Guest Posted July 6, 2015 Posted July 6, 2015 From the Reddit AMA: Q. Could decapitation kill a Gold Compounder? With a guillotine, for example? A. Most forms of extreme cosmere healing don't care much what is done to the physical body, as the person's spiritual template is in power at the time. So I dunno about anyone else, but this throws a wrench into several of my theories while opening up some fun new possibilities. For example: If Strafford been a Gold Compounder when Vin sliced him in half, would each half have remained alive until he put himself back together? Or would each half simply regrow the other? Also, if the halves regrow, how aware would each half be of the other? Could Miles have a clone running around out there he didn't know about?
Voidus Posted July 6, 2015 Posted July 6, 2015 SORONIRAbout Miles from Alloy of Law and his regenerative powers. If he was bisected down the middle and the halves were separated immediately before the healing process could begin, would the two halves each regrow into a whole Miles? BRANDON SANDERSON Good question. In all of the Cosmere's Shard-based magics, the greater portion of a bisected body regrows the lesser portion. If it were done EXACTLY halfway, the soul wold jump to one or the other randomly and that would regrow. Amusingly, this first came up in 1999, six years before I got published. (I see someone else already mentioned the situation where I had to consider it.) Sorry to ruin the dream But there may still be hope: PHANTINEActually, this is kind of a sillier followup to a silly question, but could you use Forgery to say 'actually, this half had 51% instead of 49%' and temporarily clone Miles? BRANDON SANDERSONBoy. That's a can of worms, right there.. 4
Guest Posted July 6, 2015 Posted July 6, 2015 Awwww, that's disappointing (but sensible) Interesting use of Forgery though... and I think that means a Forger could resurrect TLR at any point so long as they had a chunk of his cells, maybe in contact with some Gold and Atium to make it a bit easier.
Green Hoodie Mistborn he/him Posted July 6, 2015 Posted July 6, 2015 i would think also, that the location of the gold-minds would be important as well. if you don't have any on the bottom half of the body, it'd be hard to regenerate that half. What about longitudinal bisection? I guess whichever had more metal minds? The key would be standing there and continually bisecting the gold compounder till they ran out... sounds like tiring work for a Pewterarm to me!
VindicationKnight he/him Posted July 6, 2015 Posted July 6, 2015 Just clone the traditional way, with SCIENCE!! (Yes it is necessary to go all caps and use multiple exclamation marks, no there is not room to negotiate.) 2
Kobold King he/him Posted July 6, 2015 Posted July 6, 2015 Just clone the traditional way, with SCIENCE!! (Yes it is necessary to go all caps and use multiple exclamation marks, no there is not room to negotiate.) Would a clone of Miles be capable of exactly the same Allomantic and Feruchemical combination, or would his sDNA be subtly different? 1
Oudeis he/him Posted July 6, 2015 Posted July 6, 2015 We know identical twins, who would have DNA as identical as a clone, wouldn't necessarily have the same metalborn traits. Man, my google-fu is weak these days. I cannot find the quote.
VindicationKnight he/him Posted July 6, 2015 Posted July 6, 2015 Would a clone of Miles be capable of exactly the same Allomantic and Feruchemical combination, or would his sDNA be subtly different? Le shrug. Who can say for sure, sDNA doesn't necessarily correspond to physical DNA so not necessarily. I wonder if you made an uploaded copy of someone's mind and downloaded it into a cloned body would that make it work? We must DO MORE SCIENCE!!!
Guest Posted July 7, 2015 Posted July 7, 2015 (edited) According to Voidus' WoB, it's the Soul that goes with one half or the other. So for a clone, would a new soul spontaneously appear? Or would the clone be Soulless, and therefore completely devoid of sDNA? Would a Soulless clone be unable to receive Hemalurgic traits? Or would the implantation of a Spike CAUSE the creation of a Soul? Edited July 7, 2015 by LabRat
VindicationKnight he/him Posted July 7, 2015 Posted July 7, 2015 According to Voidus' WoB, it's the Soul that goes with one half or the other. So for a clone, would a new soul spontaneously appear? Or would the clone be Soulless, and therefore completely devoid of sDNA? Would a Soulless clone be unable to receive Hemalurgic traits? Or would the implantation of a Spike CAUSE the creation of a Soul? If you made a clone SCIENTIFICALLY like real life cloning then presumably they'd acquire a new soul the same way a newborn baby does.
Guest Posted July 7, 2015 Posted July 7, 2015 If you made a clone SCIENTIFICALLY like real life cloning then presumably they'd acquire a new soul the same way a newborn baby does. Through sDNA donation from the sperm and egg?
VindicationKnight he/him Posted July 7, 2015 Posted July 7, 2015 Through sDNA donation from the sperm and egg? Do we know that's where it comes from? In any case for a SCIENCE clone you still have a biological parent providing genetic material, why wouldn't the sDNA come from them in this case?
