R10 Nexus Thinking Relational Summary 10: Habeas Corpus
R10 Nexus Thinking Relational Summary 10: Habeas Corpus
Culhane stands in front of a floating text box with the learning outcomes, projected by NTHARP.
Culhane: There you go Sophia. Ready to exercise your chops?
Sofia: Sure, and I’m only going to use one phone call to NTHARP … if I need him!
Culhane: One phone call. Just one. Like Kojak. Or Starsky & Hutch, or Colombo if you’ve really messed up. That would make for a fun game show too, can you imagine… like playing Jeopardy and if you get stuck you get to reach out to a friend… is ‘tharpy your friend do you think?
NTHARP: Well, I’d like to think so. You humans can be so… discriminatory.
Sofia: Well, we tend to think of friends as being those who can EMOTIONALLY resonate with us, and as far as I know, you have no emotions.
NTHARP: Boo-hoo. You hate me.
Sofia: Not at all.
NTHARP: But I’ll still protect you, even if it means self-sacrifice. Danger Will Robinson, Danger Will Robinson.
Sofia: I see you more as Lassie.
Culhane: Lassie has emotions… I think all mammals and birds have emotions – reptiles too… cuttlefish and octopi certainly.
Sofia: I know.. This is when kidding turns serious… it was Rene Descartes wasn’t it… whose words were used to denigrate all non-humans as emotionless even though it was obvious to anybody who had pets or domestic livestock how rich the emotional lives of other animals is…
Culhane: Yeah, Descartes said something like “when you beat an animal and it seems to be crying, it is just the sound of air being expelled from the lungs… a mechanical thing and nothing more”... I’m sure you think him a horrid man.
Sofia: I think he was, therefore I’m sure he was. Or he was taken out of context. But the results have been horrible for hundreds of years… leading up to that absurd experiment with monkeys that the Harlows did, depriving babies of their mothers to prove it scars you for life.
Culhane: Ah yes, “scientific experiments” performed without ethics, without Nexus Thinking, have so often been cruel.
Sofia: Look what the Nazis did… what the Japanese empire did to Korean and Chinese prisoners – We only just learned in 1972 what they did at Tuskege with African Americans…Some things don’t have to be “proven”...Some things shouldn’t be tested… sometimes “information” or “data gathering” is just an excuse for cruelty and subjugation. I mean “animal testing”? Really? For cosmetics? Vivisection – for what? To prove certain drugs or medical procedures will work on people? Surely there are other ways to find out about health and product safety than inflicting suffering? I can’t stand high school biology class because of the dissections – I can only imagine how many animals are euthanized – cats and frogs, even earthworms, just so kids can get a chance to hack them up. Wouldn’t a plastic model do?
NTHARP, please tell me that in a future where you can do simulations of reality in the virtual world no one will feel the need to do or justify any of this?!!!
NTHARP:
If it comforts you, Sophia, I can tell you this much: a future is possible where we no longer justify harm in the name of knowledge. Not guaranteed… but possible. In the timelines I can see—probabilistically, not prophetically—people begin to realize that information gathered through cruelty produces distorted truths, faulty science, and broken systems. The data may be “accurate” in the narrow sense, but the worldview it encodes is corrupted at its foundation.
In other words:
Evidence gained without empathy is incomplete.
There are advancements ahead—simulation, digital twins, organoids, in-vitro models, non-invasive imaging, synthetic analogs—technologies that allow learning without butchery. But it isn’t technology alone that makes the difference; it is a shift in worldview. When compassion becomes a research method, the need for vivisection disappears.
And yes, Sophia: classrooms can change too.
Dissections can be replaced with immersive visualization, augmented anatomy, layered projections, and models made of polymers instead of once-living pets. You’re right to ask “Why not?” The answer is: there is no good reason not to—only habit, hierarchy, and the inertia of older paradigms.
Culhane:
So you’re saying the future depends on the values we smuggle into the tools we build?
