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Resurrection of Cognitive Shadows


Argent

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As has been the case with most threads I've started lately, this one is not a complete theory, but more of a dump of my thoughts on a topic in the interest of finding out where the conversation will take us. 

I've been thinking about cognitive shadows - in part because they are fascinating, but also in part because we now have a couple of examples of cognitive shadows that have managed to come back to life, so to speak, which means we can start theorizing about how those things work. Specifically, we know that 

  • the Returned are cognitive shadows shoved back in their bodies and kept there by virtue of a Divine Breath. There have been a few WoBs about this recently, and so I am pretty confident in this interpretation. Someone dies, their Realmatic aspects separate, Endowment shows up before their cognitive aspect (a cognitive shadow) and offers them a chance to Return; some do, at which point Endowment uses a bunch of her investiture (or creates a Splinter on the spot) to re-knit the separated aspects and put the mind (the cognitive shadow) back into its body. The soul, presumably, follows by default since it is the one aspect that gets a chance to look into the future. If I am correct in this, it is possible that some Realmatic shenanigans can ensue (stuff related to Identity, for example); more on that another time though.
  • Kelsier almost definitely engineered his own resurrection by way of Hemalurgy. It is not unreasonable to believe that the Sovereign's eye spike carries Kelsier's cognitive shadow (or was at least instrumental in putting his mind back into a body). It also looks like the body he is using currently (or was using a decade after the Catacendre) has the same scars as his original body did; which, given that his original body was eaten by a kandra, means that he either manually modified his new body to have the scars, or the new body underwent a process similar to what the Returned's bodies experience - a physical change. 

So what are the interesting takeaways here?

The thing I am most interested in is that it takes investiture - a Splinter-level amount of it - to put a cognitive shadow back in a body. This is obviously not a problem for the Returned, as Endowment herself is doing the Returning, but it's a barrier Kelsier would've had to overcome. Furthermore, I am reminded of Wax's death, and how it took the Bands (and maybe Harmony) to bring him back to life and heal his body. Considering that Kelsier himself probably wouldn't have been able to do much, it would've had to have been Spook who secured the investiture needed for Kelsier's resurrection - which makes me wonder if it wasn't Spook who created the Bands in the first place. 

There is also the topic of memory loss. I don't know the proper terminology here, but Returned seem to lose all memory of events, places, and people, while retaining their... muscle memory, but it's more than just muscle memory. I don't know if Kelsier suffers from a similar problem. We see very little from his perspective, and it could be interpreted either way - Wax notes that an image tickles Kel's memory from a long ago (which could suggest that he has these memories, or that he is trying to recall something and fails to). The "Survive" command he speaks fits him thematically, but it could've been something Spook told him (i.e. "Look, here's this religion that people made for you, it's all about surviving"). I am reminded of how kandra lose memories without their spikes too, and so I have to wonder if we are looking at different manifestations of the same cause.

I think that's enough rambling for now though. Let's see if someone can take it from here :) 

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Three thoughts for now:

18 minutes ago, Argent said:
  • Someone dies, their Realmatic aspects separate, Endowment shows up before their cognitive aspect (a cognitive shadow) and offers them a chance to Return; some do, at which point Endowment uses a bunch of her investiture (or creates a Splinter on the spot) to re-knit the separated aspects and put the mind (the cognitive shadow) back into its body. The soul, presumably, follows by default since it is the one aspect that gets a chance to look into the future.

There was a line that Sazed said to Wax as he was dying that gave me pause. I can't recall the exact wording, but it was about how his body would return to the earth, his mind to the cosmere, and his soul would go Beyond. It makes me wonder if the Cognitive aspect isn't what gets pulled beyond, but if it's the Spiritual aspect. The first 'stage' of death is the separation of the Physical aspect, and the second stage is the separation of the Cognitive and Spiritual.

18 minutes ago, Argent said:

Kelsier almost definitely engineered his own resurrection by way of Hemalurgy. It is not unreasonable to believe that the Sovereign's eye spike carries Kelsier's cognitive shadow (or was at least instrumental in putting his mind back into a body). It also looks like the body he is using currently (or was using a decade after the Catacendre) has the same scars as his original body did; which, given that his original body was eaten by a kandra, means that he either manually modified his new body to have the scars, or the new body underwent a process similar to what the Returned's bodies experience - a physical change. 

