theory Shallan Casts: Speak With Dead

[Jimpy]

Spoilers ahead! The topics covered should all be in TWoK and WoR

Hey all I've been trying to sleep but this is eating at me now so I guess I gotta post it. First things first let's cover some basic things:

Theory: You could speak with a dead person in Shadesmar if you're a lightweaver. 

Some things we know (correct me if I'm wrong here):

-Everything has a spren on roshar, even body parts. 

-These spren gain identity in Shadesmar based on how they're perceived by living beings. 

-Pattern can talk to these spren's beads and translate/interpret. 

-People have souls, but when they die the soul leaves behind the body. 

So! A person might lose its soul when it dies, but the body remains there. Everything has a spren so the body probably has a spren, especially since it sees itself as a whole. Therefore you could probably find a corpse's bead in Shadesmar. This corpse would have very strong ties to the person it used to be, having been there to experience everything the person had. Presumably this means that the body's spren would behave very similarly to the deceased person. 

I think that because of this, Shallan (or any radiant in Shadesmar, even) could go into Shadesmar and speak with carbon copies of dead people; this would likely be especially easy with soulcast lighteyes statues, because they're still the same person and are perceived that way. 

What do you think? What use could you see in this?

[equinox]

I am not sure. As far as I understand this, not everything has a spren, although people on Roshar tend to believe this is the case. Those beads in Shadesmar are not spren, right? They are souls of objects, some kind of manifestations of physical objects; whereas spren are ideas given life (could some Cosmere expert please explain this in more detail, I'm not up to the task). I expect the bead of one of the statues to have about as much mental capacity to speak as Stick (::insertstickjokehere::).

[Quantus]

Ok, so there's a lot of vocabulary subtlety going on here, I'll do what I can to lay it out. 

First off: the term "Soul" is all but useless in these sort of cosmere discussions, it's always culturally loaded and usually incomplete if not outright incorrect.  It's sometimes used to refer to the beads (the Cognitive aspect of objects), or the Spiritweb (the Spiritual Aspect of creatures), or the actual "Soul" as Im used to thinking of it: the thing that goes Beyond when something dies and is irrevocably lost even to the power of a Shard.

Everything does not "have a spren", but everything does have a Cognitive Aspect (which is what Soulcasters can talk to if they want to convince it to Change), and that's what the beads and the flames are representing. 

Spren are living Investiture that has gained shape via influence of living, physical beings.  Sometimes, but not always, they can gain full Sentience.  Seons & Skaze are selish equivalents of spren, Nightblood is describes as a Robot Spren (the Cosmere equivalent of your traditional sci-fi AI), and Rosharans would call even the Shards Spren (even though there's arguably a lot more to them). 

 

To the meat of your theory: There is something fundamentally lost when a person dies, it Goes Beyond, and Brandon has stated that he doesnt want to ever fully pin down what happens, leaving it permanently a matter of each readers own interpretation (much like the Afterlife in the real world).  What we do know is that something leaves, though there are ways to make it stick around longer, such as by supercharging it with Investiture (what happened to Kelsier) or "stapling" it back to it's body (The Returned), but once it goes it's it gone.  The body that is left behind is fundamentally different and has been downgraded to Meat Object, which is why a shardblade treats it differently before and after the Killing Blow.  There's a certain amount of time delay involved, just as a recently broken object can be repaired by Adhesion so long as it still views itself as the whole object and not a stack of pieces (when a broken boulder becomes two discinct rocks).   The body does have a lot of affinity toward it's past self, to the point that it's a lot easier to Awaken into a Lifeless, but it's still missing something vital. Especially in the case of Soulcast bodies, because they've been forcibly Changed from their original state into a wholly new material by a Soulcaster, though the fact that they are perfect copies of a real corpse makes them easier to Awaken (but still Type IV awakening of Inorganic materials, not Lifeless). 

In Short: To do what you describe is essentially trying to create and/or communicate with a Cognitive Shadow, which is a discinct and often very possible thing, but I strongly doubt that Soulcasting is going to allow it to happen since there are things that need to happen at (or immediately following) the person's death to make it possible, and Soulcasting is more about dealing with with the Object left after that (or doing the killing itself, as Jasnah does). 

Edited January 15, 2019 by Quantus
grammar...

[That1GuySpencer]

I think that this might be able to happen, but the person doing the communicating would only be able to communicate with the body not the mind. And the corpse would not be capable of independent thought, only preexisting memories, no complex insightful answers to questions. 

[Severian4Scadrial]

Not sure if it would be plausible or not, but Shallan the Necromancer would be absolutely awesome. 

 

(Even if she's only raising the dead to chat). 

[Zelly]

  We've seen the soul flames of people go out in Shadesmar and a corpse bead doesn't fall out or anything.  Which is not to say that one couldn't develop later as the physical corpse developed a sense of self.  I don't think a "conversation" could happen though, more like, "I am a body.  I used to be warm, but now I'm cold. I will decompose.""

[Severian4Scadrial]

2 hours ago, Zelly said:

"I am a body.  I used to be warm, but now I'm cold. I will decompose."

"... I will not make a good pair of boots; please put the knife away." 

[SirWatermelon]

It would have to bee a person who died recently, be for the soul sees itself as separate from the body, just like healing a wound