Age and Connection

[Argent]

So /u/Doom-Slayer asked a good question on /r/Mistborn - essentially, why did the Lord Ruler's age caught up with him when Vin pulled his atiumminds. And then Brandon showed up and wrote a dissertation on the topic - one that touched on how Connection works:

 

 

All right, so there are a few things you have to understand about cosmere magics to grok all of this.

 

First, is that magics can be hacked together. You'll see more of this in the future of the cosmere, but an early one is the hack here--where you're essentially powering Feruchemy with Allomancy. (A little more complex than that, but it seems like you get the idea.)

 

The piece you're missing is the nature of a person's Spiritual aspect. This is similar to a Platonic idea--the idea that there's a perfect version of everyone somewhere. It's a mix of their connections to places, people, and times with raw investiture. The soul, you might say.

 

(Note that over time, a person's perception of themselves shapes their cognitive aspect as well, and the cognitive aspect can interfere with the spiritual aspect trying to make the physical aspect repair itself.) Healing in the cosmere often works by aligning your physical self with your spiritual self--making the physical regrow. More powerful forms of investiture can repair the soul as well.

 

However, your age is part of your Connection to places, people, and times. Your soul "knows" things, like where you were born, what investiture you are aligned with, and--yes--how old you are. When you're healing yourself, you're restoring yourself to a perfect state--when you're done, everything is good. When you're changing your age, however, you are transforming yourself to something unnatural. Against what your soul understands to be true.

 

So the spiritual aspect will push for a restoration to the way you should be. With this compounding hack, you're not changing connection; it's a purely Physical Realm change.

 

This dichotomy cannot remain for long. And the greater the disparity, the more pressure the spirit will exert. Ten or twenty years won't matter much. A thousand will matter a lot. So the only way to use compounding to change your age is to store up all this extra youth in a metalmind, then be constantly tapping it to counteract the soul's attempt to restore you to how you should be.

 

Yes, all of this means there are FAR more efficient means of counteracting aging than the one used by the Lord Ruler. It's a hack, and not meant to be terribly efficient. Eventually, he wouldn't have been able to maintain himself this way at all. Changing connection (or even involving ones Cognitive Aspect a little more) would have been far more efficient, though actively more difficult.

 

Though this is the point where I ping /u/PeterAhlstrom  and get him to double-check all this. Once in a while, my fingers still type the wrong term in places. (See silvereye vs tineye.)

 

I don't necessarily know where to take this, but it was interesting to read.

[Edgedancer]

Let's see, what do we have here. Again, a statement that Compounding seems to be more complicated than what we know of it. More detail about what the spiritual aspect of something is. Some slight insight into other magics, like Forging and Biochroma that I'm not sure if I should go into it, given that we are on a Mistborn board. Although, I wonder how a form of healing that works by using your soul as a blueprint can repair your soul, even though damage to your soul means that the blueprint is gone. Maybe by some kind of extrapolation?

 

Funnily, even though this post is majorly about the effects of Feruchemy, I think Feruchemy is also the system that this post gives us the least information about.

[Eagle of the Forest Path]

Although, I wonder how a form of healing that works by using your soul as a blueprint can repair your soul, even though damage to your soul means that the blueprint is gone. Maybe by some kind of extrapolation?

 

 

How about by involving the cognitive?

From Shai's stained glass window in TES we know that the cognitive whatchamacallit contains the history of an object.

If a person sustains a soul-wound and has the means to investiturically (investically?) heal that wound, I'd guess that the investiture goes through the cognitive to look up the most recent state of the soul before sustaining the wound, and restores the soul to that state.

No proof, just spitballing.

[Charononus]

Let's see, what do we have here. Again, a statement that Compounding seems to be more complicated than what we know of it. More detail about what the spiritual aspect of something is. Some slight insight into other magics, like Forging and Biochroma that I'm not sure if I should go into it, given that we are on a Mistborn board. Although, I wonder how a form of healing that works by using your soul as a blueprint can repair your soul, even though damage to your soul means that the blueprint is gone. Maybe by some kind of extrapolation?

 

Funnily, even though this post is majorly about the effects of Feruchemy, I think Feruchemy is also the system that this post gives us the least information about.

