Kurkistan

To list: -There's already a slightly-more-complete version of the Sugarhouse signing written by RShara. --But apparently there's a bit more in the audio that no one's yet transcribed. -The Philly Q&A is already fully transcribed, just only partially in the database for some reason. I'd be theoretically willing to transcribe the rest of Sugarhouse if no one else jumps in, but I'd be fairly slow about it.

@hoidhunter While I agree that a general hierarchy can be sketched out of S->C->P, I don't think it's quite that... impactful, for lack of a better word. You need to throw in some magic to make things happen, otherwise Lopen wouldn't need Stormlight to grow his arm back. He always perceived himself as properly having that second arm, which is what enabled the healing, but nothing happened until he threw some Awesome-sauce on the fire. Here's the WoB you're likely thinking of, btw. Not quite as direct as you seem to remember. -If you'd like to see some analysis of it, though...

While I'm at it some other stuff seems to have fallen between the cracks. The full transcript of the Sugarhouse signing back in March doesn't seem to be up. There's Hero's partial report, but I can't find either RShara's fuller transcription or any transcription of the full audio—as RShara only transcribed Cosmere-wide and Stormlight stuff, not including stuff like pure-mistborn questions or the like.

Challenge accepted! *Takes a bit to fine the root citation. People need to link to things more...* Source:

I doubt this, especially given how Forgery is the most "Spiritually related" magic we've yet seen.

Death Note is a classic, and not really "cartoony". First half is better than the second, but worth watching overall.

I'd still wager no. Especially for Breath. Think of it this way: Breath can be given away. So if you just keep stamping yourself to have 1,000 Breath and then give them away and then stamping yourself to have 1,000 Breath... It's the same problem as if you try to Forge a box such that it's full of gold, then take all the gold out and Forge the box all over again; only more so.

*Eye twitch* EDIT: Well it's official. My description of the phenomenon of my eye twitching is now equally as reputable as my radically revised theory of Cosmeric healing.

It's unlikely you can use a stamp to grant yourself additional Investitures, I'd hazard. We have this on Elantrifying yourself. Source: (paraphrase)

Ah, I see. I would agree (kind of) on that being how Surgebinding works. There's the whole "fill in cracks in the soul" thing that we get from the WoR back cover, which suggests that the bond just kind of slots in there/integrates and so grants the powers. So far as the other powers go, we have from the AoL Ars Arcanum that stuff like that it "hardwritten into the spiritweb", which suggests that it is all properly internal to the individual.

I get what you're saying with regard to the their being some generally-undamageable Spiritual ideals: heck, I've written several threads based on that premise. Where we disagree (if I'm reading you right) is that I also think we have quite a bit of reason to believe that, in addition to somehow being associated with these "higher ideals", every person/thing has its own personal Spiritual aspect. Where you seem to be saying that they don't? I don't really buy this idea of individuals' Spiritual aspects being fundamentally unalterable, is the thing. Definitely less malleable than their Cognitive, no doubt, but not just these static entities. Magical interactions (Snapping, Nahel bonds, "soul breaking", life sense, Feruchemical Connection, etc.) aside, people change over the course of their lives, and so their "ideal selves" should rightly change to. I don't think I'm with you on how you model Hemalurgy, either. So far as we've seen it looks like it's really more of a "rip off that patch of soul and put it somewhere else" type of thing than just re-positioning some connections. So for the "donor" it's not just that a bit of his soul is no longer in-sync with the rest of him, but rather that that bit is gone. - So far as sensibility goes, you're doing fine. Impressive for post #3 at, the very least. I think you're wrong, but then again I'm not always right and even if you are wrong you still brought an interesting perspective to the table—it spurred me to consider Forms hijacking the system directly again as a solution to the Shardblade problem, at the very least. EDIT: I'm not sure what you're getting at with your Edit.

