Fundamental law of Spiritwebs & healing

[OleStrohm]

I tried looking around, but couldn't find any topics with this theory, so I figured it might be an interesting first post. I will here try to give my theory for the mechanism that makes healing, in general throughout the cosmere works, and hopefully back it up with some good sources.

Statement 1: Physical healing (at least the ones I will talk about, e.g. F-gold & stormlight) heals by making the physical body adhere to the Spiritual ideal.

Statement 2: Spiritual healing works directly on the spiritweb, and there is no ideal for the spirit to adhere to, and must therefore be a different mechanism.

Statement 3: Forgery instantly affects the physical, by causing it to adhere to the Forged Spiritual ideal.

Statement 4: The body can be changed without changing the Spiritual ideal. (This is obvious because the body can be damaged and then healed back it's unchanged ideal)

Statement 5: Time does not exist in the Spiritual Realm.

 

Statement 1 & 2 I will only use to remove Spiritual healing from this theory, as my proposed solution would not affect the Spiritweb.

Statements 3 & 4 together show that static spiritweb without external influence does not affect the Physical aspect, while a changing spiritweb does affect the Physical aspect. This makes me to come the conlusion that:

    A static Spiritweb does not filter down into the physical, but a changing Spiritweb does.

Using this concept I believe that physical healing works by "rippling" the Spiritweb. This causes the Spiritweb to change, as in not being static, but it doesn't actually change any of the information contained in it. By rippling the Spiritweb like this it forces the Physical aspect to adhere to the Spiritual again, and a stronger ripple would result in a faster healing. The reason Forgery looks instant would be because the change is severe enough to count as a very large change, and cause the Physical to update quicker.

Since time does not exist in the Spiritual Realm, the only way for things to change is through at direct causal chain. In other words things can't change (on their own) or over time. Therefore the only way to cause an update in the Spiritual realm is to directly start a causal chain from the Physical Realm, where time does exist. 

 

I've included what evidence for I could come up with, but there are some other explanations that could also explain it.  The side effect of each magic could simply directly cause these things to happen. Gold could simply "look at your spiritual, and then change the Physical to match it", rather than go through the extra step of starting a ripple in your Spiritweb.

Since every time the Spiritweb changes, there is some cause, proven by the fact that time does not exist in the Spiritual Realm, means that we don't, and likely never will, have a case where the Spiritweb constantly changes without some external cause. And this would really be the only way to prove or disprove the over-arching theory, as the static Spiritweb part is proven trivially.

 

Thank you for taking the time to read this theory, may the ripping-it-to-shreds begin.

[StanLemon]

It's an interesting idea. One potential issue I see right away with it though that you may want to put thought into though is that the Spiritweb isn't static, even when Investiture isn't affecting it directly. Self perception has an influence on it, it's the reason some injuries such as Kaladin's brands don't heal

Edited December 6, 2019 by StanLemon

[Honorless]

Uh... if the idea is that the Spiritweb is essentially frozen in time (but can be overwritten via Investiture) then how can it ripple?

We don't really know the nature of the Spiritweb or any other Spiritual aspects well enough to know whether it would have any rippling effect or some such related property. If it can ripple and I believe that it can and that is, in fact, how it stores data. It would mesh well with bronze Allomancy and the Rhythms. Basically I believe that the ripple pattern is the Spiritweb, that also jives the idea that Spiritwebs linger on after death for a while.

[OleStrohm]

2 hours ago, StanLemon said:

One potential issue I see right away with it though that you may want to put thought into though is that the Spiritweb isn't static, ...

This can be remedied by the fact only the parts that change update, but self-perception changes things into what already are, but don't affect other parts of the spiritweb. And to answer the second problem as well:

1 hour ago, Honorless said:

If the idea is that the Spiritweb is essentially frozen in time then how can it ripple?

The rippling affect the entire spiritweb, but it's also dependent on an influx of Investiture governed by Intent in the Physical. This means that while a person is actively healing the spiritweb ripples, and when they stop the causal chain stops and so does the rippling. Rippling the entire Spiritweb causes all of it to filter back down into the Physical, and since it's governed by the time of the Physical realm that solves both of these problems.

[OleStrohm]

1 hour ago, Honorless said:

We don't really know the nature of the Spiritweb or any other Spiritual aspects well enough to know whether it would have any rippling effect or some such related property. If it can ripple and I believe that it can and that is, in fact, how it stores data. It would mesh well with bronze Allomancy and the Rhythms. Basically I believe that the ripple pattern is the Spiritweb, that also jives the idea that Spiritwebs linger on after death for a while.

While I find the ideas of a wavefunction governed Spiritual Realm interesting I think it works more like a database of information, and the web describes the connection between the pieces of information. And thus there is no space for anything to ripple in, but by "ripple" I mean something that causes an update to the Spiritweb. Kind of like shaking a rug to remove the dust, where the dust would be what causes the ideal to filter into the Physical