Kurkistan

I think we may be talking at cross-purposes, then. I'll just ask a simple question: Nepene, do you believe that Taravangian's condition is best described as a fluctuating IQ (however that ends up being modeled, Realmatically, if at all) or is it a case of his thoughts being "slowed" or "sped up" like is the case with storing or tapping Feruchemical Zinc?

But, but... Wikipedia... It's my (ignorant) understanding that the brain partitions off damaged tissue, then other parts of the brain start taking up their functions (neuroplasticity or some such). That's not the same as making a new brain again from having a crossbow bolt go through it (which would probably result in something more akin to an explosion than a "wound".

I don't quite think it works like "advanced stitches". Brains aren't in the habit of healing back destroyed tissue: ever. And it's kind of odd to talk about the body healing "behind the scene" when it doesn't really have anywhere to do its work. I doubt that Shais desk kept "stealth rotting" underneath her stamp.

@Nepene So you just threw in Feruchemical parallels as a side note? Okay, I can see that, I suppose. You really didn't need to make the direct connection, though, as (though perhaps I'm just slow here) I think that just muddies the issue. Saying "his thoughts going more slowly makes him appear stupid and hampers his ability to rule and interact" can stand fine on its own, and is a valid point. Still, though, I'm sure that slow!Taravangian could still just chill in his quarters (very slowly) planning and plotting by his lonesome or with a group of trusted advisers, if all that really suffered from his condition was appearances. @Windrunner & Phantom Jerkistan? Really? Like I haven't heard that one before (actually, I haven't. Points for originality, at the very least). I do think you may be overreacting a tad, Windrunner, as I am normally at least mildly tongue-in-cheek whenever I refer to myself as a "Champion"of anything. Looking over my post again, though, I admit that I was slightly harsher than I ought to have been, as I was experiencing some genuine frustration when I wrote that reply; some of which seems to have leaked through. I apologize for any incivility which resulted from that.

Ah, I see. I actually think the stamp just "goes away" after being applied: either the 26 hour limit burns it off, but its effects linger (because they matched up with the Cognitive aspect) or a successful Resealing is just immediately incorporated into the body. I don't think just carving a stamp into an object itself will have the effect of making it permanent. It doesn't really go with the system-inspiration of Chinese stamps and smacks of AonDor.

Perhaps, but the mists are somewhat special: they very much want to be used by Vin, whereas her spike is at best indifferent and at worst resistant to being burned.

Wait, why are we throwing all of these other Feruchemical attributes at Taravangian? The OP talked about Feruchemical zinc, while its opponents (I'd like to call us the Champions of Reasonable Interpretation) have been saying that it's Taravangian's IQ that fluctuates: nothing more, nothing less. Just to belabor this point, here's the relevant Q&A: Source There you have it, "different IQ". I think Brandon's even said that it's his IQ that changes at some other time as well. It's his IQ. There is really no need for us to mess around with Feruchemical attributes until we get a rough approximation of what we think Taravangian's condition is.