Guest Posted July 7, 2015 Posted July 7, 2015 Do we know that's where it comes from? In any case for a SCIENCE clone you still have a biological parent providing genetic material, why wouldn't the sDNA come from them in this case? Multiple examples of sDNA being hereditary (Allomancy, Feruchemy, Lighteyes) As for why the sDNA wouldn't come from donated cells? The same reason the smaller half of Miles would die - there'd be no soul attached.
VindicationKnight he/him Posted July 7, 2015 Posted July 7, 2015 Multiple examples of sDNA being hereditary (Allomancy, Feruchemy, Lighteyes) As for why the sDNA wouldn't come from donated cells? The same reason the smaller half of Miles would die - there'd be no soul attached. Yes but with Miles you're looking at cell replication, actual cloning is a different biological process, the same one that happens in the womb, the differnece between mitosis and meosis I think, though I'm not a biologist. My point is it's the same biological process for standard sDNA inheritance, though only difference is that it takes place in a petri dish and not in a bedroom.
Guest Posted July 7, 2015 Posted July 7, 2015 (edited) Yes but with Miles you're looking at cell replication, actual cloning is a different biological process, the same one that happens in the womb, the differnece between mitosis and meosis I think, though I'm not a biologist. My point is it's the same biological process for standard sDNA inheritance, though only difference is that it takes place in a petri dish and not in a bedroom. I think you're confusing cloning with In Vitro fertilization.In Vitro: take donated sperm and donated egg, stick them in a petri dish, and let biology happen, put the fertilized egg into a mom/other incubator. You end up with a combination of mom and dad commonly called a "child". This I 100% agree would have a normal soul attached. Cloning: take a sample of a person ("donated" blood, bone marrow, stomach lining, chunk of muscle tissue, whatever). Take the DNA from one of those cells, implant it into an egg cell that's had it's own DNA removed, and put it in a mother/incubator. You end up with a (mostly) exact copy of the subject. The problem here is that when you remove the sample from the subject, the soul detaches (see Voidus' WoB), leaving you with viable DNA but no associated sDNA. Some hope may be found with that egg cell, which I suppose could have half the moms sDNA still attached to it, depending on if the sDNA follows the DNA in the nucleus or the mass of the cytoplasm, or even the mitochondrial DNA... Edit: I can't spell Edited July 7, 2015 by LabRat
VindicationKnight he/him Posted July 7, 2015 Posted July 7, 2015 I think you're confusing cloning with In Vitro fertilization. In Vitro: take donated sperm and donated egg, stick them in a petri dish, and let biology happen, put the fertilized egg into a mom/other incubator. You end up with a combination of mom and dad commonly called a "child". This I 100% agree would have a normal soul attached. Cloning: take a sample of a person ("donated" blood, bone marrow, stomach lining, chunk of muscle tissue, whatever). Take the DNA from one of those cells, implant it into an egg cell that's had it's own DNA removed, and put it in a mother/incubator. You end up with a (mostly) exact copy of the subject. The problem here is that when you remove the sample from the subject, the soul detaches (see Voidus' WoB), leaving you with viable DNA but no associated sDNA. Some hope may be found with that egg cell, which I suppose could have half the moms sDNA still attached to it, depending on if the sDNA follows the DNA in the nucleus or the mass of the cytoplasm, or even the mitochondrial DNA... Edit: I can't spell Yes I know it's not the same as with IVF, but the actual growth and development of the child is the same process, and as far as we know there's no reason sDNA would stick to one set of genetic info after sperating from the body (sperm, egg etc) but not another. My main reason is basically because we know cloning works in real life, and the Cosmere tends to work on 'like real life till proven otherwise' so there's no reason that Cosmere clones would be lifeless shells.
Guest Posted July 7, 2015 Posted July 7, 2015 Yes I know it's not the same as with IVF, but the actual growth and development of the child is the same process, and as far as we know there's no reason sDNA would stick to one set of genetic info after sperating from the body (sperm, egg etc) but not another. My main reason is basically because we know cloning works in real life, and the Cosmere tends to work on 'like real life till proven otherwise' so there's no reason that Cosmere clones would be lifeless shells. Reason I think the sDNA won't follow: the greater portion of a bisected body regrows the lesser portion. If it were done EXACTLY halfway, the soul wold jump to one or the other randomly and that would regrow.Since the sample you'd take would be the "smaller half", the soul won't go with it.Sperm/egg is special in a lot of ways biologically, it makes sense it would have some type of "proto-halfsoul" attached to it just like it has half the DNA. I don't think the resulting clone would be a lifeless shell. I think they'd be alive and biologically normal, just lacking (most of) a soul.
