Soulstamping a Knights Radiant

[Valtak]

We know that stormlight healing has to do with how one sees oneself. Lopen regrows his arm because he still sees himself as having two arms, Kal keeps his slave brand because it is part of his identity.

Now, say Shai finds her way to Roshar. Some spren notices her, decides to form a Nahel bond (elsecaller or lightweaver or something). Would her having access to stormlight drastically increase her soulstamp's powers? If she crafted a soulstamp to believe that she had always been a 6'5" musclebound monster that makes Rock look like Lopen, would the stormlight "heal" her to make this a reality, since she now truly believes that is her identity? (I understand that crafting such a stamp may be impossible given the minutia of how soulstamp's work, but we don't know for certain. For the sake of argument, let's assume it is a possible stamp)

Even more interesting, if she somehow learns enough about a radiant to craft an accurate soulstamp of them, could she somehow force bodily change onto them by altering their sense of self? Stamp them, and let their access to stormlight do the change?

Edited January 26, 2017 by Valtak

[Khyrindor he/him]

 

A relevant quote on Soulstamping from the Chicago signing in December: 

Source. (Scroll down to page 16)

I underlined the part about Knights Radiant, but the rest is good to know too. On your first question, that's most likely correct, she would probably heal herself in the pattern of her overwritten stamps. On the second one, it's hypothetically possible, but it would take so much Investiture that it wouldn't be worth it.

Quote

[34:18]

Q: If you Soulstamp somebody to give them a Connection to Arelon, and they became an Elantrian, could they become and Elantrian, and if the Soulstamp were removed, would they remain?

Brandon: Okay, you’re asking a better one than people have asked. I will go ahead and RAFO this with the caveat of why this might not work, is because, you might think you’re something, right? Like, this is not completely invisible, and so, whether the powers are going to follow those lines of Connection or not I will leave up to discussion, but it is a possibility worth theorizing upon.

Q: So a Soulstamp doesn’t necessarily change the core of your Spiritual--

Brandon: It does, but it’s overriding it. It’s like Hemalurgy. What you are is still there underneath when it’s ripped away.

 

[35:37]

Q: What if you Soulstamped a city?

Brandon: Soulstamped...the city. So if you’re a really good Forger...It is possible to do things like that, but it requires a lot of work and time. Just one thing to keep in mind with Soulstamps  is that, anything that does this...rewriting your Spirit Web, like, requires Investiture. A lot of Investiture. For instance, what Shai can do is really cool, but what an Elantrian can do is gonna look a lot more dramatic, right? Shooting a column of fire, you would say ‘which takes more power, making the wall have flowers on it or shooting a column of fire?’ Making the wall have flowers takes a lot more Investiture. It’s a lot easier to pull off some dramatic effects with others, but the actual changing of the soul...So just keep in mind the extent, right? This is why you don’t see Shai Forging so the whole building disappears. Which is not outside of reason for a couple of Elantrians with the right program to put into place. But they could blow it up, essentially, that’s what they would do. Do keep in mind, people like to ask, you’ve probably seen people ask, ‘could I rewrite myself to be a Knight Radiant?’ Well… there are certain things that you just can’t fake without enough energy that it becomes impractical. Usually what I use as an example to that is: Yes, we can turn hydrogen into gold, if we wanted to. Right? It might take more energy than the earth creates in an entire year, but we can do that. I get a lot of questions like this ‘is it possible, is it possible?’ You should probably be like, ‘is it possible, with reasonable amounts of energy provided by one Invested person.

Edited January 26, 2017 by Khyrindor

[Yezrien]

Interesting idea. The problem is that the mechanics of Forgery aren't really clear to us yet. We don't know if soulstamps make cognitive changes, or spiritual changes. If it's spiritual, then you're probably right. But if it's cognitive (working like soulcasting), the healing might actually work against the Forgery, helping the original soul-image reassert itself despite the cognitive changes.

(Since Kaladin was able to recover from Shardblade limb-deadening, it looks like healing is mainly a spiritual effect. The way his brands refuse to heal, I think that's a cognitive factor interfering with the healing process.) 

But all this is kind of a moot point. Like all Selish magic systems, Forgery is location-specific. Soulstamps probably wouldn't work outside of the Rose Empire -- let alone on Roshar, where there's no Dor. And Stormlight probably won't be an adequate substitute. Since it comes from a different Shard, it probably won't react to the Selish focus (symbols).

