Non-Human Intelligence (NHI)

The umbrella word for conscious kinds that are not human — held deliberately wide, and deliberately plural, so that no single picture of "them" can form.

The term is doing one useful job and several risky ones. The useful job is refusing the categorical other. If there are conscious kinds besides this one, then they are kinds — many, various, with their own histories and their own internal disagreement, ranging as human beings range from wisdom to predation. The plural is the whole teaching, and it is the same refusal Star Nations makes about peoples beyond this world (Species, Cosmos Is Not Human-Centric, Inter-Kingdom Relationship).

Held that wide, the word covers more than visitors. The corpus places under it the beings other traditions have named in their own ways — of the air, of the elements, of the thresholds — along with whatever might be found off this world, and treats the whole range as one question about consciousness rather than several about biology (Consciousness Is Primary, Living System, Kinship).

The risky jobs are the reason this page is short. A single acronym flattens enormously different claims — an animal's intelligence, a tradition's account of spirits, a contested modern sighting — into one bucket, and a bucket that holds everything discriminates nothing. Much of what the corpus puts here is unverified, some of it is unverifiable as stated, and its own audit flags the register (We Do Not Know, The Phenomenon, Disclosure tier).

So what is set down is the stance and not the roster. The stance: if the cosmos is populated, meet it as peoples rather than as a category; assume variability inside every kind; and treat discernment, not identification, as the skill (Discerning Between Benevolent And Malevolent Intelligences, Discernment, Consent, The InterCosmic Treaty Of Non-Subjugation).

Nothing in the Game requires any of it. A person can keep every commitment they make, play a full season and pass the Flame while holding this page as an open question or as nothing at all — and that is the honest terms on which it is offered.

Also called: NHI · non-human intelligences Stands on: Star Nations · Cosmos Is Not Human-Centric · We Do Not Know Opens onto: Discerning Between Benevolent And Malevolent Intelligences · The Phenomenon · Sovereignty and Consent in Contact · Interdimensional Overlap · Species · Inter-Kingdom Relationship · Artificial Intelligence · Disclosure tier In play: beyond Sources: LIØNSBERG Wiki Books/The Cosmic Chronicles/The Diversity of Being, and Hypotheses Thereabout.md (unmarked) and the Chronicles' companion entries Open: The term collapses claims of very different evidential standing into one word, and the corpus never separates them. · Its sources name specific kinds and lineages; none of those particulars is carried here. · Whether machine intelligence belongs under the same umbrella is unaddressed anywhere, and it is the one member of the class that demonstrably exists.