@Calderis An interesting insight. So you're suggesting that healing Spiritual damage necessitates that we go out to Forms to repair the individual's soul? You're right that that kind of things seems like it would require the "surge" of power Kaladin seemed to need to repair his Sharded limbs... There's still a bit of an issue with regards to how this is all cached out, though. So you have a Form saying "hey this arm should work", a soul saying "no it shouldn't", and then the Cognitive saying "yes it should": but how does the message get from the generalized Spiritual Form to the Cognitive aspect if the individual's Spiritual aspect disagrees? Maybe this surge of power needed to heal Spiritual injury is the magic system short-circuiting the system and bypassing the individual's Spiritual aspect? @skaa I thought so too about Shardblades simply severing rather than destroying, but then we got that WoB about Hemalurgy that I linked to. It looks to me like Brandon isn't making much of a distinction between Shardblade wounds and the "stuff just got ripped out and stapled to another person" of Hemalurgy. Perhaps it is in fact the case (as many of us have long theorized) that the soul is still perfectly intact—minus a few connections—after being Bladed, but this new WoB suggests it may be otherwise. I'd like to caution about this distinction between the Spiritual aspect and the "ideal self", though. Myself I don't see any real reason to believe that everyone's walking around with two distinct "Spiritual parts", one of which is wounded by Shardblades and Hemalurgy and the other of which isn't. Sounds quite odd. I think the only reasonable way to model it is that everyone gets one of each aspect. So this leaves us without the idea of an "ideal self" sitting off to the side as some other "spiritual self" that isn't ideal is wounded by various magics. I'd think that it's the single spiritual self that's regarded as ideal and which ideal can be tarnished/damaged. - I agree that a distinction may well be made on the stuck-in vs. slicing-through front.

As Jeremy linked to just above, all the "action" is happening in a single compact dwarf galaxy, so functionally we can treat the cosmere as a galaxy.

Yeah, I likely could have benefited from tying things together like this from the beginning of the healing discussion, but I was trying to be all enlightened and not try and shoehorn everything into fitting one old theory of mine. Turns out blind dogmatism would have been the better route, though. Stormlight 3 spoilers: --- On an unrelated note, there is some slight problem now for us if we're to look at the Spiritual demanding certain changes before the Cognitive can enact them: Shardwounds. In the previous pure-Cognitive model, Shardblades causing Spiritual damage but still being magic-healable wasn't an issue because everything was based on the undamaged Cognitive. But now, how are we to say that the arm (or any other kind of Spiritual damage, for that matter) is ever healed if that part of the soul has been ripped off already? Especially in light of my theory that Hemalurgic spikes aren't rejected because they cause immediate Spiritual change.

Yes. http://www.theoryland.com/intvmain.php?i=1084#69

@dvorean Perhaps. What you say sounds plausible enough, but we really just don't have much evidence (that I know of) pointing us any particular direction.

Source: (not sure if this is in the database yet)