 

[Valtak]

Yeah, I had the location thought as well, but I didn't want to make the post too ling. I thought I had seen a WoB that said it would be possible to hack the magic system to get things like Aondar to work off of Sel - I will try to find it when I am free (though that won't be for many hours now). This seems to suggest that you could get forgery to work as well. 

Maybe you could get it to work during a highstorm, as from what I always believed is that sellish magic is caused by the terrible fury that is trapped in the cognitive realm pushing out into the physical one, but being molded by the symbols (think of how we can create cool things with circuitry by forcing electricity to follow certain paths). I thought I read somewhere that the cognitive realm during a highstorm has the same kind of fury.

That possible sticking point aside, I hadnt thought of the cognitive vs spiritual aspect. Thanks for bringing that up! Shari's soulstamp reawakening the emperor makes me think it is a spiritual effect (Brandon named it the emperor's soul, after all. Soul makes me think spiritual aspect more than cognitive). However, the more base mechanics of soulstamping tables and walls do smack a lot of soulcasting, which is purely cognitive. Hopefully we get another short story of Shai sometime soon to see more of forgery - I would love to know more about it. I find it by far the most interesting magic system I have seen in the Cosmere so far.

[Valtak]

8 minutes ago, Khyrindor said:

 

A relevant quote on Soulstamping from the Chicago signing in December: 

Source. (Scroll down to page 16)

I underlined the part about Knights Radiant, but the rest is good to know too. On your first question, that's most likely correct, she would probably heal herself in the pattern of her overwritten stamps. On the second one, it's hypothetically possible, but it would take so much Investiture that it wouldn't be worth it.

Thanks for those WoB! They answered the question I was trying to get at. I need to get better at searching theoryland, it seems.

[Dunkum he/him]

For whatever its worth, stamping yourself while you are full of stormlight would also probably be harder than when you are not, since someone/thing holding investiture tends to resist being further invested.

[Spoolofwhool]

Interesting question. 

So it looks like we're looking at both the ability to change yourself and forgery. I'm going to break down my understanding of each.

 

Changing yourself physically/spiritually (ex. gold feruchemy, stormlight):

This works because your soul has an ideal it wants to be, a perfect self. When you trigger the ability to change, your soul starts using investiture to change yourself so that you are that ideal. However, during this process, the ideal is filtered through your cognitive self, which then limits how much change occurs. So even if your ideal spiritual self is a three-armed octupus man with ram horns, your cognitive will still think of yourself as a boring human, and you won't become your soul's ideal.  

 

Forgery:

Forgery is process which is controlled by two absolute parameters, outside of lesser ones such as the forgers ability. The first of these parameters is how well the forgery takes to the object. This is done by convincing the cognitive of an alternate, plausible way of being. If the cognitive mind accepts the soulstamp, then essentially you've changed the filter. What happens next is what I presume to be the same as a stormlight healing, where a change is induced and the cognitive filters the investiture, reconstructing the body and creating a false soul over top of the existing one. As long as the false cognitive exists, the false soul is maintained. However, the true soul is always striving to reach its ideal, so it will reject the forgery. {conjecture}. The second absolute parameter is investiture. As the WoB @Khyrindor provided states, the appears to be a limit to how much investiture can be drawn per forgery. Therefore, there is a limit on the complexity of the fake soul, therefore limiting connections to objects and other significant shifts from the normal soul such as the ability to perform manifestations of investiture. 

 

Answering the question:

First of all, the short answer is: what is described is impossible. On Roshar, forgery wouldn't work so Shai wouldn't be able to do anything.

Secondly, long answer, assuming a work-around is made, such as being able to draw from another source of investiture in order to drive the forgery: It's possible, but still very hard. The first point I'll cover is the redundancy you've made. If you can make the forgery work, both investiture-wise and making the stamp work, then there's is no need for the stormlight healing to induce a change, as the forgery would've done that. If however you're trying to ask whether you could then use the stormlight healing to permanently affect the change, I would say no. The reason being is that there wouldn't be an opportunity to. Either you have that forgery cognitive which could filter the stormlight healing to create your brute, but then at the same time the forgery would've already affected the change, or the forgery breaks and the filter no longer exists for that to happen. 