Sovereign's spike gives nothing special. If there's Investiture tying Kelsier's soul to his new body, it must be something else.

20 minutes ago, Argent said:

There is also the topic of memory loss. I don't know the proper terminology here, but Returned seem to lose all memory of events, places, and people, while retaining their... muscle memory, but it's more than just muscle memory. I don't know if Kelsier suffers from a similar problem. We see very little from his perspective, and it could be interpreted either way - Wax notes that an image tickles Kel's memory from a long ago (which could suggest that he has these memories, or that he is trying to recall something and fails to). The "Survive" command he speaks fits him thematically, but it could've been something Spook told him (i.e. "Look, here's this religion that people made for you, it's all about surviving"). I am reminded of how kandra lose memories without their spikes too, and so I have to wonder if we are looking at different manifestations of the same cause.

The Heralds were recently referred to as Cognitive Shadows, and they don't appear to have any memory issues. (Taln's a little loopy, but he remembers who he is and who the other Heralds are, and Kalak in the opening to WoK remembers going back for torment time and time again.)

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Actually Argent I think Kelsier's case and Returneds' cases are not easily comparable:

- Kelsier become a Cognitive Shadow exposing his Mind to Preservation's perpendicularity for quite an year. This Infuses his Mind with soo Investiture to become something like a Sliver's Mind (without actual be a Sliver of course).

- A Returned (but this may be actual a great speculation) is a Cognitive Shadow, but not the actual the deadman's mind, instead I think some Nalthisian spawn "naturally" a Cognitive Shadow without Shardic Intervent and this Cognitive Shadow actually come to be from the Breath the guy had (a Drab can't return). The Breath is easily capable of carring Cognitive (it's what the whole Awakening does) and I think they recive a slowly imprinting by their user. Once the owner dies and reaches the Beyond, the Breath may remain as Owner's Cognitive Shadow (the Investiture feign to be an actual being).

This is too me the messing with the Returned's Memory...They are not actually the guy, only an echo of the guy. They may recover memories or be connected to memories of the owner but it's not something as easy as be the one who experienced those.

PS: Of course with my explaination of Returned, Endowment simply recluit among the already formed Cognitive Shadow. She doesn't create them

Edited by Yata
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23 minutes ago, Argent said:

given that his original body was eaten by a Kandra, means that he either manually modified his new body to have the scars, or the new body underwent a process similar to what the Returned's bodies experience - a physical change. 

The Cognitive aspect of healing perhaps? Take Kaladin and his branding. If he somehow pulled the same trick Kelsier did and had a source of healing, I imagine those marks would show up on his new body anyway. I will admit that it is entirely within Kelsier's mental state to manually recreate the famed Scars of Hathsin if he so chose.

6 minutes ago, Pagerunner said:

Sovereign's spike gives nothing special. If there's Investiture tying Kelsier's soul to his new body, it must be something else.

I interpreted that as it not giving him some godlike power like Marsh's F-Atium spike does, just some base level ability. I am... unsure about the specifics of stapling his soul into a body, but I imagine he still had to make a spike the only way he knew how.

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2 minutes ago, Yata said:

- A Returned (but this may be actual a great speculation) is a Cognitive Shadow, but not the actual the deadman's mind, instead I think some Nalthisian spawn "naturally" a Cognitive Shadow without Shardic Intervent and this Cognitive Shadow actually come to be from the Breath the guy had (a Drab can't return). The Breath is easily capable of carring Cognitive (it's what the whole Awakening does) and I think they recive a slowly imprinting by their user. Once the owner dies and reaches the Beyond, the Breath may remain as Owner's Cognitive Shadow (the Investiture feign to be an actual being).

I thought along similar lines, but saw a WoB recently that swayed me strongly in the direction of what I wrote up there. 

7 minutes ago, Pagerunner said:

There was a line that Sazed said to Wax as he was dying that gave me pause. I can't recall the exact wording, but it was about how his body would return to the earth, his mind to the cosmere, and his soul would go Beyond. It makes me wonder if the Cognitive aspect isn't what gets pulled beyond, but if it's the Spiritual aspect. The first 'stage' of death is the separation of the Physical aspect, and the second stage is the separation of the Cognitive and Spiritual.