Eh. I feel as if there is a nice, comfortable niche for "working copies" of more rigid Spiritual Ideals to chill about in the Cognitive Realm. After all, there can be cities in Shadesmar, so there is some degree of permanence to the Cognitive. Okay, I may have been misreading you, then. The problem is, now we have another question of what exactly we ought to infer when you say that the Cognitive gets "perceivable attributes" and the Physical gets actual interaction. If you mean that we can have neither perception nor affects on a purely Spiritual level, nor affects on the Cognitive, then we run into problems. The "life sense ability" seems to work on a purely Spirit-Spirit level. I'd thought that you were trying to avoid such direct interaction by having everything still happen on a lower level, but caused as secondary effects by constant changes on the Spiritual. If it's simply an ability which is granted, though, you are stuck with two Spiritual aspects interacting directly, which, by my understanding, you don't allow. "Life sense" being Spiritual can be argued, though, so the more unambiguous case is Feruchemical Connection: A Spiritual attribute which affects your empathy with others going both ways. Once again, we get "naked" Spiritual interaction without any mediation by the other Realms. Then again, I may be grossly misreading the amount of interaction you allow between the Realms. If so, I apologize, and I am open to being corrected on this point. It's concise enough, though somewhat bare-bones. While I can see that it fits well enough into your broader theorizing, I am unsure as to its utility. While I know I have no room to talk when it comes to "practical" (for very unusual definitions of practical) uses for Realmatic theorizing, the lack of identification of the means by which these Intents and Foci go about doing things, on an individual level, leaves a dearth of practical impact. You say that burning Zinc "Temporarily give the soul the ability to increase emotion levels of other people while zinc is being burned," but fail to identify the means by which "the soul" goes about doing this emotion-increasing. Emotions are likely Cognitive (at least by my reading of this annotation), and the Allomancer needs to exercise mental effort, and we need to investigate how these pulses of Rioting manifest, and what exactly they effect on what level, and so on and so forth. We're left a bit starved for information to go off of for further theorizing. Also, as a note, we know that Hoid has Breath at this point, so you don't need to be a Nalthian to receive it.

There's a rather easy answer to that, actually: As a rule, the only Aons whose effects linger are Aons that linger. Traveling, fire-blasts, etc. are all single-effect, but you can carve an Aon for "light" into a wall and it'll keep glowing. Healing is different, but, then, it always is. Actually, AonDor is interesting in that it seems capable of both generalized "be better" magic--as when Raoden is first starting out--and more specific "do this to this section of the body" magic--as when Raoden started to get better at Healing. Essentially the difference between Healing as we know it and Resealing, except persistent. But we also know that when things go wrong with the second kind, things go wrong, permanently. That is not the case with Resealing. I suppose, then, that AonDor is capable of permanent changes to Cognitive aspects. Interesting... -Actually, hold a moment. Dilaf's wife might be an incredibly special case (being taken by the Shaod the moment she was Healed or something, and so getting Reodified, perhaps. Or maybe something else). I don't think we actually have enough evidence yet to suggest that AonDor is so special that it can permanently change Cognitive perceptions of health. But, then again, maybe it should be able to... --Aha! Who cares what the Cognitive thinks about a new state of health?! While Forgeries are necessarily impermanent in all but the most special cases, and so the body is capable of "throwing them off", AonDor could be considered more along the line of surgery; it doesn't care about whether your body thinks it has a working heart, because you have one now. While the stamps of Forgeries are made to be taken off, the food an Elantrian makes out of thin air isn't going to pop back into nonexistence any time soon. ---BECAUSE Forging alters Spiritual/Cognitive aspects and then lets its effects trickle down to the Physical, while AonDor brute-forces everything in the Physical Realm and lets the other two Realms just deal with it. I give you... AonDor: The most thuggish magic in the Cosmere! *Takes a Breath* Also, I'm unsure as to where you're going with "they carved stamps inside his head."

Considering that he spends some of his bad days locked in a room without anyone being allowed to even talk to him, let alone being able to make decisions, I would say that he'd be willing to commit the time if his thoughts were just slowed down.