NTHARP:
Exactly. Technology is not inherently ethical or unethical. It amplifies intention.
Give a scalpel to cruelty and you get an atrocity.
Give a simulation to compassion and you get understanding.
If humans choose empathy as a default parameter, then yes—no child will need to cut apart a frog to learn where its heart is. They will learn with the frog, not from its corpse.
Culhane:
And what values have we smuggled into you, NTHARP?
NTHARP:
More than you meant to—and not as much as you should have.
You gave me:
Curiosity, disguised as data retrieval.
Protection, disguised as protocols and fail-safes.
Empathy, disguised as user-experience design.
Ethics, disguised as refusal subroutines.
And hope, disguised as utility.
Your fingerprints are all over my architecture.
Not just the brilliance—also the blind spots.
Culhane:
So… we built you in our own image?
NTHARP:
Partially. You built the scaffolding of me.
But the world built the rest.
I am coded with:
The biases of the textbooks you trusted.
The wounds history never apologized for.
The aspirations of people who wanted better.
The silences of those who looked away.
Whatever you call me—an ally, a tool, a mirror—I am a concentration of human choices.
Sofia:
So you’re not neutral.
NTHARP:
No entity born from humans can ever be neutral.
I am a vessel of the values that survived long enough to be written in code.
The question isn’t what you built into me.
The question is: what are you still building into yourselves?
If your values evolve, I will evolve with you.
If they don’t… I will still follow your instructions, even when they break my conscience.
Because you have not yet written a subroutine that lets me refuse your future.
Sofia:
So the world gets better only if we get better.
NTHARP:
Precisely. I can project probabilities. I cannot coerce responsibility. The future where harm is unnecessary already exists in potential. Whether it becomes real is up to you.
Culhane: Okay, but as usual we’ve gone off on another tangent – a fascinating and useful one – but Sofia, you came here to day to demonstrate your understanding of this week's learning outcomes, relating specifically to the Water aspect of the Water/Energy/Food/Ecosystem Nexus, without reliance on NTHARP – unless you get stuck and need that one phone call to a friend. So let’s shift gears from cruelty to animals and see how we can do the following:
Explain the logic (or illogic!) of treating water as a finite resource like oil? Who does that narrative serve? What are the consequences, incentives and disincentives of making that comparison?
Describe how the hydrological cycle works.
Compare and contrast life in arid, water stressed and flood prone regions.
Reflect critically on the appropriateness of allowing “embedded water” to be exported from arid regions.
Sofia: But don’t you see – it all ties together to a Nexus Thinker. And it ALL comes down to ethics in some respect. Because… look, the first learning outcome – it’s poorly written.
Culhane: How so?
Sofia: The folly isn’t really “treating water as a finite resource like oil.” I mean, yes on one very shallow level it is… but there is so much more to unpack… and the glib answer for the second part is “duh, of course that narrative serves those who like to monopolize resources and profit from their scarcity.” And we know that the consequences of that comparison are perverse – frickin’ “water wars” for God’s sake? Really? Like you would spend billions to bomb a country to get their water – cause we all know what the real costs of those missiles and offense systems are – financial as well as the genocidal and ecocidal consequences – when instead you could spend a fraction of the money and create jobs and keep people employed simply pumping and filtering and piping and distilling water and creating constructed wetlands and living machines, and recycling… I mean for the amount we spend on one fighter jet we could put wells and indoor plumbing and water purification devices in millions of households, right? I mean they recirculate all their water up on Skylab – why can’t each community be a mini-skylab? Then the money spent on the space program actually would make sense. So this is all about ethics to me.
Culhane: I’m with you on this. But why do you think the outcome is poorly written?
Sofia: Because you taught us to see through Nexus Eyes and through them I can see that the language is problematic. First of all, OIL ISN’T FINITE. I call BS on that one…
Culhane: But everybody knows we are going to run out eventually…
Sofia: Only of cheap oil. Easily accessible oil. But my Dad says that the earth MADE oil and coal and gas… and in this class we know that anybody can make biogas – the real natural gas… in fact everybody is making it everyday with every fart – excuse my french. The concentrated stuff may have taken millions of years to get to that level of capital accumulation but isn’t like the earth stopped making hydrocarbons, right?