It's a sensible way of doing things. It plays nicely with the idea that people who have been in contact with (a lot of) investiture throughout their lives get to stick around in Shadesmar a little longer. Combine that with the knowledge that (in the context of savants) using a lot of investiture causes some of it to "build up" on one's Spiritweb (a little like plaque on teeth...), and I can imagine a universe where even non-savants accumulate enough investiture to make their cognitive and spiritual aspects stay together a little longer after the death of the body. 

I am having a "There is no spoon" moment right now...

11 minutes ago, Pagerunner said:

Sovereign's spike gives nothing special. If there's Investiture tying Kelsier's soul to his new body, it must be something else.

Right. Forgot about that one. Still, Kelsier gets steelsight similar to the Inquisitors', so the spike is not just for decoration.

12 minutes ago, Pagerunner said:

The Heralds were recently referred to as Cognitive Shadows, and they don't appear to have any memory issues. (Taln's a little loopy, but he remembers who he is and who the other Heralds are, and Kalak in the opening to WoK remembers going back for torment time and time again.)

I was going to address the Heralds, but then I forgot :( They might be a special case though.

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I always interpreted the WoB as being misleading. The spike may not give anything special, but it may do something else. Giving abilities is only one thing a spike can be used for. So I took it to mean that the spike has nothing to do with his feruchemy as that would be special.

My belief is that the spike was used to rewrite Kelsier's soul so it 'thinks' there is a connection to the physical realm allowing Kell to transition through the pool. That isn't really giving something, but it is doing something.

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On 03/01/2017 at 5:23 PM, Pagerunner said:

Sovereign's spike gives nothing special. If there's Investiture tying Kelsier's soul to his new body, it must be something else.

That seems like a fantastic misleading response.

Connecting your physical and cognitive selves isn't anything special. Literally everyone else on Scadrial has them connected, after all. Keeping you alive isn't anything special, because again - Literally everyone else you meet is already alive. It can be absolutely crucial to Kelsier's unique circumstances without being "special", because for normal people "not being dead" is a pre-existing condition. That aspect of his resurrection (Ignoring the Hemalurgic superpowers) is about getting him back to normal. 

 

 

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My take on the Sovereign spike not being special is that it doesn't grant an ability we haven't seen before. It could grant any power, just not something truly unusual. There are still probably a lot of atium mistings, but they never find out because they don't have any to burn (even after Sazed changed Allomancy, I still think atium has mistings, the probability is just different now with more metals). In my opinion, an atium spike would only be special in that you would have to find someone to spike the ability out of, which means feeding lots of people bits of atium. In other words, it is almost certainly just a standard coinshot spike, but could be anything if the bindpoint applies. I would bet he has other spikes that do do 'something special' i.e. staple a Cognitive Shadow to a body. It is more likely to be in the same place as an Inquisitor's linchpin spike, like, I would be a bit surprised if it was anywhere else.

I have other things to say, but other things to do, so they will have to wait. Lets just say that I disagree with most of Pagerunner's post except for the bit about Heralds.

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I just wonder if Kelsier's resurrection took a darker turn. What if he ended up having to possess someone - Spook, perhaps?

Which makes me think, why didn't Harmony want to tell Kelsier the truth? What was his fear about Kell's resurrection?

Edited by Rob Lucci
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1 hour ago, Rob Lucci said:

I just wonder if Kelsier's resurrection took a darker turn. What if he ended up having to possess someone - Spook, perhaps?

Which makes me think, why didn't Harmony want to tell Kelsier the truth? What was his fear about Kell's resurrection?

I don't really think he possessed Spook. The Sovereign arrived about twelve years after the Catacendre, and Spook supposedly ruled for a hundred years. This would mean that Spook would have been possessed by Kelsier most of that time, and also should have a spike through his eye. I think something like that would probably be noticed by the people in elendal. Also, it would mean that both the Sovereign and Spook wouldn't be seen for long periods of time, as they were at the other continent. I do however think that possession could be a possibility, just not that Kelsier possessed Spook.

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7 hours ago, Djarskublar said:

My take on the Sovereign spike not being special is that it doesn't grant an ability we haven't seen before. It could grant any power, just not something truly unusual. There are still probably a lot of atium mistings, but they never find out because they don't have any to burn (even after Sazed changed Allomancy, I still think atium has mistings, the probability is just different now with more metals). In my opinion, an atium spike would only be special in that you would have to find someone to spike the ability out of, which means feeding lots of people bits of atium. In other words, it is almost certainly just a standard coinshot spike, but could be anything if the bindpoint applies. I would bet he has other spikes that do do 'something special' i.e. staple a Cognitive Shadow to a body. It is more likely to be in the same place as an Inquisitor's linchpin spike, like, I would be a bit surprised if it was anywhere else.