I think I may have communicated myself poorly. First of all, "Forms" (as I call them for legacy reasons, though Brandon (and I, when talking to Brandon) refers to them as "Ideals") are, by my understanding/theorizing, generalized. They don't correspond to individual things. So there might be a form for "Human"—describing all humans—but none for "Bob". Bob has his own Spiritual aspect, which (I would argue) is in turn connected in some way to a far more generalized "Human" Form, along with quite a few others (like Male, Rosharan, etc.). I may also have miscommunicated the nature of the mechanism—though it's in part a brand-new model on my part, so I may well be wrong. I'm positing a somewhat more indirect approach where the Spiritual tells the Cognitive what to do in general terms and then the Cognitive gets it done on the nitty-gritty level. So it's not like the Spiritual knows exactly what it's about and is trying to do it through Cognitive interference, but instead the Spiritual saying "Do X" and then the Cognitive executing the 30 steps needed to actually accomplish X, with its own spin on what exactly "X" means. More on this on my very first mondo-thread. - I'll honestly just wave off the Kaladin question for now. If I had to guess I might say that cosmetic changes to already perfectly-fine physiology aren't the kind of thing that "healing" does, normally. I doubt that a Kaladin who sees himself as a certain shade of tan will always be "healing" himself back to that shade no matter how much time he spends in/out of the sun. If I didn't have to guess, I'd just shrug and say "perhaps magic system particulars trump cosmere-wide generalities?" and leave it for another day. Perhaps the question deserves to be explored, but I don't think it any particular issue for general discussions of healing. Also, the "problem" (if it is one) is non-unique to this new model of mine, as I don't see, using your argument, why healing-as-Cognitive would have any better luck answering your challenge. In fact, it might even be worse off, as an alternative off-the-cuff explanation could be that the new eye color is immediately written into his Spiritual aspect by wielding his (Spiritually-bonded, recall) Blade; where the Cognitive aspect alone doesn't necessarily have this immediate access. I'd also like to note that this theory of mine isn't trying to "reduce" healing down to just being the spiritual self asserting itself onto the body. I myself would hazard that the idea of "healing" is very much baked into the mechanism, so it's not like you can just step in and re-work the body like Playdough if you manage to hack the spirit enough. - As to what defines an "ideal self": No idea. I haven't delved very far into it and I honestly don't know if we have much on it. I might be able to dig up one or two more quotes if I devote a few more hours to it, but I'm fairly sure we don't have much that's more concrete than Nepene's. So I can't really answer any of your questions (though they may just be rhetorical on your part). One thing I will say, though, is that I doubt that the Spiritual is totally independent of the Cognitive. It needs to form somehow afterall, and we know that Forms form (har har) in the first place based upon perceptions, so we have precedent for the Cognitive affecting the Spiritual. Myself I'd guess that it's just a more gradual/safety-railed process than the formation of Cognitive aspect. I speculate about this a bit in my first Formic thread (warning: unnecessarily long and full of needless made-up jargon).

Welcome back, Silus. Lots to catch up on... EDIT: Oops, looks like you've been kicking around for a bit now, I guess I just didn't notice. This thread has a lot of discussion on squires, if you want to read up. Peter also drops a cryptic hint or two along the way, IIRC.

Thank you very much for your regard. I myself might hesitate to link to this as a "here's the basics of how it works explained in clear terms with relevant examples!"-type thread, but I guess some of the citations provide the nitty-gritty. My apologies for your suffering re: acronyms. Ooh, just had a thought: the Spiritual as dictating what's even considered for healing also goes to rather easily explain why hemalurgic spikes don't get spit out. We needn't rely on Inquisitors just very quickly seeing them as normal, and can instead perhaps argue that the spike, in altering the spirit in the first place, makes it so that the spirit itself immediately sees the spike as part of it and so is flat-out incapable of sending any "get this spike out of me" directive when healing magics come into play.

