Kurkistan

I stand corrected, then, particularly if the Starbelt is a circumpolar as.

As a point of order here, that's likely not true. Unless you're standing on strictly opposite sides of the planet, there will always be some shared stars in the sky. For temperate regions on each side of the equator, that number is actually fairly large.

So how do you reconcile this "it existed and had the same form/function, but wasn't technically a cannon" with: What you said earlier here seems to indicate that the cannon itself couldn't have been physically constructed until after the idea for it had been conceived. By your new analysis/phrasing, it looks like Leonard very well can create the Gonne, but he'll just be thinking of it as that fireworks stick that happens to accelerate lead occasionally.

Ah yes, I'd forgotten that apsect of how Leonard's genius works in Discworld. :/ Okay, so bad reference/example to use, though I believe the gist of the example is still clear enough.

I believe I have been misinterpreted, and think the correct question here is instead whether you're supporting my position, as I've never held that spren are identical to the Forms that they are based on. My second quote above is from 2012 in the very first theory I wrote on Forms, and postulates that spren are imperfect Cognitive tokens of Spiritual ideals. So yes, when I said in the "Simplified" thread that spren were manifestations of Forms, I meant manifestations as the word "manifestations" is generally defined/understood, not that they were the ideals themselves.

Thank you for the shout out, as I feel that Forms don't get enough love and attention. One concern immediately springs to mind, though: I'll stick by past-me here and say that handsome devil was pretty darn firmly on point: Source: (May 2014)

@Confused Re: Healing Some fun facts: -AonDor looks like it has two distinct methods of healing people. The surgical methods already mentioned and a more general "make this dude less unwell" method. I talk about the distinction here. Moral of the story is that Raoden is capable of just drawing Aon Ien aimed at someone and healing them a bit, without any more knowledge or direction. It's noted in-book that this isn't the most useful method of healing because just drawing Aon Ien without any modifiers will just try to heal everything equally. So that guy with a slice on his thumb and a cut artery is going to get both of those wounds healed at the same rate unless you modify the Aon to focus on his neck. -We've no direct evidence that normal Awakeners (vs. those who've just received a big dose of Divine Breath) have any special "active" healing powers. Immunity from disease/aging, sure, but we've yet to see one grow back an arm, nor any indication that that's how it works: otherwise I'd expect to see people being healed by huge temporary influxes of Breath n a regular basis, or the like. --As a general note, I'd note that on Nalthis healing only seems to happen when you expend an entire Divine Breath all at once to do the job. It may well be that there's a way to rig a cache of 2,000 normal Breath to do the same thing, but as is it's not so much "self healing" as "any single person besides yourself assuming that 'yourself' is a Returned and you don't mind dying". -By no means are all Elantrians bonded to Seons. -If you want a Forgery's healing to be permanent it looks like it needs to conform to f.Gold-like standards in terms of the healed person's identity. If you want temporary Resealing then sure have at it and go fix people's eyes for 26 hours at a time. -Feruchemists can totally heal other people (though in a roundabout way). Best guesses here look to the goldmind being "unlocked" by its Feruchemists storing all his Identity to the point where the attribute is "blank"; similarly there's some way for muggles to be able to tap metalminds, so presumably those other than the original Feruchemist could use f.Gold that way as well. -This talk of healing being entirely about patching spiritwebs looks simply wrong. Healing can heal the soul, but that looks to work by a separate mechanism than most healing: if you're growing back an arm it's going to go an unharmed spiritual aspect talking to a (quite possibly also unharmed) cognitive to an unarmed physical. Szeth can't even manage a teensy little Shardblade wound, yet is quite capable of healing physical damage You yourself seem to even come around to this eventually: But at that point it seems like we're no longer talking about healing being about the Cognitive changing the Spiritual to change the Physical, like you have so far? ---- Re: Creations/Discoveries It seems like you're stepping back from your original position here. Am I reading that right? You say: So there's a physical thing. This thing behaves in certain ways, fulfilling certain functions. As a consequence of the characteristics of this thing, an idea/ideal of it is formed, codifying/categorizing that thing. It seems like the thing preceded the idea, then: it existed as a particular kind of object in and of itself before being conceived of as such. Yet by my reading you've been claiming that the canon simply didn't exist until its cannon-like qualities occurred to Leonard? ---- I deny your general assertion that the Spiritual Realm is incapable producing impulses independent of direct and temporally proximate Cognitive input; even if that is the case in some sense, then I further see no reason why the extent of the necessary Cognitive input couldn't just be the equivalent of a "do the thing" prompt that starts off an otherwise fully Spiritually-controlled process. Re: 5.c ("You say the following about healing...") I find that I'm having trouble parsing your arguments here.

