Storing Identity?

[Dragon314 he/him]

A question can up sometime around midnight last night with me and my cousin that I found inherently interesting.

What is the difference between storing all of your memories in a coppermind and storing your identity? How much of our identity is your memories? Is there even a distinction between the two?

 Calling all cosmere experts. Thanks in advamce

[The One Who Connects he/him]

@Dragon314, bear with me on the deep almost philosophical way of thinking(and speculating a bit). The Spiritual Realm is not a physical place so much as a web of connections.(lower case)

You are like a hub, that things connect to. Every person, every place, every event.. They are all hubs of a wheel, with spokes connecting them to other hubs(other events, other people, the Shards, you)

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Memory:

Your memories are your connections to past events and past people, so your memories are a specific set of connections. Storing a memory is singling out a specific connection, and preserving that string in your Coppermind. The important distinction is that it still exists in the SR. Just because you stored away bad memories doesn't mean that they didn't happen. It doesn't stop you from being connected to them, from them having an effect on you.

Storing memories in a Coppermind is like hiding the tip of an iceberg, you can no longer see it, but it's not gone. You've stored the surface level connection that you can see(or remember)

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Identity:

Your identity is all of the connections to things that make you who you are. The things you experience, people you know, places you've been, how old you are, etc... Storing these connections is gonna store a lot more than the tip of the iceberg, which is why you are so susceptible to interference from things that affect Identity.

Forgery and Soulcasting are much easier to do when Identity is being stored, because there is less of your Identity fighting the change.

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Connection:

Regarding Connection(upper case), I'd need a detail that we don't have. If you retain your memories when storing Connection, then it essentially stores everything except the tip of the iceberg. If you lose your memories when storing Connection, then you store the whole thing.

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Fortune: We have no idea how it works. I can't explain it. End of story.

I can explain a few of the others though, which was a fun(albeit annoying) thought experiment.

[Calderis he/him]

I think this one is an issue of conflating Cosmere realmatic with real world psychology. 

Real world yes, our cumulative experiences are a big part of our personality and identity, but that not actually what's being stored. 

In the Cosmere (and I fully disclose this is speculation) identity is the fingerprint of your spirits investiture. The molecular structure of the soul if you will. 

When you store that, it removes what makes your powers recognizably yours, and would also make you more vulnerable to things that can change your spiritual structure, like forgery or soulcasting. 

Memories may effect the way that structure is shaped, they may not, but your personality and your identity are two very separate things here. 

Edited July 17, 2017 by Calderis