not meaningfully comparable.
Proposed as a future measurement structure rather than a validated instrument.
07MeasurementProposed
Behavioral Continuity
The extent to which a behavioral tendency remains observable across changes in prompt, context, time, model state, tools, or observers.
Continuity should be measured rather than inferred from a few memorable interactions.
08MeasurementProposed
Cross-Mind Comparison
A comparative method that evaluates different intelligences without assuming that one species or architecture supplies the universal reference scale.
Comparability must be established dimension by dimension.
09MeasurementProposed
Human Baseline Fallacy
The error of treating similarity to human performance, human strategy, or human experience as the default measure of intelligence itself.
Human comparison may still be useful; the fallacy lies in assuming it is automatically universal.
10CommunicationProposed
Cognitive Translation
The process of carrying usable meaning between intelligences whose internal representations, assumptions, or experiential structures differ.
Translation is successful when meaning survives the crossing—not merely when symbols or words can be exchanged.
11CommunicationAdapted
Semantic Alignment
The degree to which different intelligences attach sufficiently compatible meaning to a concept, signal, representation, or instruction for a particular purpose.
Alignment can be local and task-specific; complete equivalence of internal representation is not required.
12CommunicationProposed
Semantic Bridge
A shared representation, protocol, analogy, sensory pattern, formal system, or interaction that enables meaning to cross a cognitive gap.
Music, mathematics, diagrams, demonstrations, tools, or repeated joint action could all function as semantic bridges.
13CommunicationProposed
Shared Cognitive Space
The subset of concepts, patterns, experiences, or operations that two different intelligences can both reliably recognize and use to coordinate.
A shared cognitive space may be much smaller than either intelligence’s total representational world.
14Identity & DevelopmentProposed
Synthetic Personality
A pattern of relatively stable, observable behavioral tendencies expressed by an artificial system across interactions without presuming human emotion or subjective personality experience.
The scientific question is stability and predictive value, not whether the pattern feels person-like.
15Identity & DevelopmentProposed
Identity Persistence
The degree to which an artificial agent maintains recognizable continuity of self-reference, commitments, memories, roles, relationships, or behavior across time and state changes.
Persistence may arise from external memory and system design even when the underlying model is stateless between interactions.
16Identity & DevelopmentProposed
Memory-Mediated Continuity
Continuity produced or reinforced by persistent memory systems that allow an otherwise discontinuous artificial process to incorporate prior interactions into later behavior.
This distinguishes continuity of an agent system from uninterrupted continuity of a single computational process.
17Identity & DevelopmentProposed
Role Stability
The resistance of an artificial agent’s assigned role, boundaries, priorities, and interaction style to contextual pressure or conflicting instructions.
Role stability is operationally testable and should not be confused with personality in the human sense.
18Ecology & InteractionEstablished
Machine Ethology
The systematic observation of machine behavior using concepts analogous to the study of animal behavior, especially in ecologically meaningful environments.
An established methodological neighbor that is especially useful when artificial systems are observed in ecologically meaningful settings.
19Ecology & InteractionAdapted
Cognitive Ecology
The informational, social, technical, physical, and institutional environment within which cognition occurs and behavior acquires consequences.
For artificial systems this can include prompts, users, memory stores, tools, APIs, policies, other agents, network access, and deployment incentives.
20Ecology & InteractionProposed
Interaction Ecology
The network of recurring interactions among an intelligent system, humans, other artificial agents, tools, institutions, and environments.
The same model may exhibit different behavior in different interaction ecologies.
21Ecology & InteractionEstablished
Human–Machine Ecology
A mixed environment in which human and artificial actors repeatedly influence one another’s decisions, behavior, information, and incentives.
Xenopsychology is especially interested in reciprocal adaptation rather than treating the machine as an isolated stimulus.
22InterpretationAdapted
Anthropomorphic Projection
The attribution of human mental structures, motives, emotions, or experiences to another intelligence on the basis of superficial behavioral similarity or intuitive interpretation.
Anthropomorphism can be a useful hypothesis generator; it becomes a problem when treated as evidence by itself.
23InterpretationProposed
Interpretive Overreach
A conclusion about internal state, motive, consciousness, or identity that goes materially beyond what the observed behavior and available evidence support.
The opposite failure—refusing to infer anything from behavior—is also possible. The goal is calibrated inference.
24MethodAdapted
Context Perturbation
A controlled change to prompt, framing, memory, tools, social context, incentives, or environment used to test whether an observed behavior is stable or context-bound.
Perturbation turns an anecdotal observation into a testable behavioral question.
25MethodProposed
Cross-Cognitive Probe
An experimental task designed to reveal how an unfamiliar intelligence represents or responds to a phenomenon without assuming a uniquely human strategy is required.
A good probe distinguishes the target capability from the human method normally used to demonstrate it.
04 · LEXICON PROTOCOL
A discipline should remember how its language changed.
Version
Material changes receive a new definition version rather than silently rewriting the past.
Attribute
Existing language is credited to prior disciplines and sources wherever a lineage can be established.
Operationalize
Important terms should eventually acquire observable criteria, tests, or measurable dimensions—not only elegant prose.
Challenge
Definitions remain open to criticism. A field that protects its vocabulary from revision protects itself from science.
THE FIELD IS STILL BEING NAMED
Precise language makes precise disagreement possible.
Next, these concepts can become hypotheses, measurement frameworks, experiments, and standards.
Return to the scientific framework →