Shardplates' Souls and Healing

[Observer]

Would this mean that a Shardblade could kill Miles? I'm not too sure, but it looks like it would.

[Vortaan he/him]

No, please do not follow Kaladin's mother's explanation.

 

That might well by how Cognitive aspects work, but not souls (by which Brandon is probably talking at least partially about the Spiritual) in the sense that we're looking at in Healing someone/something. We know from the quote in the OP that intact souls stay intact for people. Besides that, your explanation still requires that the "spren" in separated parts of Plate be connected to/aware of each other (in order to commit suicide properly), and is counter to how Healing works for living things. I don't think there's any real need to posit two different "only heal one part of a splintered whole" systems just yet, so we should avoid adding unnecessary complications.

 

If you don't like teleporting spren, I invite you to reconsider. As I said earlier, I don't think we really ought to think of the soul as inhabiting the body in the strictest sense. It may well be more like it just having a multitude of connections to various parts of it. So Miles 2.0 in the process of regrowing is "attracting" the various parts of the soul to reattach to it as it grows back their corresponding body parts. This is after the lion's share of the soul has already associated itself with whatever part of the body you started out with.

 

So if Miles lost his foot (and it was instantly teleported 50 miles away instantly by a very peeved KR), his soul would retain a connection to that foot up until the point that a new foot was grown, at which point the primary body's foot would steal the connection. Being the part of the greater part of a bisected body, then, gives you priority when the soul has to choose where to connect to.

 

EDIT: Alternatively, the detached foot could lose its Connection immediately, but still be "alive" in the sense that it can still attract the soul if the primary body should be destroyed.

 

Does any of this make sense, or am I just running down the street the opposite direction from you?

 

I like that better than my thought, actually. Second curious question: if a full Feruchemist is storing Identity when he gets bisected, would that mess with the healing process? Could you get clones that way?

[Phantom Monstrosity]

Does it make more sense if you follow Kaladin's mother's explanation? When a suit of Shardplate is separated into smaller pieces, each piece  has a spren, but smaller than the spren that powers the whole suit originally. When it is regrown whole, the spren attached to the missing pieces dies, and the spren attached to the larger piece becomes larger to account for it.

Well, I really don't think honorspren like Syl are divisible.  From reddit, we know that there are different kinds of spren:

 

Well, it depends on how you're defining spren. In the books, they don't make a distinction, but there are several varieties. At the basic level, everything has an identity--a soul, you might say, but more than that. This is based on how it is viewed, and how long it has been viewed that way. Feces would have this, but wouldn't have a very strong cognitive identity because of its transitional nature.

Other types of spren, the type that characters see and interact with, are cognitive ideals or concepts which have taken on literal personification over time. These are usually related to forces or emotions, and don't relate to this particular topic.

And that's far more than I ever expected to say on this...

 

And, if the shardplatespren were an infinitely divisible type, I have a lot more trouble seeing them only regenereating a single intact plate, instead of starfishing.