Kurkistan

So will you be maintaining that "the Cognitive realm is host to the rhythms that we see occurring in the Cosmere"?

Challenge accepted. Clarifying questions: How many guards are there? How long is our time frame? Am I being observed? Do my guards know I'm a Forger/what Forgery is? What does the surrounding building complex look like? Is this a room in the middle of a dungeon, or a shack with a long hallway leading to the door? -So what's at the end of that hallway and what's in the rooms surrounding me, is the question.

You are remembering a tad incorrectly (if I remember correctly ). The knowledge that the Forger happens to have about some subject doesn't have any impact on how well the stamp takes. Instead they have to lay out that knowledge explicitly on the stamp. The way I currently model it is that stamps "procedurally generate" their effects: Shai can say "be a stain glass window" and get a somewhat random "generic" window or she can say "be a stain glass window made X way in Y pattern" and get a much more specific/coherent work. So far as the mural goes, I would say that the idea of "mural" could also be complex enough that there's no way to get a "generic" version to stick, since the stamp doesn't have enough "parameters" to do the generation. Or it could stick, but it wouldn't be of the caliber that Shai wanted. --- The phrase "cognitive connections" means nothing to me. All talk of connections we've ever seen are spiritual in nature. Could you please clarify what you mean? Beyond that: Could you please clarify what you mean by "various different forms that make up an object"? I may just be misreading you, but I'm not sure if you mean the same thing by "form" here as I do. Another part where I might be misreading you: Are you suggesting that the "context" of a Forgery is important? So if you try to Forge a metal chain into being soap, you'll have to contend with why Guard A didn't notice it on top of everything else? Because if you are, I have a discussion for you to look at... (Spoiler: Over the course of the discussion we came to (mostly) agree that the answer to the "freak guillotine accident" question, and more generally whether Resealing was part of Forgery, would settle the matter. A WoB basically settled it in favor of the "context doesn't matter at all" camp). Feel free to pick up the discussion here if you think I don't adequately address your concerns on the other thread. On the topic of interconnected Forms: I myself posit that how these Forms interact with objects can be described as a "web of the way the world is". I've also discussed the possibility of hierarchies of relationships between Forms earlier in this thread. So far as the gritty details of how "plausibility checks" work, you'll have to look at my mondo-death-thread to get the details on my thoughts on that.

UPDATE: Just a little confirmation that soulstamps do in fact overwrite spiritual aspects. No word on whether it's restricted to just spiritual aspects, but it's nice to have confirmation that "soul" means a bit of what we think it means in this context. Source:

You may want to adjust your theory to some extent. Source: So it seems, then, that the ability of the Parshendi to tap into the rhythms is fundamentally spiritual. A matter of spiritual connectivity, actually. This gives us two broad options, I think: Either the Parshendi are spiritually connected to each other or they have some connectivity to the "hub" of the rhythms. Perhaps there could be some melding of the two in that the Parshendi might do a bit of both. But I think it likely that, given how the highstorms affect the rhythms and the existence of "Odious" rhythms, there is some "hub" to be dealt with. The problem for your theory, then, seems to be that that hub is probably spiritually located. At the very least it's almost certainly not entirely cognitive in nature.

UPDATE: Got some answers from Brandon awhile back and now I'm wandering around updating things at random. Source: So that's a bit of a whoopsie on Forms as applies to Divine Breath healing. Oops. Spren/the-bare-existence-of-Forms got confirmed, though, so that's nice. Tied in with some of the evidence in the OP, this answer about Spren actually confirms quite a bit. Source: So that's 100% confirmation that Forgery-plausibility and Returned beauty standards are both based on Forms as well.

If you're looking for candidates on what needs more development, the theory about the spiritweb/spiritual aspects that Aaradel and Co. developed as a tangent on my Forgery thread is in need of a singular explication.

Do we have direct WoB on this? I know some devilishly handsome and intelligent fellow has proposed a theory that touches on this, but I didn't know that we had anything confirming it.

UPDATE: Source: I'm not quite so sure how to interpret this. I really should have dug down and gotten clarification, but my brain wasn't really working just then. So the most pessimistic reading of this places the laws of physics somewhere non-Spiritual that the Spiritual happens to be able to influence. I'm inclined to be more optimistic and see this more as Brandon wanting to be very clear that the laws of physics are normal as a rule. I think, then, that I would have gotten a far less ambiguous answer if I'd prefaced my question with "We know that the laws of physics in the cosmere are ours, but..." This interpretation is buoyed by the Ars Arcanum referring to gravity as a Spiritual bond that's reassigned by Lashings and Brandon reaffirming that language in relation to time bubbles, as I discussed with Phantom.