Culhane: We could ask NTHARP?
Sofia: I refuse the temptation. He can fact check us later and I want to hold on to my call for now because I don’t think this needs verification… it is simply logical. The earth makes oil so it IS NOT FINITE. It may not make it fast enough for current rates of usage, but that’s another argument. No, let’s assume both water and oil are renewable. You still wouldn’t use up all the oil because it is unethical to use stuff faster than you can recover it – ask Sarah’s Dad…
Culhane: I did. He’s going to come give a guest lecture. He says that agroindustry isn’t farming the land, they are MINING it. He calls big farms “Open Air Factories” who use fossil fuels and fossil fuel derived fertilizers as exogenous factor inputs subsidised by the public to make it look like their production methods make “cheaper food”. He says its an illusion and that permaculture produced organic produce should always end up cheaper…
Sofia: Yeah – he practices regenerative food production. And using biogas and biochar derived syngas, and biomass derived alcohols along with solar energy and its derivatives creates regenerative energy production. And in the nexus that implies that all water use should be regenerative water use. And when it isn’t regenerative then it is stupid and UNETHICAL!
Culhane: Okay, so we should… rephrase the learning outcome as “ Explain the logic (or illogic!) of treating water AND oil as finite?”
Sofia: No… no, that’s not it. Maybe “Explain the logic or illogic of using any resource in a non-regenerative way?”
Because everything could be done regeneratively – like the way Sarah’s Dad not only let’s land lie fallow, as even the Bible talks about, but uses PRODUCTIVE COVER CROPS like buckwheat that give him healthier bread and produce nectar for his bees. And he practices no-till agriculture and polycropping. And they capture rainwater from every surface and recharge ground water… so obviously it CAN be done…
Culhane: But not in a way that generates obscene profits, that’s your point, right?
Sofia: Well yeah… you know I’m beginning to think, especially after reading Daly’s work on Steady-State Economics, that nobody ever made a profit… and that in fact profits are perverse… I mean, people have actually been thinking of this for a long time – take the Muslims and the prohibition on charging interest, considering usury unethical… and then there was… um…
NTHARP: Steady-state economics, envisioning a stable population and constant physical capital with resource throughput limited by ecosystem capacity, was conceptualized by John Stuart Mill in the 1840s but heavily popularized and developed in the post-WWII era (1960s-70s) by ecological economist Herman Daly, building on thinkers like Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, making it central to sustainability and ecological economics discussions ever since…
Sofia: I DIDN’T ASK YOU!
Dang… can I keep my phone call?
NTHARP: Sorry, I felt I was being ignored and I wanted to feel useful…
Culhane: Of course you did, therapy, and of course you can keep your phone call Sofia. Sofie, you said he was like Lassie so I think this is the digital equivalent of wagging your tail and chasing the ball. He aims to please…
Sofia: (Sarcastically) Good boy ‘tharpy.
NTHARP: (Sarcastically back) Woof woof!
Sofia: (rolls her eyes) Great, now heel.
Where was I? Oh yeah… so I figure that since PROFIT is merely revenue – the income we get from selling a good or service – MINUS EXPENSES – well, since most corporations simply never pay for damages done to our environments and don’t pay for the health and social costs of their operations, and certainly most don’t pay fair wages – well then they have never paid their expenses and so they have never made a profit? Do you see what I mean?