Oudeis he/him Posted July 7, 2015 Posted July 7, 2015 Well it really depends on what you think of as "soul". Are you talking in a religious sense, like the bit of you that passes out of life after you die? Or are you simply talking about someone's spiritweb? Everything has spiritwebs. My keys have a spiritweb. The button on my fly has a spiritweb. It's just the spiritual aspect, like how everything has a physical aspect, a spiritual aspect, and a cognitive aspect. The spiritweb of my keys are prolly not as complicated as the spiritweb of a person, more like oh gee let's just say a stick. Spiritweb and soul get used interchangably sometimes but that's not always specifically what people mean. Since we're talking about metalborn traits, I'm going to assume when you say soul, you mean spiritweb, since that's where metalborn traits are centered. So. Where would the clone get its spiritweb from? Who knows. Different people have different ideas. Maybe the cell nucleus you take, which should have its own tiny, not very complicated spiritweb, develops into a larger one the way one cell becomes a whole person. Maybe not. The general sense of the spiritual realm is that it's all about connections, so maybe as the life is created, a connection appears to Miles, and one appears to the place where he's being cloned, and one appears to the person doing the cloning, maybe others from Miles's actual parents, maybe there's someone who cut Miles and stole the finger they're using to clone, all the people and things that might impact the clone all converge, and start making the new spiritweb. Who knows? Of all three realms, the spiritual one is least well known. Now I want to know. If you cloned someone genetically Scadrian in Elantris, could they ever be an Elantrian? Could they ever be metalborn? To the ultimate list of questions! In the quote, I feel like "soul" means the viable portion of the spiritweb, the portion with the "Identity" of Miles. The other half would still have a spiritweb; it would just not be that of living Miles. It wouldn't have his identity, and it would no longer be a carrier for his metalborn traits. You couldn't spike anything out of it. Who knows if the individual cells could be cloned to make a metalborn. 2
Voidus Posted July 7, 2015 Posted July 7, 2015 Just clone the traditional way, with SCIENCE!! (Yes it is necessary to go all caps and use multiple exclamation marks, no there is not room to negotiate.) Have you considered a career with the Dark Alley in the social guilds section? On the sDNA/Spiritweb/Soul issue there's still quite a bit of confusion on the exact distinction between terms, would the clone essentially be like a drab? This seems like the most likely scenario but equally likely is that the sDNA that it carries with it is enough to produce a functioning soul with some (if not identical at least similar) metalborn trait
Oudeis he/him Posted July 7, 2015 Posted July 7, 2015 I feel like from what we know, the clone would have as much chance of being Metalborn as the person himself did at birth. If the person was from a powerful allomantic line, high chance. If we cloned Allriane, for example, the first allomacer born to her line in hundreds of years, I feel like you could make dozens of clones without any of them being allomancers. Of course, I could be reading way too much into one quote about twins not necessarily having the same metallic traits. Maybe a clone of an allomancer does have a much greater chance of being an allomancer, even if the person him or herself had only a small chance. As I've said, the spiritual realm (and, by extension, spiritual aspects) are the ones least known about. I wonder if the creatures who live in the Spiritual Realm have anything to say about it. Is your spiritweb constantly being tended by creatures you cannot experience? Also, for terminology, I'm under the impression sDNA and spiritweb are the same thing. I could be wrong.
DreamEternal Posted July 7, 2015 Posted July 7, 2015 Perhaps SDNA is just part of the spiritweb. The clone would have most of his spiritweb, but would have a "blank" sDNA, copied from the generic "human" template. This only works if people "grow" a spiritweb as they come into being, and only the sDNA part is inherited from their parents.
Kurkistan he/him Posted July 7, 2015 Posted July 7, 2015 Regarding terminology: Source: Kurkistan: Could you explain the relationship between spiritual DNA, spiritual aspects, and the spirit web, or are they all just terms for the same thing?Brandon: They are all similar terms for the similar stuff, yeah.Kurkistan: Okay. So it's not like the core is spiritual DNA then things as you spread out all spiritual aspect?Brandon: No.
SmurfAquamarineBodies he/him Posted July 10, 2015 Posted July 10, 2015 As far as I'm aware clones don't share minds. Which in the Cosmere is the Cognitive aspect. If they don't share Cognitive aspects I see no reason why they would share Spiritual aspects. I think a clone, in the cosmere, would be treated as a child with one parent. So the part of the sDNA that corresponds to the parents would have only 1 part as opposed to 2.
Oudeis he/him Posted July 10, 2015 Posted July 10, 2015 I don't think your mind is your cognitive aspect. Your "mind" is a series of electrochemical impulses traveling through your brain matter, and as such are as physical as a stick on fire. I think your "cognitive aspect" is a representation of what you think about yourself and what other people think about you, which is strongly related with a huge cross-correlation, but still distinct. However I agree with you that clones would likely share neither physical, cognitive, nor spiritual aspects with each other, even if all three would have a greater degree of similarity than you might find between two random people.
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