Thought

Regarding forging, we know that contact is important. To undo a forge, Shai removes the stamp. But what if, say, Shai changed a table by stamping a leg, then broke off that leg? From what we know of stamps requiring physical contact, the leg should retain the forging, the rest of the table should revert. Instantly. We don't see an example of this situation coming up, mind you, but there's good reason to doubt that removing physical contact will result in anything but immediate reversion. From the other touch-specific magics we've seen, it's the same way. Not touching your metalmind? No feuchemy. Your spike's been removed? No hemalurgy. A-nope. The original window was cracked and gap-sided, as per Shai's description in Day 30, but there's no indication it was missing panes of glass, or that she made new ones appear.She did make the frame fit the window-hole, and clearly pigments had to appear in the glass, but if this was creating matter or rearranging what was already there isn't clear. Given that the imperial pots were still roughly the same shape and size of what they were being forged into, it seems that even if forgery can create some matter, there's a limit to it. For forging a tank, the stamp would have to affect whatever the tank already contained (if it's empty, that would be air). Given it's highly improbably that air would actually have the history of fuel, that wouldn't work. A forger might be able to forge a tank full of water into a tank full of fuel: that's still unlikely, but at least we're not trying to turn a gas into a liquid. Of course, we also never see Shai trying to stamp gas or liquid at all, only solids. It's questionable how much of a cognitive presence such things have. What you might be able to do is to forge something heavy into something light, so less fuel is needed to get it into space. Or perhaps inefficient fuel into efficient fuel (though it's been implied that bad things happen when you destroy invested objects: even if you could burn this fuel, who knows what would happen). Or forge rare resources (you know that rare earth mineral MaiPon has to import from Elantris? Yeah, they can just forge the circuity that uses it instead).

Quite understandable! Though I suspect we might be reaching the point where we're not going to convince the other to budge.

Revenge, my dear Kruk? Certainly not. Just an indication that you should know better than to expect short replies! Anywho, I'll endeavor to be briefer, else we might be writing books soon. I can make no promises. Regarding Shai's dismissal of her own supposition, allow me to quote: "Or maybe she was just getting romantic again." There's nothing explicit about that, and she isn't saying her original supposition was wrong (or, indeed, even poetic, which I had missed before). That's implied only insofar as we assume that romantic notions must, a priori, be invalid. Shai isn't even convinced of her own rejection: she's not saying that she was being too romantic, just that it might be a possibility. Discounting her insights because of a half-arsed single sentence full of self doubt and a weak argument that, even if right, doesn't disprove her original supposition is unreasonable. If Shai rejected her supposition based on a counterargument, then we might have reason to doubt that supposition. But being romantic? That's not a legitimate criticism against her supposition. Also, no, no one here's an expert in realmatics. Well... let me take that back. Peter Ahlstrom likely counts, but he doesn't tend to weigh in on such discussions. At best were at the amateur historian level. Only, you know, with realmatics instead of history. I'd happily defer to Phantom's quote from Brandon about this. Regarding the "meant to be" aspect of the two mentions of the windows desires, yes, I am reading that as desire, but specifically the action and will behind that. Why should the window have "meant to be" a stained glass one? If that was what people wanted it to be, then in the Imperial palace of all places, that would have happened. We have to conclude, then, that it was the window that saw itself as meant to be something different than what it became. The phrase "meant to be" reveals intent, intent reveals desire. Good. Because I'm an eternal pessimist, and as we all know, pessimism is the best outlook, because you're either always right or pleasantly surprised The problem with passivity is that it can't resist. We know that objects can resist and reject stamps. Thus we know that they aren't entirely passive. They aren't active enough to force the change themselves, of course, but they're active enough to make a forger's work easier or harder, depending. And. Definitely and. You misunderstand my point. I'm saying it wouldn't have been recorded by the Emperor's soul at all, because nothing was aware of it. Not the Emperor personally, not his cognitive aspect, not his grandmother thrice removed. It's like an archeologist who find a shard of pottery: nothing will tell him about the history of that pottery, but he knows that something created it, and he can start to deduce certain things about it. The Emperor's soul has been wiped clean, so Shai's job is to put a new shard of pottery in the same place and make certain that an archeologist who sees it would make the same deductions as with the original. The problem with the historical record model is that it'll be impossible to forge believably. There would simply be too many details that Shai has no way of knowing, if specifics are truly necessary, and there'd be no way to fit all that information into a single carved stamp. To be practical, forging has to work at a generalized level. Again, Shai doesn't have to identify every brushstroke in the mural, even the critical ones. She has to identity how those