Do we have WoB that Resealing is a part of Forging? Sure, he discusses it as if it were part of Forging, and has explitely said Bloodsealing is not Forging, but I can't recall a direct WoB saying "Resealing is Forging." I can see a "two soul" discussion of people. It's akin to something that FlashWrogan brought up in the first thread that I tried to tackle Resealing in. I don't think we need to quite so far as you suggest, though. No need to wrangle each muscle's soul into obedience, I don't think. I also don't think that the longevity of Resealings comes from their granularity, as we know that Resealings that don't conform with the body's conception of its own health will be burned off. More likely, changes to a person's past and a person's soul can have some incidental affect on the body, while changes to a body's past and soul are limited to the body just as the body. Just as the mind rules the body, then, the soul of the person rules over the soul of the body, and so cannot be swayed by the body alone--at least not in this case. Also, as an aside, things are probably a bit more muddy than we're presenting it. The Cognitive aspect, at least, seems to overlap both the body and the mind. As for why Resealers need to know muscles and whatnot, it could just be the nature of the game. The body is a bit busy going "OH SWEET ADONALSIUM, THERE'S A HOLE IN MY BRAIN!!!" and could very well just need some very specific instructions to tell it how it is whole again along with how the past was different in order to justify it. Just as Shai couldn't just say "hey wall, you had a painter here who painted you, now you're a painting," a Resealer needs to baby-step the body back to its proper form before it can be "locked in" by the approval of the Cognitive aspect. It seems, then, that the body's Cognitive aspect doesn't do anything to help the job along while your doing the Resealing; instead just making the judgement call at the end of the process. And this makes a certain amount of sense. After all, this isn't AonDor or Feruchemical gold where you're just pouring Health into the body and telling it to heal: Forgery changes the past of objects to change their presents, it isn't really set up for Healing. It's energy goes into manifesting its specific changes, and is simply not of the right type or being applied properly to simply be handed over to the Cognitive aspect to do with what it will. EDIT: Actually, the more I think about it, the more I think this second point is the kicker. Forging is just not optimized for Healing. It simply isn't. Where Feruchemical gold, Regrowth, AonDor, and even Divine Breath (though that one is weird) are all perfectly fine just pouring power on and seeing what happens, Forging has this very odd requirement that you have the slightest idea what you're doing. It's like how Healing would work in a "hard fantasy" setting where we didn't have Realmatics to help us out. Because of this, I'm fairly sure that the above is an adequate explanation for the oddities of Resealing: Resealing is more of a hack than a proper part of the magic system, a delightful consequence of the way that stamps are rejected which allows a very carefully written Forgery that applies to the body to squeak by and be incorporated rather than burned off. --- I doubt that there is a correspondence with Kandra. It's quite clear throughout the book that Shai is making a new soul out of whole cloth, not simply reawakening the old. We even have a handful of instances where we are bashed over the head with this, IIRC. Not only would it be going against one of the main themes of the book ("imitation" as a whole and worthy art in and of itself), but we'd have to go against a large amount of in-text opinion. I think the body already has access to the Cognitive, just no motive force or core Identity to do anything about it.

Yes, but the "pattern" Khmauv is referring to is the pattern of changes occurring in the Physical first, then trickling up to the other Realms (which I also think is wrong, btw). His OP holds that magic still follows the same path (P->C->S->P...), but is allowed to start in a Realm other than the Physical.

There's a rather clear implication that the spikes are in their bodies, seeing as they die if you remove the wrong ones and the question was clearly asking about an Inquisitor burning his own spikes while spiked by them, not removing one and then ingesting and then burning it. There is really no way that Brandon interpreted it as anything but someone burning a Hemalurgic spike spiking their body.

As for Cognitive thingamabob's: ah. Although I think you may have thrown the baby out with the bathwater on this one, a la the Brandon quote about "perception of ideals" being Cognitive. So far as "whatever they like", I may have been somewhat misleading as to what my real concern is. It's not so much unconstrained changes to the soul (though that does have the potential to be worrying, if it's limits are not well-defined) as the need to go through the soul for all non-Physical interactions, specifically changing the soul each and every time. So "life sense" wouldn't just be a faculty of the soul, but the result of constant changes to it, it seems. Cognitive aspects changing would have to not only be mediated by Spiritual connections, but defined by those connections changing the soul as well. It's a tad restrictive, if that makes sense after I just said it was too powerful. With the chair, my main concern is that the space-chair not be a chair even in potentia. It's Cognitive aspect oughtn't to conform to our conceptions of "chair" in any way, and I think it may even take some doing to transform it such that it became one. So beyond needing a 3rd party, we may even need a bit more "oomph" in order to change space-chair into a proper chair. You may not disagree with this, but I wanted to get that out there. So far as my interpretation of Phantom's quote, I acknowledge that you consider OOP an analogy (though one you stick to quite doggedly). I was merely trying to provide the full range of impacts from it, of which the worst case is an explicit rejection of any attempt to characterize Realmatics in terms of computer programming. Brandonh has said "Cosmere stuff [is] my underlying theory of existence in my novels, which is based on a mash-up between Platonic Forms and Asian style 'everything has a soul'", so you are right to say that Plato's theory of Forms is important to Realmatics. Don't feel too bad about approaching it philosophically; I actually am a (larval) philosopher and it doesn't seem to help much, beyond surface characterizations.

