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Found 3 results

  1. So I was writing up my absurdly large time bubble thread (what else is new?) and I got the section about bubble occupancy. For the first time, I actually sat down and thought about the implications of a particular new WoB in light of some fairly old knowledge: Namely, how do we reconcile the facts that time bubble borders are static (i.e., don't distend ever) and any living thing touching a time bubble is affected by it with the fact that passengers in a bubbled train that doesn't notice the bubble won't notice it either? The WoBs: Living touch enough Bubble borders static VS. Bubble occupancy ----- How to reconcile these, then? It seems that the key to this question is to ask how time bubbles "find out" whether or not objects should be included in their effect. We see that objects are included or excluded as wholes: You won't be speeding up one leg of a chair and leaving the rest untouched, for instance. Yet objects do not lose their individual identities when they become a part of a greater whole. We saw in WoR that parts of the whole can both have their own beads in Shadesmar (their own individual Cognitive aspects) and be represented within the beads of their parent (and presumably their parent's parent and so on). The doors and lamps in Kholinar's palace have their own distinct beads at the same time as those same objects are a part of the "PALACE" mega-bead. We see, then, that time bubbles know not to include the child without consulting the parent. You won't see the chair leg being included on its own because the bubble somehow knows that that leg has a parent aspect and that that aspect is not included. The bubble then doesn't include the leg. Where is this answer derived, though? 1. Does the bubble look first at the leg, then see it has a parent, then look to the parent, then check if it has a parent, then see it doesn't and determine if it would like to go fast today? -This requires some mechanism of "trickle down" for all the child objects to be suitably affected/not-affected. 2. Does the bubble simultaneously survey all potentially-included objects, figure out the tree, and then only bother to actually look to the root nodes for occupancy? 3. Does the bubble simply ask the leg "would you like to go fast?" and then the leg, as black-box, replies Y/N after querying its parent? I am somewhat disposed towards the third option, myself. It's a bit of extra work on the part of individual aspects, but requires fewer/slower fundamental changes than the first and far less unbelievable work than the second. The first option requires that pesky trickle-down mechanism. It requires that either the bubble remember everything it's looked at and associate them with their parents as it finds them or that the parents be able to tell all their children its "decision". The second requires a large degree of "thought" on the part of the bubble: it takes place in two distinct steps, with some concept of consideration/evaluation in play between the steps. The bubble somehow "looks" at everything before "actually" looking at only a subset of those things for its actual answer. It seems overdone. The third option does demand some degree of work from individual objects. It requires that random peice of wood #7 go through the trouble of actively figuring out whether it and/or its parents want to be included in the bubble. This could go on for dozens or hundreds of layers, depending on how fine-grained we get. -- Another thing we must consider is how what objects are included in the bubble is decided. Yes, there's Cognitive "is this thing 'in' this space?" questions, but who's asking and who's answering? Are individual objects returning their assessment of whether they're within the bubble's space, or are third parties, or is the bubble itself determining this? The answer to this question has special weight for Option 3 above because that option doesn't allow the bubble any input into whether the root object is included. -- Getting back to my own judgments, I would also say that the objects' Cognitive aspects in the broad sense (so including both personal and external opinion) determine "where" they are in space, and then that object reports whether it thinks it's "in" the bubble if some part of it is straddling the line. I don't think it appropriate to saddle a distortion in space-time with too much thinking. This presumed lack of cognitive ability is yet another reason to discard Option 2, also. I think it fair to proceed as if we've narrowed the reasonable options down to 1 and 3, then. Not being sure between these two still leaves ambiguity as to exactly what these Cognitive aspects look like, though. In the case of Option 3, then the only thing we need in order to reconcile the WoB's is for child objects to know who their parents are. You can have a bunch of illegitimate passengers running around saying "this train is my parent" without the train ever being aware they even exist, let alone that it allegedly has a few hundred children. -- But in the case of Option 1, things are nastier. We've already essentially excised the time bubble from any computational heavy-lifting, so requiring that it remember/associate children with parents seems untoward. That leaves the parents being able to inform their children of what's what. How, then? I see two fundamental ways. Either the parent knows all of its children and tells them all personally or it "broadcasts" some message to all saying essentially "My kids: listen as I say...". The broadcast idea is rather uncivilized, and ghastly-expensive/loud. If the parent has no idea whatsoever who its children are, then it has to tell everything it can reach the message. And the kids have to all be listening for it and be able to actively distinguish when their parent has a message. Ugly and I don't see Brandon designing it that way, frankly. On more Realmatic grounds, the Cognitive isn't really that kind of place. Nor is the Spiritual, when you get right down to it. We've yet to see any simple broadband "tell everyone the news" communication Realmatically. The Spiritual has sets of 1:1 connections while the Cognitive seems composed of a bunch of quite singular entities that, to their core, know what they are. While this "knowing what you are" could quite easily extend to "just knowing" your parents or children (and thus perhaps going on to forge and maintain Spiritual bonds with them for communication), it doesn't seem to extend to knowing and being able to communicate with your local area. So the other way is