Xenosophy: Asking About Contact When No Common Frame Is Guaranteed

What can be said about another side, be it the source of a radio signal, a language model or an octopus, when nothing shared with it is guaranteed? Hermeneutics, semiotics, translation theory and radical interpretation each start from something shared. Xenosophy begins earlier: before asking what another side means, or whether there is anything it is like to be it, it asks whether there is another side at all, on what basis its boundary is drawn, and from where one claims to know about it. It keeps these questions apart. Here the move is shown in detail on one case: would a superintelligence able to model a human brain be conscious? The question turns out to fuse several questions about different systems, and that the superintelligence models a brain shows nothing about whether it is itself conscious. Applied to a live debate, on digital likenesses of the dead, with Lem's Solaris as a model, the approach is used to formulate untested hypotheses and new concepts, each with a condition under which it would be withdrawn. The approach's refusals and limits are also stated. A first pilot test asked whether the approach's distinctions find, in another field's work, errors, unstated assumptions or gaps that the field had not itself pointed out. Its analysts and judges were AI systems. By a rule fixed in advance, its one valid test, on a study of sperm whale vocalizations, counted against the claim: its one confirmed finding came from a single procedure close to ordinary critical practice. This negative result may have several explanations: the test was too blunt; the procedures work only together; the approach's value lies in generating hypotheses; or its apparatus grew to withstand criticism rather than to find things. Each comes with a planned test and an outcome, named in advance, that would count against the approach as it stands.