brushstrokes were chosen to be made. You brought up the door to the Emperor's chamber that Shai forges and breaks through. That's a wonderful example of why historical facts are less important to a forge than the processes behind them. Shai used the same stamp to rot the door as she used on her bed. Under what insanity could we suppose that the door and bed frame had a similar history? If Gatona's soul could let Shai test the emperor's soul on his because he was familiar with the Emperor's soul, how familiar should a door be with a bed? The stamp didn't take long, true, but since every relevant historical fact was wrong, it shouldn't have taken at all. Unless its the processes, not the specifics, that are important. Given what we know about the realms, the Cognitive aspect should be able to rearrange the Physical without needing to resort to extra power. To illustrate, if Jasnah's physical aspect travels across the physical realm from Roshar to Sel, we'd well expect that her cognitive aspect likewise travels across the cognitive realm from Roshar-Shadesmar to Sel-Shadesmar. Mere movement from point A to B is clearly not the sort of change you're referencing, but it illustrates that there is a direct connection between the two realms. That is, Jasnah doesn't have to worry about the force to propel her physical aspect as separate from the force needed to propel her cognitive aspect. Move one, and the other moves, like a spanreed. If one turns, the other turns. If I rearrange your physical face, your cognitive face will eventually be rearranged to match. Yes? Even if we quibble about the time it takes for those changes to become incorporated, the fact that they'll be incorporated, without the addition of shardic power, is agreed upon, right? So the inverse should be true: if I rearrange your cognitive face, your physical face should get rearranged, too. If I neuter your cognitive aspect, your physical aspect should get neutered, too. We have no reason at present to believe that change is limited to one direction naturally. As for Sanderson's note, amusingly that supports my original supposition, that amputation via forgery is unlikely to take. It'd be moving you away from how you know yourself. Also, it looks like there are two slightly different things in action here. We know that the cognitive aspect is in part determined by how other people view things (stated by Shai without even the slightest reservation). Being injured affects how other people view you, thereby affecting your cognitive aspect. But that doesn't preclude healing, either. Therefore, we can separate the cognitive identity into two closely related (and often overlapping) concepts for this in particular: how you actually are, and how you believe yourself to be. For someone like Sazed, these two have merged, which is why "how he is" (a eunuch) can't be healed: it's the same as "how he believes himself to be." But again, we are getting at desires here. "Knowing yourself" to be something that you actually aren't? That's a very strong desire, not an identity. Or, perhaps we might say, a very strong desire for a no longer accurate identity. But it's the desire that's important. The point about the Emperor is that identity isn't enough. Which we seem to agree on, until you start making arguments against desire. Sounds like we're largely in agreement, except that I'm saying that the reaction (and original action) to the foundational event is far far far far far far far far far more important to a successful forge than the event itself. Clearly, that's not all that's needed, elsewise Shai wouldn't need to know the history and nature of an object in order to forge it. To forge her original prison, for example, she needed to know the nature of the rocks so she could know where they might have been mined (the Laio quarry for the grindstone, for example). If all she needed to know was that it was grindstone, for example, why couldn't she have then just said that someone accidentally installed anthracite in its place instead? The nature of the grindstone, it seems, extends more than to just the fact that it's grindstone. Its origin is part of its identity. If Shai has to know its nature to get the forge to work, then that information has to be represented in the forge itself somehow. Shai couldn't forge the grindstone to be very poor quality, little better than dirt, for example, without knowing where it was mined, and in turn using that knowledge in the forge. It seems, at least, that you're discounting all the research that Shai's very clear she has to have. The reality that all these facts must be known and included should make us realize that there is far more than a single "someone took care of it" command involved. But if we both agree that the forging process is still largely procedural, then we must conclude that the facts (and lies) themselves aren't key (as that gets away from procedural generation), but rather guides. You have to know the past so you know how the narrative flows, so you can know where and how to nudge it in the desired direction. A reasonable objection at this point would be that my proposed model (that process is more important than events) seems to discount events as well. However, my model accounts for the need to know history because the history is needed to determine the process, and so gets represented in the process. It's not important to know, for example, that the Emperor skinned his knee when he was five, but rather the narrative flow of how that affected him. Without knowing the Emperor's own narrative flows, Shai has to look at the events and from those deduce the flow, much like a geologist might look at sediment and deduce from it the flow of water that created it. Far too implausible to ever come close to thinking about