If the soul is damaged my guess is that it pulls information from one of the other realms.  

[Titan Arum]

Is this the first time Brandon has talked about Connection, with a capital C or has he done so before? I know that a Duralumin ferring can store connection, but that seems just on the spiritual side. Here Brandon talks about it across all realms, assuming time is of the Cognitive realm. 

[Yata]

About the Soul's Healing.
Probably if your Soul's Aspect (blueprint) are damaged, the Healing "reverse-Engineering" how the Soul was from the Cognitive-Aspect.

But this would mean that after a long time a Soul's damage isn't reparable.

[Kurkistan]

Yeah that one was a bit surprising to me. So my model of TLR aging b/c Forms was incorrect. It begins to amuse me that the foundational observation ("Why do TLR/Miles age?") for the whole Ideals/Forms model isn't an instance of that model.

I guess Brandon was being pretty broad when he said "the same sort of concept."

http://www.17thshard.com/forum/topic/23343-chicago-02202015/page-4#entry231691

So far as soul-healing goes, I'd still wager that that's an instance of Forms.

[EdroGrimshell]

What about storing your identity in Aluminum? Wouldn't that make it so he wouldn't immediately revert to his spiritual state since he's "storing" that spiritual state? Or at least slow the process of aging back to his original age to dampen the process somewhat?

 

Another thing of note is that when storing identity (according to MAG, so not canon until WoB says otherwise), you become easier to influence, which could very well be how Ruin got to him and made him such an arrogant bastard in the series, and thus making people hate him in general to further Ruin's plans to a degree.

[Wordweaver]

This seems to indicate that storing large amounts of age nets you some "free" longevity, as your soul attempts to revert the physical aging.

 

I wonder whether you could re-invest the resulting youth. It would be an incredibly inefficient system, to be sure, but with a long enough lifespan...

 

 

 

Also, if feruchemical gold uses your soul as a blueprint, shouldn't it reverse the effects of atium feruchemy?

[Argent]

Also, if feruchemical gold uses your soul as a blueprint, shouldn't it reverse the effects of atium feruchemy?

 

That was the whole point, playing with your age doesn't fool your soul, it still knows you are old(er). So gold, or any kind of Spiritual healing won't work.

[Eagle of the Forest Path]

So TLR actually died when that Thug stuck a spear in his chest near the end of TFE?

He didn't just rip it out and use it on Kelsier?

 

I must be remembering it wrong, then. 

 

 

Sarcasm aside, there must be some other factor that allows feruchemical gold to still work on 1000+ year olds.

Edited November 21, 2015 by EagleOfTheForestPath

[natc]

Well, I wonder if it is possible to control the healing to an isolated area . . .

[Yata]

So TLR actually died when that Thug stuck a spear in his chest near the end of TFE?

He didn't just rip it out and use it on Kelsier?

 

I must be remembering it wrong, then. 

 

 

Sarcasm aside, there must be some other factor that allows feruchemical gold to still work on 1000+ year olds.

Feruchemical Healing work with the Cognitive Aspect, therefore maybe just TLR after years of self control had his Cognitive Aspect as a Young Boy. Of course the Spiritual Aspect yells "you are a old man" all the time.

[natc]

You know, a thought occurs to me.

Hemalurgy is mainly spiritual, and atium is basically the strongest, all-purpose spike material for hemalurgy. Atium feruchemy is apparently mostly physical, distorting the body's age in the physical realm but not the spiritual age. I believe there was a WoB saying that, if you somehow make your allomancy strong enough, burning atium will allow you to see into the cognitive realm. This suggests that allomantic atium is primarily cognitive in nature.

Interesting coincidence here.

[Wordweaver]

I'm not saying that gold should make you younger in and of itself. Brandon has said numerous times (both in-character and externally) that it doesn't work that way.

 

But, since it is effectively restoring you to what your soul says is a "natural" state, it should theoretically restore your natural age, too- whether you've been storing 20 years in a metalmind, or you're a thousand years older than you have any right to be.

 

It obviously doesn't work that way, as shown by TLR. I guess that means it's either an oversight, or there's yet another factor which prevents it from working on age.