UPDATE: Got some WoB from Brandon awhile back. Source: Brandon's laugh was truly evil, I must say. So hopefully all we need is bubble-anchoring or something, but at least we're facing the right direction. Also some other WoB from aeromancer: Source: As I say in that thread, in an ideal (for me) world, that missing ability is bubble-anchoring in nature.

@Natans Sorry, already drank it all several months ago. UPDATE: I neglected to update at the time because I'm lazy, so here's our confirmation. Source: I'd like to note (from my own impressions) that the "hesitance" was likely a matter of Brandon wanting to be sure I didn't walk away thinking that spren were these Spiritual Ideals.

I'm not so sure how the mechanics of the thing would work out if you de-stamped a hollowed-out wall that was containing other stuff. An interesting question, though... My first intuition would be that the stuff would be either expelled from the wall or destroyed, but probably not "incorporated" such that they'd be retrievable in their original form after re-stamping.

The one does not exclude the other. Source:

Perhaps its a bit extreme of me, but I just tend to ignore the Essences/Body Foci in regards to the Surges. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say that all that stuff came about as some magico-philosophizing resulting from people trying to make more of the soulcasting properties of each of the gemstones than there really was to make. So the Essences would not really be a proper part of the system by this understanding, just a human embellishment. This view is lent some credence by Brandon's tendency to have classification systems be in-world and somewhat inaccurate in his books. EDIT: Alternatively, there is some weight to be put behind associating the various Orders with these essences ("Foil"/metal with Resolute/Builder seems to fit, no?), but nothing truly to be made about Surges—except perhaps how their combination exemplifies the attributes of their Order.

An interesting thought. I'm not sure if it's so simple to fool the cognitive aspect, though: it could well have a bit more inertia than what can be overcome by simple in-the-moment confusion.

Oops, for some reason I tend to read "Alethkar" as "Alethikar", seeing an 'i' there for no apparent reason. So I thought you were commenting on that, and... :[ On second thought, though, even with the proper spelling emphasis in poetry/song isn't necessarily correct, so there's still some chance you had it right to begin with.

Ah, it seems I misinterpreted you, then. That's also how I interpret Breath as working. This quote could be of use in discussion the relationship between magic systems and symbols. Source:

Nah, all you need is some shared compounding and you don't have to worry about anyone suffering from putting in the initial health.

You're right, "pigmentation" was a poor word. I should have just gone more Anglo-Saxon and said "color". What I mean here is that what "color" an object is is highly dependent on conditions external to that object. A green bucket under red light looks different from one under blue light looks different from one under white light. Same with a bone-white bucket. Yet I think we can all agree that it'd be somewhat silly for Awakeners to be able to shine a red flashlight on a grey piece of cloth and then use it for Awakening. That's why I say that we need to look to some intrinsic, cosmerical idea of what "color" an object is. Let's keep reading the Ars Arcanum entry: Perfect Invocation: Awakeners of the Tenth Heightening can draw more color from the objects they use to fuel their art. This leaves objects drained to white, rather than grey. This shows that stuff drained to white is considered to be even more color-drained than usual. Also note that the colors spring up from white objects, not "in" them. The objects aren't suddenly transformed into all colors at once, but rather there is an aura of color around them. Even if this changes the appearance of objects near the prismatic colors, I still don't really buy an interpretation where Awakening simply feeds off of reflected light of a range of wavelengths. Once again, we have the absurdity of the Awakener who walks around with a piece of paper and a red flashlight to fear in such a case. I don't read that as Awakening, I read it as Bluefingers being freaked out and/or not wanting to be immediately killed by an enraged and Awakening-capable God King. The carpet was likely pre-Awakened or Awakened from some other color source, then. No, I'll not be buying this. The color-changing abilities of the Royal Locks are confirmed, both in-book and by WoB, to be a function of the fragment of Divine Breath in the royal line. It's of the same type as how Returned can change their appearance. We have no grounds to extend this entirely self-contained process that is restricted to only the Breath-holder to apply to the Tenth Heightening's prismatic effect. Ah, then I misread "feedback" as their needing to be gains. I'm still not sure about you phrasing it like this, though. Stuff isn't "consumed" by storing attributes, but stored for later use. Saying that this is equivalent to consumption and creation seems to be like saying you're "consuming" money by putting it into a bank and then the bank "creates" it again when you withdraw it. (which, okay, is kind of what actually happens, but you get the point) Ah, sorry, I failed to address this point when I ported the discussion over to this thread. I see such an explanation as... stretchy. Perhaps the explanation I'd buy if we had much more compelling reason to go with this model, but not one I'm well-disposed to walking in, if our dear friend Occam is to be credited. First of all, such constant and instantaneous self-healing would necessarily be a constant (and increasing, with higher stormlight levels requiring more healing) drain on stormlight internal to the Surgebinder. Surgebinder POV's show us stormlight leaking out faster when they hold a lot, not "vanishing" for no apparent reason as would be the case if they were unknowingly healing themselves. Second, I'm not quite so sure that healing someone who's suffering from extreme heat/cold would make it so that they don't still feel sensations of temperature. Miles is noted as being odd/addicted/possibly-a-savant because he doesn't feel pain anymore, indicating that this isn't the norm. Kaladin and Szeth feel pain when they're chalk-full of stormlight, and even in the scenes where their pain isn't explicitly noted they still get the bare sensation of "something just cut me". So it seems to me that Surgebinder POV's should be telling us about this constant internal cold, even if stormlight healing is offsetting all the damage. As Trevor was kind enough to point out, Kaladin does indeed take the time to identify himself as suffering from shock, just as he identified himself as suffering from hypothermia when he was in a much worse mental/physical state after being tied up in the highstorm. Kaladin's made a rather good habit of proper self-diagnosis. This is not definite evidence, but barring more compelling reasons to ignore it, I think we're best just going with Kaladin's own call. Perhaps the visual is that way, but even within your own framework that could also be the visual of a cold object in hot air. And once again Surgebinders radiating heat is the kind of thing I think would have been more explicitly noted in-text at one point or another by 2 books in.