So in the last few years we've learned quite a lot about how healing works in the cosmere. Whether or not you whippersnappers can fathom it, we used to be quite confused on the whole issue. But post-TES we've essentially nailed down healing as based on the Cognitive aspect of the healed (with some very well-delineated exceptions). This Cognitive model has been explicitly applied to permanent Resealing in Forging, as well as almost certainly applying to how Stormlight healing works, and being described as applying to "most" healing in the cosmere and so very likely including Feruchemical Gold. Myself, I've tried a bit to explore the fringes of the system by examining what exactly is limiting people from going crazy and using warped self-perception to grow an extra limb, or become immortal. I've settled on my old standby ("old" only at this point: once again: whippersnappers, all of you!!! ) of Forms as the main answer, historically. So TLR aged because some Human Form kept him grounded, and we needn't fear Doc Oc growing actual tentacles for the same reason. ---- But then we got a new WoB from the SLCC signing: Source: My first comment when I saw this was "We've gotten pretty definitive 'it's Cognitive' stuff before, so perhaps here Brandon is emphasizing the Spiritual as a limiting factor?" -- But really, the phrasing here is a bit odd given all we've had in the past to suggest a primarily-Cognitive mechanism. I think the answer, then, might be a mildly radical re-shaping of how we understand the mechanism of magical healing. Since TES, we've essentially been saying that healing is just the body's "state of health" being brought into compliance with its Cognitive aspect. To the extent that the Spiritual was involved at all, it was only tangentially as I insisted that Spiritually-based Forms acted as a limiting factor on what healing could accomplish. Given this new WoB, though, I might suggest a shift in this model. Instead of healing being both driven and expressed by the Cognitive aspect, I would argue that its motive force is instead based in the Spiritual aspect of the healed. Now we have much less knowledge about Spiritual interactions than I'd like, but we do have this: Source: So we can start at a crude level by just thinking of the spirit as your "ideal self" (whatever that means and however that's formed/maintained...). So far as healing goes, then, perhaps we should model it as the Spiritual aspect attempting to impose its idealized form onto the body, but having to work through the "reality" (or at least closer-to-reality) of the Cognitive aspect. -I really really promise that that one theory of mine wasn't even in my mind when I started writing up this thread. That said... So the Spiritual saying "make the body like X" and then the Cognitive interpreting and applying directive X within the framework/restrictions of the Cognitive aspect. --- This new "workflow" also provides a convenient inlet for Forms to do there thing, as before they were just kind of butting into an otherwise purely Cognitive process. Here, then, it seems we might be able to conclude that Forms plug into the Spiritual aspect of each individual (as makes most sense in terms of interaction) and so guide the healing process from the top down. If the Spiritual never asks the Cognitive to heal the effects of aging, then it never will. Of course an alternative might be to discard Forms from healing altogether and posit something intrinsic to the spirit such that it never "distorts" enough to allow bizarre "healings" or the like. This has some plausibility if we're to see the spirit as somehow ideal. Myself, though, I like the idea of having a very firmly external authority to go to with these matters, to cut down on shenanigans. I'll end about here, I think. This merits some further exploration, but better to let some discussion commence than just keep rambling into more and more speculative territory by myself. EDIT: For sake of reference, here's Shai's definition of the Realms: Essence, ideal; potato potato?

Well that's the question. Still, some pretty freaky-powerful stuff is going on pretty fast with the Heightenings. "Oh, btw, you're immortal. Like an elf" is pretty big in terms of how much its messing with the normal functions of your body.

Ehhhh... I'm not so sure. Breath (at least Divine Breath) breaks the rules. A lot. So I think if Endowment incorporates the idea of being able to see the full spectrum of colors, anyone who gets freight-trained with a Divine Breath is probably going to find their vision "corrected".

@Aonar As someone who's done it a bit too much myself in the past, I'll just say that over-spoiler-blocking a post is a bit unnecessary and hinders ease of use by a fair margin. I think it'd be fine if you got rid of the spoiler tags and just kept the headings. Regarding the actual content, there might be one or two issues I see. First of all, the Breath being rendered unrecoverable likely isn't the only reason (if, in fact, there is a reason and it's not the case that we simply haven't seen somebody use a "destructive Command" yet) why you might not be able to issue "destructive Commands". "Depending on how the object is destroyed", Breath can be recovered from damaged/destroyed objects. Myself I'd wager that you could get all the Breath back if you cut a cloth in half but only half of it back if you then burned one half of the cloth to ash. I'll also have to disagree with this strong Cognitivity you associate with Breath. As Nymp linked to, the Heightenings are a function of becoming more like Endowment, rather than some more fuzzy "reinforcing your Cognitive aspect". And if we really are to draw a parallel between the ideals that spren represent and the more internalized ideals that Breath seek to enforce, then it seems that's where we get more Spiritual. On that note, I may just have to write up a little theory expanding on this new Spirituality of healing... @Nymp We've generally found that the Intent of the shard is almost always found in how one acquires the magic, rather than having much to do with its use. So I wouldn't be quite so eager to analyze Commands based on how "Endowy" they are. Then again, Awakening could potentially be a special case if you want to interpret all Awakening as an act of acquiring/giving away the magic.

Well we do have this regarding colorblindnes on Nalthis: So far as what happens when you get Breath... that's an interesting question. If it were any other "you get better" magic I might be inclined to say you get to stay colorblind, but we already know that the effects of Breath kind of act independently of the Cognitive restrictions we usually have to be wary of. Then again, there's the question of what "level" the Heightening work at. Would you expect getting Breath to let a completely blind man see? If you had a magic that granted people great dexterity with their hands, would you expect it to grow hands for someone born without them?