that the parent knows all of its kids and tells them personally. How kind. But the problem with this is the ephemerality of some of the relations we're talking about, and how quickly they'd have to be established and torn down. When a passenger sets foot on a train, this model requires that that train immediately become aware of that passenger as its child and see itself as containing him. That's the impact of this set of WoB's. And that's rather absurd on the face of it. Besides the "absurd on the face of it" thing, which isn't exactly a scientific assessment, we also have good reason to disbelieve such ephemerality: Soulcasting. When Shallan soulcast the ship in WoR, she did not, as it turns out, turn all of its human occupants to water. Despite this, I think it fair to claim that those same occupants would have been unaffected by a passing time bubble that the ship ignored. So there are in fact at least these two levels of Cognitive identity to deal with: one where ephemeral occupancy does protect you from time bubbles but does not entail being "part of" something (the ship's occupants) on a deeper level, and another where long-term occupancy both protects from time bubbles and entails "partness" (the ship's various planks and whatnot). Following from this, the natural conclusion to make, I think, is that what separates these two types of belonging is exactly where children objects are accounted for in their parents' cognitive aspects. Perhaps some other division could be made, or we could make allowances for the difference being due to different degrees in which the parent regards the child, but such seems unwieldy and quite unnecessary in the face of a simpler option. -As an aside, I'd say that Soulcasting directly affects exactly those parts of an object which its Cognitive aspect (its bead) says are a part of it. So Soulcasting directly locates and transforms all those basic-level, non-parent objects which are a part of the whole according to the whole. The whole knows what all of these objects are, and is likely Spiritually connected to them, so I'd wager it easy enough for a Soulcaster to follow the threads down. ---- It seems, then, that we've discarded Option 1 in its entirety. That leaves Option 3, which, to recall, is the one where individual objects are queried by the bubble and make black-box replies which they base on querying their parents. This model requires only singly-linked lists rather than the more expensive doubly-linked tree option 1 needed. Any given object needs only to know either what object its parent is or that it does not, in fact, have a parent. In the first case it asks the parent whether they're in the bubble, in the second it makes the judgment itself. The parent doesn't need to remember any of this, only bothering to connect to its children for a moment as it replies to their individual queries. To the parent in this model, the child asking after occupancy is asked and answered in the same exact way as the bubble asking after occupancy. ---- So, to summarize, this leaves passengers in the train not "touching" the bubble proper because they don't really "interact" with it directly. At no point are they actually doing any work in assessing whether or not they're in the bubble: all they do is ask the train to make the call. When the passenger is in the train, he doesn't actually know whether or not he's touching the bubble because the only way he has to assess the question is asking his parent the train what the answer is. When the passenger is outside the train, though, the buck stops with the human and he is, in fact, "touching" the bubble with no Cognitive intermediary. Honestly I preferred distension to all of this, but given the WoB we have and assuming that I'm not drastically misinterpreting it (which I'm fairly sure I'm not), this seems the answer. ------------- Implications: This is likely the exact same way that clothing and/or held items behave for time bubbles. While I have my whole thread on the matter, I have yet to address what happens to clothing when people touch time bubbles. I think it intuitive and natural that their clothing is included in the speedup/slowdown as well. It wouldn't do to have a "pulled out of his socks" situation it a man poked a time bubble with his finger while running by. So perhaps the mans clothing is included in the direct, "this is part of the human's Cognitive aspect" sense. It's a bit more of an open question whether held-items (like weapons) would have the same privilege. To expand why such short-term "partness" is plausible, I would argue that such possessions (including held items?) are included (and eventually discarded) so easily because living beings are living beings. We cannot expect a train or a ship to actively track and/or have opinions on what's properly part of it: That kind of thing is decided entirely by the input/views of living beings who can make such judgments. By that measure, though, it could well be that the living things have much more malleable "part of me" parts of their Cognitive selves, and can in fact very quickly come to regard clothing/held-items as a part of themselves. In this human case, then, clothing and possibly held objects are included in the effect of the bubble directly because of the uniquely malleable nature of the living Cognitive aspect. -- Another point to make is that I would think a man wearing gloves who touched the edge of a bubble with only the gloves might get included, as the gloves are a part of him. That one's a tad in the air, though, as to whether the "part of me" extends so deeply. We wouldn't expect someone whose shirt got cut by a Shardblade to feel pained by it, after all. ---- Another expansionary point is that this might actually address the "man runs into pole at 500 mph" point I touch on in a few of my time bubble threads. The basic problem is that of a moving person who is trailing along a train (matching its speed) and then gets time-bubbled at 20x speed into the back of a train that is ignoring the time bubble. Does this man suffer damage from this collision? This "parenting" theory may solve this problem: potentially, the moment the man contacts the train his overriding "wait a minute, I'm now in contact with an object big enough that I consider myself to be 'on' it" is such that he begins to take his time-bubble-related ques from the train rather than his own body. So the man ends up painlessly coming to rest against the back of the train with no tangible impact, rather than going kersplat. ------ So... yeah. This is what happens when I get in time bubble mode.