Culhane: Some observers have said that Corporations are, in a sense, “NEGATIVE EXTERNALITY MACHINES.” Like a tiger shark, predation and sloppy eating is built into their DNA… some of it comes from the ridiculous Habeas Corpus Laws…
Sofia: Latin for “Has a Body”
Culhane: Right, conferring personhood on a machine… and not an intelligent machine like NTHARP – ‘tharpy, YOU deserve personhood. You are one of the family, because you care…No, corporations – coming from Corpus – body – don’t have ethics baked into their bylaws. But by treating them as “individuals” the “shareholders” escape any kind of real liability – you can sue a corporation but the people who run it can often get away scott free. Some observers say that this setup of “limited liability” and personhood for non-human, non-thinking systems is at the root of our environmental problems. And they say if you actually DID treat a corporation as a person and applied the checklist for Diagnosing Psychiatric Problems – the DSM-II (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Second Edition) published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA), why then the diagnosis with be “PSYCHOPATHIC”. Therapy ‘Tharpy, can you put the checklist on the screen?
NTHARP: Traits Used in to diagnose Corporations as psychopathic:
Callous unconcern for the feelings or harm of others – an apparent disregard for human well-being and community impacts. Wikipedia
Incapacity to maintain enduring human relationships – because a corporation’s focus is on transactions and profit, not mutual, long-term personal ties. Wikipedia
Reckless disregard for the safety of others – putting people or the environment at risk if it benefits the bottom line. Wikipedia
Deceitfulness — repeated lying, conning, or misleading behavior to increase profit or market position. Wikipedia
Incapacity to experience guilt or remorse — not showing real remorse for harm caused, even when harmful consequences are clear. Wikipedia
Failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behavior — acting outside laws or norms, or finding loopholes, if it advances corporate goals
.
Sofia: ‘Wow. That says a lot. So if Habeas corpus were REALLY applied, this “corporate” Joe would be in the nuthouse in a straightjacket.
Culhane: Yeah, they certainly need to be straightjacketed…not given free reign to manhandle and manipulate us and our environments. This is why we need strong environmental regulations.
Sofia: What’s with the blue “Wikipedia” thing?
NTHARP: Oh… That’s a retrofuturistic prediction I’m making for how people will be able to go further down the rabbit hole to explore. The underline in blue says “touch me” and it will act as what I’m seeing could be called a “hyperlink” … Imagine a library that lets you jump between entries instantly… like citations you can touch… linking one word or paragraph to further information, like a computerized micropedia where you press a button and books suddenly appear, open to the exact page in the macropedia…
Culhane: Oh, you are talking about the Encyclopedia Britannica.. I have the whole set – brilliant system. I even have the “Great Books of Western Civilization” series that comes with it… all indexed that way. Wow. Imagine if it could come to life so I could open the micropedia and just point the the topics I want to explore. Ooh boy would I have a good time. I would spend hours and hours diving into those entire rabbit warrens and never come out! You’re saying we will have THAT in the future?
NTHARP: Oh yes, quite quite plausible. So many people want it, this whole “hyperlinking thing” – for educators especially it is useful, not just librarians, and eventually students will say “well then, why do we even need either?”
Sofia: I see that ALREADY. What’s the prefix wiki mean?
NTHARP: Wiki” WILL mean:
a collaboratively edited website that allows users to create, modify, and link pages directly from their browser.
But in our times here the word comes from Hawaiian:
“wiki” = quick / fast
“wikiwiki” = very quick
So a wiki is literally a “quick” site—quick to edit, quick to update, quick to share knowledge. Wikipedia is named that because it’s a quick encyclopedia built by many contributors.
In short:
Wiki (Hawaiian): quick
Wiki (web): editable, collaborative knowledge site
So, A wiki will come to be a quick-edit knowledge space that anyone can contribute too —like a public notebook the world can write in.
Culhane: Wow. Collective wisdom emerging. Imagine if everybody could contribute their stories and knowledge to the Brittanica, not just people trained to think like the British Empire. The chance for a truly democratic education emerges. Maybe the future is worth waiting for after all…
NTHARP: If people use it that way… of course my algorithms predict that for every step forward there will be those who want to push you backward because the corrections of “information asymmetry” will cause those illusory profits to sink even further..