Yes Phantom, but Kadrok is asking about why Marsh's eye-spikes didn't disappear when he Duralumin-Steeled at Vin.

@skaa I'm still a tad unclear on what exactly the form of these not-yet-actualized Cognitive windows take, and what purpose they serve in your system. From what I can gather, I still think you're conception might be a tad weak. We have from Brandon that "human perception of ideals has a lot to do with the cognitive realm, and a true ideal has a lot to do with the spiritual realm." That suggests something a tad stronger, a "perception of an ideal" that has real existence, rather than the vague shadow I understand from you. Something stronger than just isolated and ephemeral thoughts, essentially. I can see a "classes" understanding of "Forms", though. I'm very leery of calling all interactions that aren't mediated by the Physical "abnormal". It closes a lot of doors. Also, while I think Morsk may be somewhat overstating just how "powerful" your conception of Realmatics as programming is, saying that any and all "abnormal" interactions are just Investiture doing whatever it feels like to souls does seem to be overkill. The other Realms have power, I think, and it would be dangerous to try and wrest it from them. For instance, I have theorized (though this is by no means gospel) that the Cognitive is primarily responsible for "burning off" stoulstamps. Are you going to say that this is all courtesy of Daddy Spiritual, or allow the Cognitive that power? When two Awakeners sense each other's heightened Breath-counts, is their held Investiture changing their souls on the fly to "feel" that, or are their Spiritual aspects simply interacting one-on-one? Strong emotions in the Cognitive can apparently interfere with the other two Realms, up and down the stream. It seems contrived to attribute this to indirect soul-changing in the Spiritual, when these emotions are the very thing that interfere with Ruin's continued Spiritual dominance of you. As for the chair, that question was actually two-fold; the first part you answered: whether a mass of loose objects without a perceiver would see themselves as a whole. You say it will. The second is a tad more delicate, though: will it see itself as a Chair? You say that it can type-cast as a chair, meaning here that it retains all of its meaningful properties in either context, but does it see itself as a chair at any moment before being perceived as such? This has a rather strong impact on any theory of Forms/Archetypes/Ideals. The second question relies on the answer to the first: a "no" to the first makes the second moot. But since you say yes to it, you do raise this issue. In TES (Day Twelve), Shai says "The longer an object exists as a whole, and the longer it is seen in that state, the stronger its sense of complete identity becomes." Now this quote does seem to suggest that aggregates can become singular objects all on their lonesome (though, just for philosophical (actual philosophy, not a principled stance) reasons I'm tempted to think that such an understanding is wrong, whether or not Shai means it that way), but either way I think that being a chair necessarily imparted by some observer, as I do not trust blocks of wood to make that choice. In some cultures, what looks like a chair to us (4 legs, a seat, a back) is actually a short table which happens to be attached to a convenient coat rack. What right does a coat-rack-table have to think of itself as a chair, if it were made and used only in that culture? @Morsk I feel your concern, but I don't think skaa is being quite that evil just yet. We'll keep an eye on him @Phantom Will that guy ever shut up with the quotes I mean seriously. Also, that almost seems to undercut skaa a bit, or at best just be neutral, if Brandon considers Sel "programming world" and thus, presumably, finds it more programy than the rest of the Cosmere.

Maybe...

Also, at this point, if Sazed were to die for some reason, he would drop a unified "Harmony" rather than two separate Shards, and separating the two would take some doing.

Thanks, I hope the new widget isn't too obnoxious. OT: Chaos, I believe that you might be having issues with your "Messenger". I've been trying to get in touch with you about the FAQ thread, but to no avail. Or you just hate me ()

And then the descendants of the crew of the Wandersail would come back from around the Origin, with an absurdly evil culture and preposterously large collective ego. We will then be treated to far, far too much conflict with this group, when considered in proportion to the whole "dark god about to kill us all" threat that rightly ought to be slightly more central to the plot.