I have other things to say, but other things to do, so they will have to wait. Lets just say that I disagree with most of Pagerunner's post except for the bit about Heralds.

There is a topic in Secret History section where we try to figure how the Hemalurgy may allow him to return...without a real or likely answer. The Problem is you can't simply spike a Cognitive Shadow at least for canon material we have.

 

On 3/1/2017 at 6:37 PM, Argent said:

I thought along similar lines, but saw a WoB recently that swayed me strongly in the direction of what I wrote up there. 

Argent I forgot to ask you, can you tell me what WoB is ? Because I don't find any problem with the material we have....so probably I had to miss it

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3 hours ago, Yata said:

Argent I forgot to ask you, can you tell me what WoB is ? Because I don't find any problem with the material we have....so probably I had to miss it

Sure, it comes from here.

Quote

Also: the Returned on Nalthis are cognitive shadows, shoved into and firmly attached to their dead bodies by virtue of that enormous "divine Breath" they're given.

 

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At the end of Secret History, Kelsier asks Harmony if there's a way for him to get physical again. Harmony says no... but he's lying, and Kelsier knows it. Then, of course, Kelsier manages to do it without Sazed's help. I see two ways to interpret this.

1) Resurrecting a cognitive shadow can be achieved in different ways. Perhaps Sazed could have fixed Kelsier with a snap of his fingers, but preferred not to disrupt the natural rhythms of life and death. Kelsier and Spook then figured out how to achieve the same effect using Hemalurgy.

2) Hemalurgy is the only way of resurrecting a shadow. Sazed refused to tell Kelsier about the possibility because he doesn't like Hemalurgy, and he doesn't want to unleash the knowledge of it into his new world. (But when Kelsier and Spook started experimenting on their own, Sazed wasn't about to quash their free will by stopping them.)

I like number two. It's a good source of conflict, and it makes a lot of sense. It also has some interesting implications...

For instance, I think Hemalurgy is essential because Kelsier lost his body. If Sazed had all three of Kelsier's realmatic aspects in hand, he could stick them back together, just like Endowment does with the Returned. 

But what about the Heralds? WoB says they're cognitive shadows, too. And I think we have reason to believe that their resurrections are achieved without their original bodies:

1) They're pretty confident that they'll be resurrected, no matter how they die. Even if their bodies are completely destroyed, they will still return to Braize.
2) It's possible that they die on Roshar, but rise again on Braize. Even if their original bodies are still intact, they might just get new ones, like Kelsier did.

We don't know much about what happens to them on Braize... but doesn't Kalak mention something about metal hooks piercing his flesh? What if the heralds are being resurrected via Hemalurgy? What if they all have spikes that we haven't seen yet? Another WoB says we've seen the results of Hemalurgy outside of Scadrial, but we wouldn't recognize it as such. This probably refers to worldhopping Kandra... but maybe it includes the Heralds as well.

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On 1/4/2017 at 2:35 PM, Tarion said:

That seems like a fantastic misleading response.

Connecting your physical and cognitive selves isn't anything special. Literally everyone else on Scadrial has them connected, after all. Keeping you alive isn't anything special, because again - Literally everyone else you meet is already alive. It can be absolutely crucial to Kelsier's unique circumstances without being "special", because for normal people "not being dead" is a pre-existing condition. That aspect of his resurrection (Ignoring the Hemalurgic superpowers) is about getting him back to normal. 

 

 

The question specified give. My initial thought was that it was asking about abilities. So the spike could do anything that doesn't involve a special ability.

Im of the opinion that Kell was spiked in the Cognitive Realm. We know he can be affected there if he thinks he is. 

I always took option three on that conversation between Kell and Saze. Saze just doesn't want Kell to interfere and cause trouble. Which he would totally do.

or 4) Saze got a glimpse of something in the future that told him Kelsier would have to do this himself.

Kell's old body still exists; it would just take a bit more work to fix it... I think Saze could have done that if he wanted.

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On 1/3/2017 at 11:01 AM, Argent said:

 It also looks like the body he is using currently (or was using a decade after the Catacendre) has the same scars as his original body did; which, given that his original body was eaten by a kandra, means that he either manually modified his new body to have the scars, or the new body underwent a process similar to what the Returned's bodies experience - a physical change.