working. The human mind simply doesn't work that way: we're all about shifting unimportant details out of our conscious experience. If something's been unimportant the last 100 times you've checked, it doesn't matter if your life is on the line, your mind wont think it's important that 101st time. The chain knows no one is going to pay that close and consistent attention: the forge would evaporate before it even had a chance to take hold. Also, to my understanding, we've never seen what happens when two separate forges are working against each other, so we don't really know if forging the lie into the building would prevent a forger from making an exception. That would be fun to find out, though. She clearly said it was fragile, not broken. Consider how someone can lay on a bed of nails while being punctured by a single nail. A fragile bed could easily support someone when they distribute their weight while not being able to support someone (a larger someone, no less) when they jump on it. That's only a hair trigger if we're talking about a brace of coneys (okay, sorry, bad pun). The key is that the objects are strong enough for normal use, but not strong enough to take intense abuse. We don't see Shai ever forging something in a way that renders it actually useless, just close. Good point about the bed frame (though mostly an aside, as this gives evidence that things don't have to be forged in whole, which gets back to resealers working on a body apart from a person). But it's very explicit that she just made the frame fragile. You might have a glass jaw, doesn't mean you can't eat with it. Oh, it's easy to justify, given that no murder ever happened. As described in the book, the objects were still perfectly useable. Having cancer isn't the same as being dead, having rot isn't the same a bed being murdered. Your arguments just don't fit with the text. Also, regarding the mattress: what's more probable, that Shai decided to cut through it with guards in the room watching her, thereby running a high risk of exposure (cutting a mattress ain't quiet, it ain't easy, and it ain't subtle), because she couldn't be bothered to forge it, or she knew that the safe, forge route wasn't an option? Unfortunately, your explanation is highly implausible. No one notices things that aren't noticeable. The success of a lot of Shai's forgeries, both mundane and magical, seems to be summed up right there.

I'm pretty sure you got worse/longer when we were discussing how feruchemical storage works. I can understanding your hesitation, except the very fact that Shai thinks she's being too poetic is actually more of a reason to think she's hit onto something. It shows an uncommon level of self-awareness and a willingness to critique her own assumptions. However, poetics isn't a good justification for discarding a supposition (after all, why can't realmatics be poetic?) Furthermore, in this case, Shai's "gut" reaction is actually something worth listening to. This might seem to be an about-face on my earlier comments, but let me explain. If I appeal to your gut reaction to make an argument, then you should disregard your gut reaction because I am appealing to your emotions. If I appeal to my own gut reaction to make an argument to you, then you should disregard my gut reaction because that is an appeal to authority fallacy. But what's the difference between an appeal to authority fallacy and a legitimate appeal to authority? The authority being appealed to: none of us are experts, so appealing to us is fallacious, but Shai is an expert. Or, in other words, she knows enough about forging that her intuition is likely to be correct (much as if a noble laureate has an intuitive prediction about an experiment: they know enough to make a reliable guess, while their summer undergrad lab helper, not so much). I should also note that Shai ascribes the change to the window's desire twice, actually, and discounts only one. At the start of the chapter, when she's giving the history of what happened, she says that when the window was broken, no one repaired it as it was "meant to be." How something should be is very subjective: clearly, no one viewed the window as meaning to be stained glass, or else in the Imperial palace of all places, that would have happened. It's the window, then, that meant itself to be stained glass. It was actively rejecting its present identity (as a non-stained glass window) for an older identity. It had a desire for one identity over another. If it is just identity that's important, then how it was is how it should see itself. But there's a desire to be something in particular (even if that is an old identity) You're the one reading a positive connotation into being beautiful, I'm just arguing that there is an active force (which we lose by replacing "desire" for identity). The window desires to be beautiful, so it resists stamps that don't take that into consideration. I would say that yes, the congnitive/spiritual aspect of a body desires to have a chronic illness. Why should it see the illness as good or bad? That's our judgment, but why should the other aspects of the body share in that judgment? We might rephrase this as saying that an object desires to be true to its identity, but that desire, the push back, is important. "Seeing" is far too passive. I'm not sure I entirely follow your objection to comparing the window's desire with the Emperor's desire. First, let me point out the context that Sanderson himself provides: he bookends the discussion of stamps in Day 30 with Shai figuring out the window's desires at the start, and failing to get the Emperor's desires right at the end of it (the rest of the chapter serves as the starting bookend for Shai's relationship with Gatona, which ends when he burns her notes). The