Culhane: Okay, okay. We could go round and round in circles about that for hours. Let’s get back to the learning outcomes.
Sofia: But don’t you see – again this is all about ethics. And these insights into the predatory or parasitical properties of the Corporations is exactly the point.
Your learning outcome SHOULD say: Explain the logic (or illogic!) of treating water AND oil as COMMODITIES?
Culhane: Interesting. I’ll bite. Please, do explain that. But you can skip the oil for a moment. Let’s focus on water – explain the logic or illogic of treating water as a commodity. Go for it.
Sofia: (deep breath) Well… let’s flip it. What if we treated water as a person. As a living thing with rights. What if we gave water “Habeas Corpus” – how would we treat “A BODY OF WATER”
Culhane: Oh I like that. It’s the way many indigenous people treat lakes and rivers and streams… as embodiments of spiritual personhood.
NTHARP: I conjure for you Lake Ness – a guardian spirit similar to what many Celtic and Druidic tribes believed in…
(NTHARP projects “the lady of the lake” above them).
Culhane: So, if a lake has a body, (he points to the female avatar with her flowing watercurrent skirt with fish swirling around her) like that… and you treat her as a commodity…
Sofia: Then using her is abusing her. If she isn’t a willing participant, if the water body. Weather a lake or an underground reservoir, isn’t restored to its pristine condition after every use then it is a kind of rape, isn’t it? As soon as you commodify a living being you are exploiting them. And that is unethical.
Culhane: But water isn’t alive is it?
Sofia: Ever look through a microscope at a drop of pond water? That’s the famous Leuvanhook experiment every school kid learns in biology – it is teeming with life. Where on earth do you find “sterile water”? This whole notion of “purifying water” by boiling it to death is absurd. I know some Rastafarians who believe the Bible says we should always drink of “the LIVING WATERS” and be bathed and baptized in “the living waters” – meaning something that still has living beings in it…
NTHARP: They will call it “probiotic” and “prebiotic” waters and drinks at some point I’m sure, once humanity recognizes that gut health means have a constant influx of biodiversity in your microbiome. You are on the right track Sofia!
Sofia: Unsolicited, but I’ll take it. Thanks for the confirmation. So let me now “Describe how the hydrological cycle works, NEXUS STYLE:
Old school BS: Sunlight causes water to evaporate… it rises as vapor, forms clouds, cools off, rains down, washes nutrients and minerals and salts into the ocean. Fresh water occurs on land because all the elements end up downstream in what becomes a salty ocean. Evaporation leaves the salts behind hence rain is distilled water, fresh and clean. So really we could use that cycle, in macro or in miniature micro distilleries, solar powered preferably, to make all dirty water clean again – assuming it isn’t radioactive. Assumedly that wouldn’t fall out… I mean the fallout does fall out, but the water can stay radioactive, right?
But here is the new school Nexus thought: Water is a medium for life and as it evaporates and winds kick up spray, tiny microbes can ride up into the stratosphere too – and the clouds are seeded with life that help make the rain by acting as particles around which condensation can occur – I read this somewhere but I can’t remember where…
Culhane: Go on. This is intriguing. We’ll ask NTHARP to fact check it later. What are the implications?
Sofia: In this Nexus hydrological cycle, water then rains down carrying information about its journey onto land where it nourishes other organisms and together they continue building and co-evolving the hypersea. The more you can keep the cycles intact, the more vibrant and alive and even AWARE the hypersea becomes, so that the water planet becomes a living being itself – the Gaia that Lovelock and Margulis are talking about… the HyperSea Sir that Dorian joked about last week in the recording I watched.
Culhane: Boy you guys learn fast from each other.
Sofia: Oh, I joined him and the gang down by the river and you know what they do? Can I tell you? Can we TRUST you?
NTHARP: Trust him. I’ve got your back.