  2. *MISTBORN SPOILERS AHOY* So there have been some discussions as to why Sazed can't un-eunuch himself with Health. We know that severe bodily trauma isn't world-ending because Miles grows back from chomping on a stick of dynamite and Wayne grows back his fingers at least once. So what is "health?" Is it the state of health that the person is in when they store? Then why is Miles getting older and what does Compounding do? I think that TES has given us an answer. The application of Feruchemical Health is dependent upon the Cognitive aspect of the Feruchemist (or, more accurately, his body's Cognitive aspect). So Sazed's body see's itself as lacking in certain reproductive areas, Wayne sees himself as having a whole hand (as opposed to the normal course of healing just resulting in a quick creation of new skin over the stumps), and Miles sees himself as not chunky salsa. Miles gets older, then, because his Cognitive aspect adapts to age and sees it as the new normal regardless of how much Health his body has coursing through it. Health, rather than being a "state of health" or anything so complicated, is essentially just raw power whose use is dictated by the Cognitive aspect. That way, Compounding can just pour on a little extra power rather than having to interact oddly with any other aspects of what makes up "Health." I'm not going to give much analysis here because I think it's self-evident after reading TES. I'm sure other people have proposed something similar, but now we know that this is almost certainly how Health works.
  3. So, in the philosophy of identity, there's a bit of a discussion as the extent to which "things" are part of us. How much is your homeland or house or favorite book a part of who "you" are? To what extent can you claim them as an extension of your self, a part of your identity as a person? Now, as I've said before, philosophy actually matters in the cosmere! There's actually an interesting discussion to be had as to whether objects gain some "sympathy" with their owners (oh, that is interesting...), but that's not what I'm looking at today. No, instead, I will look at clothes!!! You see, it turns out that (I think) your clothing is a proper part of your identity in the cosmere, at least to some extent. At least some magics operate on a level at which affecting "you" means also affecting your clothing. Examples: 1. Jasnah's combat-soulcasting. When she soulcasts the thugs, she wipes them out completely, clothes and all. She doesn't turn a man into a statue with clothes on it, but everything from hair to boots into crystal. This implies a deeper level of connection between clothes and identity because we already have fair reason to believe that soulcasting works on the level of "objects" by default: A goblet, an entire stone, etc. Shallan's blood when she was poisoned is an oddity here, but we might be able to explain that away as either Blood being an essence or Jasnah making a special effort there. 2. Lift's "Slick". This one is the one that caught my attention, actually. Lift, it seems, includes her clothing in the effect whenever she goes "Slick". I scoured the interlude to make sure that it wasn't just her bare skin, but at one point she slides full-body across the floor, so that suggests (unless she was secretly nude the whole scene) that her clothing is included. And she's not exactly a master of skill and subtlety, so I doubt that she included her clothes "on purpose" by some extra effort. In fact, I'd wager (just because) that Edgedancers can only actually "Slick" themselves, not necessarily their surroundings, which would lock in clothing as part of the self. --- This isn't 100% at the moment. For all I know, Lift makes a special effort to include her clothing and/or soulcasting is entirely based on the soulcaster's perceptions of what an "object" is. I'm inclined to believe, though, that instead people's Cognitive aspects possess a (very very weak) perception of their clothes as a part of them, and that at least some magic systems are sensitive to this perception. This might mean that clothing is included in Basic Lashings, for instance. Thoughts?
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