Take a cat. Spike it with everything, but mostly double it up on all the useful Feruchemical/Allomantic metals. Win.

I think you may be being a bit too miserly with "energy" in the Cosmere here. Recall that thermodynamics is kind of cheated in the Cosmere. Investiture can still "do things" without being used up. The idea that Feruchemy just works off "natural" processes is incorrect, I would say. Beyond just the more "floaty" Feruchemical powers that can't be tied back to anything physical ("luck", anyone?), nothing deteriorates in Feruchemy either. Sazed in an easy chair can store as much Strength as Sazed out running a marathon. While his physical state of health is what determines how much "50% strength" means, storing or tapping that 50% doesn't have any lasting impact on his body. I would say, then, that in the case of both Feruchemy and Awakening the work-doing energy is non-entropically siphoned off from "soul power".

@Moogle Let's continue this discussion in your other thread, so that it doesn't get split up.

An interesting theory that I may be forced to viciously attack. Sorry. I'm not fully on board with your "feedback principle". Let's look at your examples: Awakening: Color is only ever drained for the initial transfer, and so that doesn't seem enough to make color integral to the workings of the whole system. More importantly, I doubt your claim that any kind of color is "crated" by BioChromatic auras. No, we don't have any WoB on it, but throughout Warbreaker it's rather clear that objects are what get drained of some intrinsic "color" property. Awakeners don't feed off of radiation at a certain wavelength, but off of the intrinsic pigmentation of objects on some level. So I would be mightily surprised if Susebron's prismatic effect was enough for him to suddenly be able to drain a white wall for Awakening fuel. Feruchemy: I agree that this is a bit of a stretch for some "fuel" definition. At the very least, there's no "feedback" because you balance the system, rather than getting a net gain. Surgebinding: And now we get into our discussion on your frost thread, I do not get the impression in the books, at any point, that the intrinsic heat of Surgebinders is being drained, nor that they are actually radiating heat at any point. I am quite willing to subscribe to a theory whereby they somehow drain heat from their local environment (either as "fuel" or as a simple by-product of their magic), but I don't really see anything to support them draining heat from themselves at this point. If Kaladin is suffering from hypothermia in that scene, then, rather than some "used too much magic just now" effect that he ascribes it to, than I think it would be because he was suddenly surrounded by a world that was -50000000 degrees for a bit, rather than because his core temp was lowered directly by using stormlight. I do doubt the hypothermia explanation at this point a tad, though, if only because that would have been a good time for Kaladin "identify all the illnesses" himself to draw the parallel. ---- I believe it's actually in-book that the slime/lichen in Elantris came after the city was built and magic-fied: it survived by feeding off the light the city gives off, so in answer to the chicken/egg question here the magic definitely came before the slime. And the text indicates that the slime arose entirely because of light given off by some light-making magic, not just because "thir's magic afoot!" So, in sum, I think that your foundational examples are less solid than you'd like, so at this point I don't see the theory as having much basis. ---- @Terisen Awakening is end-neutral, so I imagine the power comes from human souls, just as the end-neutral Feruchemy likely works.

This (tragically derailed *whistles innocent*) thread touches on some of the same questions. @Chrono I don't think you're on the right to track to say that body heat is consumed. Frost forms on Szeth's clothes, but there's no indication that his core temperature drops more than is appropriate for someone who just had a bunch of iced dropped on him. Also, Breath is not consumed by Awakening.

So far as the pronunciation of Alethikar within the story goes, you could well have been pronouncing it right all along and Hoid (probably) dropping that syllable could simply be an elision for the sake of the meter.