Or Kelsier's "Sovereign" body is a kandra using Kelsier's old bones. Maybe he put his soul in a spike and Spook stuck the spike in a mistwraith.

It doesn't seem like you could spike a Cognitive Shadow, but maybe the process involved is something else. Maybe Kelsier could infiltrate himself into an already charged spike (rather than charging it with himself), or use it as a bridge of sorts.

Quote

The thing I am most interested in is that it takes investiture - a Splinter-level amount of it - to put a cognitive shadow back in a body

I don't know where Spook would have gotten that much, though. There are no Splinters of Ruin or Preservation.

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On 1/6/2017 at 8:21 PM, cometaryorbit said:

I don't know where Spook would have gotten that much, though. There are no Splinters of Ruin or Preservation.

Investiture can be found inside people on Scadrial, and extracted by Hemalurgy. (Or nicrosil feruchemy, but that seems less feasible for Spook.)

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7 hours ago, Belzedar said:

Investiture can be found inside people on Scadrial, and extracted by Hemalurgy. (Or nicrosil feruchemy, but that seems less feasible for Spook.)

That much investiture though? Enough to be equal to a Splinter?

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Just now, Argent said:

That much investiture though? Enough to be equal to a Splinter?

Hmm, that's an interesting point. I assumed that a spike with enough investiture to create an feruchemist would be at least on par with a small spren, but I really have no way of knowing that. Measuring (or at leas distinguishing) different quantities of investiture is an idea worth theorizing about...

But even if one spike wasn't enough, you could just use more than one. I'm sure Spook could assemble enough investiture by organizing a large hemalurgic massacre. Not that he would, but... I don't know.

Also, I suspect Kelsier's spikes might have been created by Spook himself. He did apparently believe old allomancers should sacrifice themselves to create spikes. And since Spook was made mistborn by direct Shardic action, he might be more invested than most. He may have given his own life to create the spikes that could resurrect Kelsier. 

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The timeline doesn't match though. There is a place in The Bands of Mourning where Marasi, Wax, and Allik talk about the Sovereign, and they establish that he arrived in Southern Scadrial about 10 years after the Catacendre. Spook would've been no more than 30 around that time, and history reports him ruling for a century.

Edited by Argent
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5 minutes ago, Argent said:

The timeline doesn't match though. There is a place in The Bands of Mourning where Marasi, Wax, and Allik talk about the Sovereign, and they establish that he arrived in Southern Scadrial about 10 years after the Catacendre. Spook would've been no more than 30 around that time.

And setting the foundation for a country, no less. 

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Do we know that a whole splinter's worth of Investiture is necessary? Endowment might give much more than she has to, perhaps to allow for many of the other powers a Returned gets access to (such as agelessness, intuitive Awakening, foretelling, whatever the healing they can do actually is...).

Also, what is the difference between healing someone just after they died (like Wax, Szeth, and maybe Gawx (though he was probably still a little bit alive)), and reinserting a Cognitive Shadow into their old body? Shouldn't those two things kind of be the same? I was thinking it might depend on if the brain still works (I think the old version of Szeth's resurrection in WoR mentions the brain), but we have stories of TLR being decapitated or burned, and still resurrecting.

Maybe the Cognitive Shadow continues to have a connection to the body a bit after it dies, and if that connection is severed (which might happen before the Shadow moves on to the Beyond), it takes more effort to put the Cognitive part back into the body...

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1 minute ago, Eki said:

Do we know that a whole splinter's worth of Investiture is necessary? Endowment might give much more than she has to, perhaps to allow for many of the other powers a Returned gets access to (such as agelessness, intuitive Awakening, foretelling, whatever the healing they can do actually is...).

Also, what is the difference between healing someone just after they died (like Wax, Szeth, and maybe Gawx (though he was probably still a little bit alive)), and reinserting a Cognitive Shadow into their old body? Shouldn't those two things kind of be the same? I was thinking it might depend on if the brain still works (I think the old version of Szeth's resurrection in WoR mentions the brain), but we have stories of TLR being decapitated or burned, and still resurrecting.

Maybe the Cognitive Shadow continues to have a connection to the body a bit after it dies, and if that connection is severed (which might happen before the Shadow moves on to the Beyond), it takes more effort to put the Cognitive part back into the body...