juxstapoisitioning indicates that we are supposed to understand one failure in the light of the other's success. Also, I would object to the claim that the Emperor's motivation being a matter of historical fact. That something motivated him is clear, but the problem is, chances are he didn't fully understand his own motivations, and certainly no one else did. If it's not recorded, it's not history. No part of the Emperor's cognitive aspect should have identified itself for the specific reason. The desire, though, that's more likely something that would be remembered, even if he didn't remember what had caused it, because desires are emotion and emotions make for powerful memories. Shai's task wasn't so much to find out why the Emperor became the Emperor, but rather what produced the desire that motivated him to become. Here I must reject your emphasis on identity, and will again return to the window to demonstrate why. If the window deeply held Stained Glass as part of its identity, why did it need Shai? Forgery works by changing the cognitive/spiritual aspects, and thereby producing a physical difference. If the window deeply identified itself as Stained Glass, then its own cognitive aspect should have been able to rearrange its physical. That didn't happen. Indeed, that never happens, to anything: identity is relatively weak, it changes sufficiently in the cognitive realm to easily and immediately accept and incorporate physical changes. To apply this more directly to the Emperor, if you are right, then Shai was wrong. The Emperor identified himself as Emperor. Even when he was attacked, that identity remained unchanged. An emperor in a coma is still an emperor. An emperor without a soul is still an emperor. And an emperor with a new soul is still an emperor. If identity is important, then this isn't a point of the Emperor's soul that she'd have needed to forge: that identity was already there. We can see this better with the window. Even if it once identified itself as a stained glass window, it was now a regular window, had been seen as a regular window, etc. We might suppose that it had a dual identity, one of what it had been, and one of what it was, but the point is, being a regular window was part of its current identity, the part that was manifesting in the physical realm. That alone indicates it was the stronger identity. You say that the stained glass part of its identity was strong enough to prevent the forgery to take without Shai considering it. But, if the stained glass identity was strong, why didn't the non-stained glass identity, which was stronger, react when Shai removed that part of it's history? By changing it from non-stained glass to stained glass, Shai was ignoring part of its history. If ignoring one part could prevent a forgery, why could ignoring a different part allow it to happen? Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if she does know how to do all those, conceptually at least. I used to publish with a content mill. It was one of those "how-to" websites. I'm sure at some point one of their authors wrote about something that they actually knew how to do, but that would have rare. Most of the time, the writers just did a quick google search, compiled what random (hopefully reputable) things other people said, and called it a day. From my time in this, I "know" how to do things like build a bookshelf. I can't actually do that, mind you. I suspect that would be enough for forging, however. Let's consider the mural: did Shai define every brush stroke as part of the "what happened so it changed that way"? We both seem agreed as to the procedural nature of forging, so no. It's more of a "what were the processes that lead to this change." You might notice my theme on movement and motion. It's not "what happened" that I care about (and in turn think the magic system uses) but rather how things happen. Or, in other words, its "how" not "what." The complexity of the "how" things changed is where I see the complexity comes in. It isn't sufficient to say that the Emperor decided to become the Emperor because of X: anyone could decide to become Emperor because of X. It has to be more person: why did this man become Emperor because of X? What was it about X that motivated him? And, of course, that motivation didn't stop there: how did it continue to influence him? Since we've been talking brain, allow me to try to draw an analogy. Oxytocin is a hormone that is important in forming social bonds. By saying that we just care about what the change is, that's like saying we just care about the fact that oxytocin is there. But, oxytocin is released when we see a baby, it's involved in milk letdown, and it's part of orgasm. WHY the body releases oxytocin is often more important than the fact that oxytocin has been released. So moving on to Bob. Changing his heart so that it wasn't weak would likely change his present, based on how important that was to his development. If a weak heart prevented him from pursuing his dreams, then fixing his heart would have allowed him to pursue those dreams, and should influence his present. If Shai were to forge his heart strong, I suspect she'd have to take his dreams and desires into account (even if just to know that his heart fix wouldn't change those). For a resealer, since it seems that they focus on the body, rather than the person, I doubt that fixing the heart would influence Bob. Shai's eyes, in contrast, likely wouldn't have made much of a difference to her life. Wearing glasses or not wearing glasses, the process of her life would have largely remained the same. Which brings us back to the window: Shai doesn't have to know everything about it's past to in order to forge it, but she does have to know the important things about it's past, because those