Belonging, cognitive aspects, and time bubbles

[Kurkistan]

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

KLOKKAN ()
Hello Mr. Sanderson, I have a question about bendalloy bubbles—what happens to a human that is partially in and partially out of the bubble when it's placed? Does the difference in the flow of time kill him?

And, if yes, is the boundary of active bendalloy bubble effectively impassable for living organisms? I get that bullets shot out of the bubble randomly change directions, but what happens to, let's say, a person trying to jump out of the bubble (or, given enough time, a person trying to get inside)?

BRANDON SANDERSON
Any living thing touching the bubble is affected by the bubble.

Bubble borders static

Kurkistan: Last question: If Wayne was inside of a speed bubble and punches somebody who's standing outside it, what's happening with his fist and them: are they like sucked into the bubble, or what?
Brandon: So, I have... So _exiting_ a speed bubble, while it's going, has _weird_ ramifications on lots of things. It would be really hard to punch somebody through a speed bubble-
Kurkistan: So would the surface like distend around his fist-
-<Illustrates with fist "stretching out" invisible film>
Brandon: It's going to steal your momentum, but if you actually managed to do it, then- yes. Anything in the speed bubble that's touching through is counted as being as part of the speed bubble.
Kurkistan: Okay, so the bubble would end here <Draws invisible surface in the air> and his fist would be out there <Illustrates by "punching" arm through the fake surface, demonstrating the fist extending past the bubble while he arm is within>, but still fast?
Brandon: Yes.
Kurkistan: Oh okay, thank you.
Brandon: That's how I would imagine it so far.
Kurkistan: But the bubble does _end_ at [the same place still, with the fist extending out past its boundary].
Brandon: The bubble does end, yes.
[...]

VS.

Bubble occupancy

Kurkistan: If you are standing inside of a time bubble, and throw a spear out of the bubble, what happens to that spear as it traverses the border of the bubble? Are different parts of the spear ever in different "time zones," going fundamentally different speeds?

On that line of reasoning, what would happen to a train and its occupants if Marisi stood next to railroad tracks holding up a Cadmium bubble while that train sped by?

Brandon: In general, a large object going through a time bubble is not going to notice. An object is either in or out, and it depends in part on how the object views itself. People inside the train would be inside of its influence, and wouldn't notice the bubble. The spear would go from one to the other, but would never be in both.

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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.

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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.

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So... yeah. This is what happens when I get in time bubble mode.

Edited May 15, 2015 by Kurkistan

[Argent]

Gods, not another time bubble thread by Kurk...

 

Now. I don't normally step into Mistborn theories, because my Realmatic knowledge of that world is the worst for some reason, but I'll address a few points here. 

 

First, clothing. I believe either Kaladin or Shallan remarked somewhere in Words of Radiance that their Surgebinding seemed to affect their clothing the same way it affects them. I think it was Kaladin thinking about how his clothes weren't flapping in the wrong direction whenever he Lashed himself in a direction other than downwards. So, safe to assume clothing - and probably held items - become part of one's Cognitive aspect.

 

Second, I think you are starting to dwell into this more than even Brandon intends to, or has so far. The way I see it, the difference between the Soulcast ship and the hypothetical train passing through a bubble is far more ephemeral, and it boils down to essentially "it's magic." It's rare that I make this claim about Brandon's worldbuilding, and I've been proven wrong in the past, but this feels like one of those things - a distinction that, if made explicit, would complicate things far more than it would simplify them were it made implicit.

Edited June 9, 2014 by Argent

[Kurkistan]

On clothing: Yes, that did happen so my clothing theory is probably safe. Also of note is how the Full Lashing works: However Kaladin wants it to. By turns it affects just clothing, both clothing and bodies as a whole, and not-Kaladin-or-his-clothes depending on what the situation warrants. That's a side note, though.

 

I agree with you on the second point that this all seems rather over-complicated at face value. But that's mostly my fault, I think, as it usually is. I do you the disservice of baring my entire thought process that leads me to my conclusion. In the end, though, that conclusion is rather simple. I can see Brandon coming up with this distinction of "oh well the ship's parts are a part of how it's seen while its passengers see themselves as part of the ship" readily enough.

Edited June 9, 2014 by Kurkistan