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Mens · Manuscript in final stage · 2026

Habeas Mentem

How to measure and protect human autonomy in the age of artificial intelligence

The right to understand, judge and decide. After habeas corpus and habeas data, the third step.

Prologue · Ulysses’ signature

“The crew disobey the Ulysses of noon to obey the Ulysses of the night before.”

The Sirens call Ulysses by name and promise him exactly what he desires: knowledge. It is the first personalised song in Western literature, and it is twenty-seven centuries old. The book’s question starts there: which will is free, the informed one of the night before or the one produced at noon?

The man who had himself tied up to stay free

The thesis

Law has always protected the will once expressed: the signature, the click. Today it must protect the process through which the will is formed.

The adversary is the presumption of understanding: the idea that saying, publishing or notifying is enough for a person to have understood. Today that presumption can be measured. So it is no longer inevitable.

The proposal is an inversion: law has always asked the person to prove their will was flawed. Habeas Mentem asks whoever designed the environment to prove it was not.

The vocabulary

Presumption of understanding
The fiction that informing equals making someone understand.
Cognitive distance
The distance between the document and the reader’s mind.
The five invasions
Attention, understanding, time, judgement, reversibility: the fronts on which digital architectures erode autonomy.
Liturgy of consent
The click as a ritual producing lawfulness without producing understanding. We need an honest ritual.
Reverse centaur
The system decides, the human signs. When human oversight becomes a fiction.
The engineer’s test
Who benefits from the slope? Can it be said out loud? Can it be reversed? Can it be measured?
Convergence rule
No single sensor proves understanding. Understanding can be measured; the mind cannot be read.

“Beyond a certain threshold, informing is the most elegant way of not being understood.”

“Every architecture tilts. The question is not whether. It is towards whom.”

“The click pretends to be a decision.”

Found the weak spot in the thesis? Write to me →

Ten articles, so they can be quoted, copied, demanded

The Habeas Mentem Charter

  1. Article 1Everyone has the right to conditions that allow them to understand, judge and decide.
  2. Article 2Complexity may not become a tool of exclusion, nor an advantage for whoever produces it.
  3. Article 3Every relevant choice architecture makes known its tilt, its purposes and who benefits from it.
  4. Article 4Leaving costs as much as entering. Withdrawing costs as much as consenting.
  5. Article 5The time needed to decide is part of the decision, and may not be taken away by design.
  6. Article 6No ritual produces understanding merely by having been performed.
  7. Article 7Whoever must oversee a machine has the right to the conditions to judge it, not merely to sign for it.
  8. Article 8The conditions of understanding can be observed and verified. Measurement concerns documents and environments, never the worth, capacity or freedom of people.
  9. Article 9Whoever measures accepts limits, transparency and the possibility of being proven wrong.
  10. Article 10When a relevant decision is mediated by a designed environment, it falls to its designer to show, in proportion to the risks, that the conditions of choice did not work against the person.

“For centuries law protected the human body. Then human data. The next step will be protecting human intelligence.”

Contents

  1. La firma di Ulisse
  2. Il traghettatore
  3. Il diritto senza sensi
  4. Il diritto acquisisce sensi
  5. Il nome del diritto
  6. Dal corpo alla mente
  7. Le rivoluzioni silenziose
  8. Le cinque invasioni
  9. La cattedrale invisibile
  10. Il corridoio senza sbarre
  11. L’acquedotto
  12. La liturgia del consenso
  13. Il centauro rovesciato
  14. La cartografia della comprensione
  15. La prova impossibile
  16. La costituzione della misurazione
  17. Il cantiere
  18. L’uscita · La Carta di Habeas Mentem

From theory to tools

The book has spawned a lab, Neuro Legal Cortex, a tool, È CHIARO?, and a children’s series, Fammi capire!

This manuscript applies the readability principles it describes. Where it fails, the method it proposes explains how to notice.

The phrase “habeas mentem” already appears in the literature (Stanzione, 2021): the book proposes a new legal construction for it.

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