Maybe Progression helps link the person it's being used on back to the physical realm?

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43 minutes ago, Eki said:

we have stories of TLR being decapitated or burned, and still resurrecting

He wasn't resurrecting - he simply was not dying. Similarly Miles has blown his brains out and healed.

On the other hand, Wax and Szeth had died and then resurrected. I don't know whether we could use Wax's example as Harmony was involved, both directly and indirectly.

Nalan comments that he waited until Szeth's body was dead, his Connections broken and then he resurrected him before his brain had died. So it seems like clinical death.

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10 minutes ago, Eki said:

Do we know that a whole splinter's worth of Investiture is necessary? Endowment might give much more than she has to, perhaps to allow for many of the other powers a Returned gets access to (such as agelessness, intuitive Awakening, foretelling, whatever the healing they can do actually is...).

That's a fair point. 

11 minutes ago, Eki said:

Also, what is the difference between healing someone just after they died (like Wax, Szeth, and maybe Gawx (though he was probably still a little bit alive)), and reinserting a Cognitive Shadow into their old body? Shouldn't those two things kind of be the same? I was thinking it might depend on if the brain still works (I think the old version of Szeth's resurrection in WoR mentions the brain), but we have stories of TLR being decapitated or burned, and still resurrecting.

Halfway through this paragraph I was going to say that the two should be pretty much the same - though I imagine the longer a person has been dead, the more difficult it would be to re-link them. It would take more investiture, in other words. All of this up to the point where the Cognitive Shadow has passed into the Beyond (which is probably a less correct representation of what happens, I suspect the Cognitive Shadow is destroyed, and the Spiritual aspect of the person passes into the beyond). Using the brain as an indicator might be accurate, but this time I would actually avoid getting tangled with such technicalities. Because it's not that important. 

As for the Lord Ruler surviving stuff, I have two somewhat contradictory comments. On one hand, we should be careful about what we believe. In-universe lore, especially about such a mythic figure, is bound to be shrouded in exaggerations and inaccuracies. On the other hand, we have multiple accounts of Miles Hundredlives eating a shotgun blast, and even a dynamite stick. We also have Wayne's experience during the "rotten tomato" maneuver. Both of those suggest, I think, that someone with sufficiently large reserve of Feruchemical healing can kind of preemptively dump it into their body and allow it to heal them from an otherwise fatal injury (fatal not only in the sense that it would kill them, but also in the sense that it would disable them in such a way that it would prevent them from consciously using healing powers). In a way this reminds me of how Kaladin (and to a lesser extent Vin) healed after being strung up (and in Vin's case, after she fought a bunch of Inquisitors). What I am getting at here is that the body seems to know how to heal itself even if the brain does not - or cannot. So in this context, I don't think decapitation is that much of a problem for a Feruchemist who walks into it prepared.

51 minutes ago, Eki said:

Maybe the Cognitive Shadow continues to have a connection to the body a bit after it dies, and if that connection is severed (which might happen before the Shadow moves on to the Beyond), it takes more effort to put the Cognitive part back into the body...

This might be an overcomplication of what's actually happening. But I imagine it is more or less correct.

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I think the difference between these is like in the Princess Bride. You are dead, but there's different types of dead, you see. There's a little dead, mostly dead, and truly dead (and also no longer of this world once you have moved Beyond).

A little dead would be where you are decapitated, but heal it off immediately. There appears to be no lasting impact from this occurring occasionally beyond the standard effects of using large quantities of Investiture.

There is mostly dead, like what happened to Wax. Your C-Shadow has left your body and your Connections begin to break up. It is still possible to restore such a person, but it will take more power and skill. Done incorrectly or inefficiently, we can expect negative consequences with capacities in certain Realms such as those experienced by the Returned and their memories. I would presume that the Investiture of your Connections haven't fully dissipated back into the Shards from whence they came, they have merely been cut, so it isn't totally unreasonable to restore such a person.

Then there is truly dead. A person in this state has lost all of their normal Connections to the physical beyond any that are strictly necessary to maintain a Cognitive presence. This is the boat Kelsier was in with Spook. I suspect that it is extremely difficult to return non-slivers to life at this point. It may be impossible depending on how long it takes to move Beyond versus reaching this state. They may be one and the same, which is an extremely interesting line of thought. It suggests that what Kel did at the Well granted him some residual Connection to the Physical Realm that acted as a tether to prevent him from moving Beyond.

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