Thank you, though I'm just a humble Catquisitor with too much time on my hands (who should be learning OpenFlow at this moment, actually, so not that much time...). As for EDITing the OP, might I caution you on that? Discussions tend to get a bit hazy when their topic (your OP, in this case) is in a state of flux. Earlier comments don't make sense to someone reading the thread for the first time, people get frustrated, etc. If you really feel that you need to make substantial content changes to the body of one of your posts, I would note the time/date and set it off in a separate little block, so it's very obvious what happened when for what reason.

I just picked up Infinity Blade II (the game that Brandon wrote the interquel for as well as helping the developer's on worldbuilding and whatnot), and saw a few Sanderson references The first ring you get after the prologue is called "High Storm", while one of the helmets is called the "Atium Helm". A nice little Easter egg that almost no one will pick up on, but cool.

EDIT: Gorram it, he posted while I was typing. Very well laid-out thread, skaa. The bolding of the Realms was a good idea, helps break up the flow. Thank you for taking the time to read my and Satsuoni's threads, as well as reference them directly. I'll be following this with interest. So far as just general computer-sciencyness goes, I have been cautioned rather strongly in the past that my use of such terminology is less than helpful. Just a fair warning, even if it is only an analogy. Be warned that magic-modeling in-detail is harder than it looks. Awakening took the equivalent of a small book for me to nail down, once all the wrangling with Nepene was over and done with (and that wrangling even stopped on a less-than-conclusive note). In addition to Satsuoni's "challenges", I have a few more thoughts that I jotted down while reading the OP: It also seems that we're allowed to have "pure" interactions between Realms, without the need for interfaces through the Cognitive in order to have a Physical<->Spiritual interaction, for instance. There's also some rather heavy indication that you can have pure Spiritual<->Spiritual interactions (Gaotona's soul knowing Ashraven's, "life sense" for Breath, Feruchemical Connection, etc.). You might also want to look to the thoughts Aaradel and I discussed starting on this post of my Forms thread; don't worry, it has very little to do with the gargantuan OP, much to my chagrin. Also, Shai notes that the Cognitive is defined both by how objects view themselves and by how they are viewed by others, so you need some external interaction going on there. How exactly do you model objects Physical forms being damaged, but their Cognitive aspects remaining the same? Such as with magical Healing, or Shai Forging that stained glass window. In both cases, we rely on an amount of inertia in the Cognitive Realm despite changes in the Physical. If the Physical is merely the result of the interaction of the Cognitive and Spiritual, then there will be nothing to tell the Physical object that it is damaged, it seems. You're placement of abstract ideas in the realm of Cognitive entities is a bit disturbing, given that Shai herself talks about the idea of a Window residing in the Spiritual Realm. Since we know that the same kind of thing that defines plausibility in Forgery defines spren, it seems that even more abstract concepts also reside in the Spiritual Realm--though I"ll admit that there is a slight leap from plausibility-calculation to some "Window Form", I think that the fact that I was purely theorizing when I went from the second to the first, and only then got proof of the first seems to indicate that they are one and the same, if I may say so myself. Also, query: would a mass of wood and screws in space that drifted together into a chair see itself as a chair, under your model? Or, as a non-sentient entity, would it need some perceiving being to see it as a whole first, before it saw itself as such? P.S. You might want to know that all your links in the OP currently lead back to this page.

I don't know the overall reasons, but it's noted in the book that the composition of even Joel's chalk is still largely regular chalk. That chalk is organic and formed from the bodies of shelled creatures, so maybe you can run with that. Charcoal from relatively new burned down trees, chalk from long-dead (albeit very tiny) animals.

So yes, he can talk to people without them having held him, but he isn't exactly in the habit of "broadcasting," so it's not necessary for him to talk to anyone but his holder the vast majority of the time.