More later, but for now the two dead links: http://www.theoryland.com/intvmain.php?i=1094#24 http://www.17thshard.com/forum/topic/21597-healing-and-the-spiritual-realm/page-2#entry261943

This seems to have come a bit out left field. So everyone "who can process investiture" is capable of self-healing? Are the birds in Sixth of the Dusk capable of it? Any non-Bloodmaker ferring? A misting or mistborn? Returned (without giving up their Divine Breath)? Awakeners? Note also that, while I would perhaps buy a distinction between "Feruchemical-gold-like healing" and "other", I'm not quite sure distinguishing between self-healing and healing others is very useful. By all accounts, how Forging (permanently) heals people follows the same constraints as f.Gold; AonDor can (almost certainly, given how Raoden is able to Aon-Ien people) heal people through both f.Gold-like processes and more "surgical" methods. And Divine Breath is just weird. Beyond all of that, I'd probably call Regrowth (at least so far as we've seen it) a "Feruchemical-gold-like" method of healing, due to how it seems to work mechanically. Here's the Spinoza WoB. While I see where you're coming from with the "it's all one thing" angle, at the very least it seems the conclusions reached from that (that everything's created spontaneously out of thought) seem a bit stretchy. Ah, I see. So what of accidental creations or discoveries? Is it necessary that someone come up with the idea of "fire" before it can manifest in the world? Or what about tinkering: what if Leonard was just messing around with his fireworks tube and then accidentally let a lead ball drop down it before setting off the charge? It doesn't change the physical object or what it can do at all, but could easily be argued that it's only at that point—after the object's already fully in existence—that the idea of it as a weapon would even form, in this scenario. Chaos was the one with the classification scheme. Regarding the Aon: sorry, you need it to spit fire. But it's a column rather than a ball (sorry, misremembered the exact details). Elantris Ch 49 (after Raoden adds the chasm line to the fire Aon) c. This strict order of operations in general (C->S->P) seems incorrect. Let's look to healing. Two WoBs (one, two) would have us believe that it's a Spiritual impulse, filtered through the Cognitive, that guides Physical healing. So the soul never changes during the process (barring when there's "soul patching", which looks like a different thing that is likely reliant upon Spiritual ideals rather than the Cognitive). I've no problem with some magical effects following C->S->P, but the idea that all of them must follow it just looks too restrictive.

The concept that everything is flat-out built out of investiture on a fundamental level seems incorrect. Source: Source: These two WoBs (plus the ones on the nature of physics) seem to rather heavily suggest that Investiture and magic in general is more layered on top of/throughout more "normal" reality, rather than supplanting it. So yes you can go matter->energy->investiture->energy->matter, for instance, but that's not the same thing as knowing with any certainty that all matter is comprised of investiture. By this logic alone, all investiture could be said to be comprised of matter. So we're left to conclude that the mere existence of a process of converting between more "normal" things and investiture doesn't demand that they all be fundamentally the same. ---- For the main Argument, I'm all aboard for First and Second: It's "Last" that trips me up a bit. So when Leonard of Quirm first conceives of a Gonne, does it suddenly emerge fully formed out of his brow, rather than him having to physically build it? --- Regarding the idea that all magics are just about manipulating Spiritual connections... that seems a bit of a stretch. You managed to pick out two of the more obviously-Spiritual effects as your primary examples there: Forging has been confirmed as the most Spiritual magic we've yet seen and the Ars Arcanum of WoK talks about how the First Lashing is Spiritual. It remains to be seen how the more brutish effects of the magics are supposed to be explained in terms of spiritual connections. Test #1: Using an Aon to spit a ball of fire. -- And so I run out of time at the moment to keep reading/thinking/replying, so I'll leave it at that. @Green Hoodie This WoB might interest you.

A note: The laws of physics in the cosmere are expressed in all three realms, not just as a result of Spiritual impulses: Source: This being my attempt at clarifying an earlier WoB: Source:

My reading of the effect was that if TLR was trying to depress everyone by 10 points Vin's copper blocked out 9 of it but 1 still trickled through. Whether the whole "I would like to make everyone depressed" effect was itself subtle is secondary to the fact (as I read it) that all 10 didn't get through the moment TLR's soothing "kicked in the door". Or are you saying instead that there was perhaps some secondary mechanism by which Vin became aware that she was still being Soothed, independent of her noticing the effects on her emotions?

TLR successfully penetrates Vin's Copper-burning and it doesn't come across as door-kicking, though I can't recall if we have a WoB stating that she was simply more susceptible because of her earring or if it was just how strong his Soothing was... ... So CognitivePulsePattern might have a point, now that I think of it...

The WoB you're referring to: Source: Regarding Aluminum Feruchemy, we know already from the Mistborn Adventure Game that some kind of manipulation of Feruchemical Aluminium would allow the "sharing" (and/or stealing) of attributes from metalminds; and it's been suggested that Breath-ownership and Feruchemical attribute-ownership work under similar principles.

I think he's a Windrunner squire at the moment; so he needn't necessarily become a full Radiant.

Honestly poor Peter & Co. seem to have been swamped lately as the Sanderbots have continued to multiply, so I certainly wouldn't begrudge a more relaxed release schedule for SA3.

As a rule I've found that it's perfectly fine (if not even encouraged) to necro old theory/discussion threads when a new WoB comes to light that answers the question at hand. Necroing for the sake of necroing not so much, but for the sake of new information is all to the good.

It amuses me deeply that you interpret 9 days since the thread being posted as "awhile" to settle a cosmere question.

What makes you think that?

*Kurkistan reaches instinctively for the spam-hammer upon seeing the non-roman alphabet in the title, just barely stopping himself before it became too late...*

I always try to err on the side of attribution.

Interestingly, though, that WoB does suggest that "significant, but maybe not in the way that [Feather] was imagining" might be so simple as referring to gender ratios for certain types of spren.

I tried to restrain myself, I really did, but then...

Regarding terminology: Source:

The quote.