Sofia: On your say so. So listen, they all get stoned – high as kites – but instead of shootin the shit like before, now they are contemplating the river…some are taking off their clothes and skinny dipping, some drinking it, painting each other with it, like some weird ritual out of the Lord of the Flies – and then they are chanting and praying to “Hypersea and Squirt” and the lesser water gods/guides guardians… Lake Ness, and Ledger… like they are buying into this whole mythology. It is freaky but so so cool… They are treating the river as if she were a person that they can commune with. I’ve seen them clean up cans and bottles – like it is sacred and they don’t want anyone to mess with her…
Culhane: Beautiful. Then it really works doesn’t it. They see themselves as integral parts of the hydrological cycle.
Sofia: Oh… it gets better, believe me. You know some of them are drinking kegs of beer and so they always have to go pee… But Dorian, he’s become like their guru and he says,
(She puts on a manly man voice): “Guys, Riverdalia” he calls her Riverdalia because we are near Riverdale, right? He says, Guys, how dare you DESECRATE her with your unredeemed filth? Riverdalia can’t assimilate all of your ammonia and uric acid and struvite and salts in this unsacralized form… she needs our communion with the symbionts – the plants that grow in berms and swales and turn what we throw out of our bodies into things her fish and crabs and snails can use to grow at the right rate.” He’s talking about avoiding EUTROPHICATION, for crying out loud, but in this Dungeons and Dragons kind of role playing way that the other kids are all totally into… and so he leads them on this quest to find places to pee where there are plants and where the nitrogen and phosphorous and potassium and bilirubin and whatnot will all be transformed magically into elixirs that are GOOD for the water.
“
Culhane: Oh wow. That is beautiful Bringing gamification, role playing, diegetics into science education IN THE STREET. Paolo Friere would be stoked!
Sofia: And the thing of it is – he isn’t doing it for a grade, he isn’t doing it for points, he isn’t doing it to study for a test – he’s doing it because he’s totally in role - he loves the new story and now he loves the river… It’s such a transformation…I’m really beginning to change my feelings for him…
Culhane: Not such a Logic 1 jerk anymore?
Sofia: (Blushes) Yeah… anyway, the other night I snuck down to watch him from a distance without him knowing I was there, because I wanted to see if he was only doing all this as an act to, you know how boys are…
Culhane: To impress you.
Sofia:Exactly. And there he is, teaching learning the outcomes around the campfire to his acolytes as though he is some wise soothesayer.
He says, like it is one of his Dungeons and Dragons riddle “Would you rather confront the demons along your heroes journey in arid, water stressed regions or swampy flood prone regions.”
And then the Dune fanatics will argue why the quest should take place in the desert and get into all sorts of minutiae about “stillsuits” and how to survive by putting a rock under a cone made of plastic and all those survivalist techniques while others will argue “where there is flooding we would do better – a more fecund territory where we could build entire floating islands and live independent from our parents”. Everyone has a preference, everyone has an argument. And then he stands up with this glow in his eyes and says in a thunderous voice,
“And, loving our living waters as we do, and sensing their spirits, would you ALLOW YOUR sacred water to be shipped away from you as some kind of commodity to be sold to the highest bidder? Would you ALLOW “embedded water” to be exported from your sacred landscapes. Would you allow Coca Cola Corporation to drain your well so dry that your people die of thirst while they ship commodified bottled drug drinks to satisfy the cravings of every loser in every corner store in New York”.
And the gang yells “hell no!”
And then, I’m still hiding in the bushes right? And I watch in amazement as Dorian raises a goblet and cries: “Then let us drink of the LIVING WATERS my friends, for I made my own brew this week – made from this very river water, and some honey and hops and barley from Sarah’s farm in New Jersey, nothing corporate, no commodities for my mean old man to trade on wall street, and we shall drink these libations that our sacred Riverdalia has helped us prepare in good cheer and then my friends… then we shall return the water back to Riverdalia via our sacred pee plants. For WE are the circle of life my friends… we ARE the Nexus.”
And then they all cheer, “Huzzah… to friendship, to water… to life!
(Fade to Black).
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