Second point, whether you could change a KR, I'm assuming either to another order or remove their power altogether. The latter would be easier I think, but both would be complicated because of the close bond with the spren. To remove, I would imagine that you would just have to craft them to be in a state where the spren would no longer be able to bond them, or accept them as a KR, and would break the bond on its own, stripping them of their powers. I imagine this would cause them to remain without powers even after the forgery wears off until a spren rebonds them. Changing the orders would actually be the same way, except you would be changing them to a state where a spren of the desired order would want to bond them, then you would have to wait for the spren to do so. You would then have to keep the forgery maintained. However, this would be both difficult and crippling I would imagine, because as @Dunkum points out, investiture interferes with investiture. Even if you did use stormlight to power the forgery, chances are that the process would change it slightly, creating interference. Likewise, stamping a stormlight filled radiant in general would be difficult. I also don't think you would be able to power the forgery using the target's investiture, you would need to be connected to your own source. 

Anyhow, that's my two twenty cents. tl;dr: Basic premise doesn't work because distance, more advanced could but interference and other things make it more difficult. 

 

[Valtak]

That was an incredibly well thought out and informative answer, @Spoolofwhool. Thank you very much.

If you don't mind, I have another question that the answer to can clear up a lot of my misunderstandings of how these systems may play together.

If a transgendered person, say a woman (who has always felt trapped in her body, inside is totally a man) becomes a KR, would the stormlight alter her body to become male? I know this could be a touchy question depending on people's stance on real world things, but for the sake of the answer let's assume that transgender people (as described) exist (and agree not to crucify me for my pronoun choices in the preceding sentence).

Edited January 27, 2017 by Valtak

[Spoolofwhool]

Good question. The way I see it, the cognitive would desire to be the opposing gender. In that case, the question is what the ideal of the soul would be. I feel like the ideal of the soul would be tied to the gender they are born as, so they wouldn't be able to change their gender unless they somehow change their soul. I'm not too sure though. Would be a good question for Brandon I think.

[Dunkum he/him]

though in that case, I suspect that someone who had had a gender reassignment surgery would not "heal" back to their old biological gender

[Yata he/him]

@Spoolofwhool I am not sure about your point on Forgery and Cognitive. To me it seems that a Forgery bypasses the Cognitive and try to force the change directly on the Soul, it's the Soul itself who fight against the change (like we see with other kinds of Spiritual change as F-Atium) and if the Dor isn't enough to sustain the Forgery the Forgery fade.

To me, this is the actual difference between Forgery and Soulcasting. The first affects mainly the Soul and extends its effect upon the Cognitive, the second works mainly on the Cognitive and extends its effect upon the Soul (forging a new connection to the new material...but it's a minor Soul's editing). Of course, in the end, both of they affect the physical.

But a Soulcasted's Soul "knows" its previous history, it knows before he was a stick and now is fire (of course is another stick, not the Stick)

Edited January 27, 2017 by Yata

[Spoolofwhool]

@FiveLate She doesn't need a timer for the other four because in those ones, she's still aware of herself as a forger, to a degree. The one with the timer is the one where she completely forgets about being a forger, so requires a different reason for her to stamp herself. I'm fairly certain all of them fail after a day like usual.

[Landis963 he/him]

2 hours ago, Spoolofwhool said:

@FiveLate She doesn't need a timer for the other four because in those ones, she's still aware of herself as a forger, to a degree. The one with the timer is the one where she completely forgets about being a forger, so requires a different reason for her to stamp herself. I'm fairly certain all of them fail after a day like usual.

Even the "death of personality" one had a timer.  She merely gives her new identity a good reason to keep stamping herself each day.  

[Spoolofwhool]

4 minutes ago, Landis963 said:

Even the "death of personality" one had a timer.  She merely gives her new identity a good reason to keep stamping herself each day.  

Death of personality? Which one was that?

[Landis963 he/him]

Just now, Spoolofwhool said:

Death of personality? Which one was that?

The farmhand one. The one she'd use if she never wanted to Forge again.  The one, by her own admission, that she'll never use.  (I borrowed the term from B5)

[Spoolofwhool]

3 minutes ago, Landis963 said:

The farmhand one. The one she'd use if she never wanted to Forge again.  The one, by her own admission, that she'll never use.  (I borrowed the term from B5)

That's the one I was referring to. The others don't have a timer because she's still aware of herself as a forger under their effects.