[Oversleep]

I'm not saying that gold should make you younger in and of itself. Brandon has said numerous times (both in-character and externally) that it doesn't work that way.

 

But, since it is effectively restoring you to what your soul says is a "natural" state, it should theoretically restore your natural age, too- whether you've been storing 20 years in a metalmind, or you're a thousand years older than you have any right to be.

 

It obviously doesn't work that way, as shown by TLR. I guess that means it's either an oversight, or there's yet another factor which prevents it from working on age.

I'm not sure if I understood you correctly; tapping atium lets you use the charge inside to change from your natural state. So, being 1020 years old, to be 20 years old, you have to tap 1000 years at all times. It's not restoring you to your original state - storing makes you go below your "normal point" and tapping above - storing strength makes you weaker than normally and tapping strength makes you stronger than naturally. So, tapping atium makes you younger than you are.

...

OK, now I think I know what you meant: why tapping gold doesn't revert to your normal state which is 1000+yrs old? While age and health are connected, tapping gold makes you healthy - doesn't matter, healthy 5 year old, 20 years old or 1000 years old.

Or maybe while you are tapping atium you fool gold to think you're younger? But since gold uses Cognitive matrix of yourself... I'd stick with healthy 1000+ years old.

[natc]

Health doesn't just do that, it can regenerate lost biomass or apparently even regenerate shardblade wounds or spike damage to some extent. Whichever realm it uses as a basis it's going to end up restoring you to that default.

Though I don't remember if it was cognitive or spiritual. Healing shardblade cuts suggests that it can at least do the former. Atium feruchemy doesn't affect the latter, but the former is really all in your head, so I don't know if that checks out

[Pechvarry]

So TLR actually died when that Thug stuck a spear in his chest near the end of TFE?

He didn't just rip it out and use it on Kelsier?

I must be remembering it wrong, then.

Sarcasm aside, there must be some other factor that allows feruchemical gold to still work on 1000+ year olds.

I may be mistaken in what you're saying, but i think you're missing the crux of what Brandon is saying - with his bracers, TLR's gold heals his 20 year old body. Once he loses his bracers, his gold "heals" his body to match his now thousand year old body.

[Eagle of the Forest Path]

I may be mistaken in what you're saying, but i think you're missing the crux of what Brandon is saying - with his bracers, TLR's gold heals his 20 year old body. Once he loses his bracers, his gold "heals" his body to match his now thousand year old body.

 

How people seem to understand the WoB in the OP is that the atium bracers turn TLR's body 25 years old, but not his soul.

And since investiture-based healing works by aligning the body with the soul, feruchemical gold should counteract the feruchemical atium.

 

What I meant to say was that since feruchemical gold obviously still works on TLR, either atium also changes the soul's age (which snapped back when Vin happened to TLR, dragging his body with it) or there is something else at play here, allowing gold to work and not interfere with the atium, thereby causing TLR to have to send out inquisitors to go buy him adult diapers.

 

Basically this:

(Note that over time, a person's perception of themselves shapes their cognitive aspect as well, and the cognitive aspect can interfere with the spiritual aspect trying to make the physical aspect repair itself.)

 

 

Atium doesn't change the soul's age, but TLR spent so long in his 25 year old body that's the way he sees himself, powerfully enough that his cognitive aspect takes over the part of the role his spiritual aspect should fulfil when tapping gold (specifically the age part, which doesn't match between the cognitive and the spiritual).

[Yata]

Atium doesn't change the soul's age, but TLR spent so long in his 25 year old body that's the way he sees himself, powerfully enough that his cognitive aspect takes over the part of the role his spiritual aspect should fulfil when tapping gold (specifically the age part, which doesn't match between the cognitive and the spiritual).

It quite the point of my previous post

[Curiosity]

I would also consider the probability that a person's age-related Connections are not necessarily the same as a good portion of their health-related Connections. Simply storing one can suppress the "poor health because you're a millennium old" Connections much easier using atium and gold than the "goodness, your birth thread reaches back 1,000 years to Terris? You should be dead!" Connections. 

 

This makes me wonder if time travel is possible through the Spiritual Realm...