things reveal the process of the window's desires. Look to what Shai focuses on in her forge of the Emperor's soul: it's not facts she cares about, but the why behind those facts. Now, Bob's heart condition may or may not be as important to him as having a particular limb. That will depend on Bob. But we do know that limbs are important to people. Having one or not is going to be a fairly large life changing event: having a heart condition may or may not be a life changing event. So, limbs are going to be harder to forge away because they are life changing than giving Bob a heart condition (especially if his life would have never been effected by that heart condition). To note, I will concede that a resealer might have an easier time of ampu-forging a limb than someone like Shai. But then, as per the original supposition, the amputation is really only useful for someone like Shai. Or in other words, if you are forging yourself, you have to care about your life process. But if you are forging your body, you might be able to get away with that. Unfortunately, resealing is too poorly understood to really say for sure, but I suspect regardless! To note, the unpleasant doors seem to have already been opened: Shai said that its easier to turn gold into lead than lead into gold because "inventing a history for a bar of gold where someone had adulterated it with lead... well, that was a plausible lie." You'll note, even for that one change, Shai indicates she'd have to create an entire history, not just a single switch to flip. Does Shai have to account for every person who touched the chain? Certainly not. For one, only one or two people along the lines will notice the defect (familiarity breeds indifference). But also, she just has to construct a plausible history. If the easiest history will be accounting for each individual to make a mistake, sure, but it might also be how all those people were circumvented in one fell swoop (say, the chain came in a load of three thousand, and no one's going to carefully inspect three thousand manacles, link by link). I agree on the "come into being" part, but my comment was on its history. A bed can well sit for ages in an unfit state (again, remember that it was useable after being forged, just fragile. Shai still had to fiddle with it to make it collapse). That's a believable part of its history. Ashes never cleaned up is far less believable, not because there are ashes now, but because there were ashes left in the fake history for three years. Look at Warrior Shai: Shai couldn't just make her be a part of that warrior culture, she had to take into account how that warrior culture would have reacted to her (resentment, attempts to kill her, then eventual acceptance). "What ought to have happened in the interval" seems to matter a great deal to a Forgery. Again, the bed worked as a bed, but a fragile one, and one she had to physically, non-forgically, corrupt further. She corrupted the bed, but didn't steal it's purpose. The very fact that she forged it up to a point, but then have to shred the mattress to take it further, indicates that there is a limit. Besides, the teleological statement is just one I pulled from the book. Shai's quite clear that a window knows what stained glass windows are supposed to be, and that Gatona know's what the Emperor's soul is supposed to be. Likewise, lead knows what gold is supposed to be... and it knows that its not that. If the world changed and lead was suddenly worth more than gold, it would likely become harder to forge gold into lead than Shai's present world. Not at all, it just requires that the change was never critical to the thing's existence. Shai couldn't forge the chain so that the lock didn't work: she'd have to forge a weakness that she could then non-forgically exploit. If no one ever knew of the weakness, no one could have ever exploited it before, so the weakness would have never become a problem. The chain would have continued to be functional towards its purpose. Again to the bed: Shai didn't forge in the cuts she made to the mattress, she cut it herself. Why? Perhaps precisely because the bed had to remain functional. Basically, my stance is that it's possible in theory, just not practice. For example, it might be theoretically possible for an Awakener to Awaken the planet itself, but in practice, there are far too many difficulties to actually overcome. But yes, I didn't make this clear in my original post (because the end result's the same).

I'd recommend keeping in mind that people communicate with more than just words. I'd say, part of a person's voice is how they'll gesture, what they'll look at (or not look at!), where they stand in the room, etc. A cautious character might hide their opinion in a sea of words, but they might also take the back seat in a room, cross their arms in an argument, pause before giving their thoughts, etc. One of the things that helps me quickly define a character's voice is to throw them into an argument/conflict. How they try to assert control, what they think needs controlling, how they formulate arguments (or refuse to argue), if they'll invade someone else's space, all defines their voice.

Sorry to open a new line of thought while still needing to address your previous post, Kurk, but the discussion of resealing is quite interesting and, I think, might ultimately bring us back to amputation. Anywho, resealing seems to be forgery that targets a different aspect of an object than forging does (but is still the same magic system). Or to put it another way, Shai forges a person's soul while resealing forges a person's body. Shai makes it clear that she neither has studied nor performs resealing. Given that imperial resealers also appear to be different individuals than those who forge the imperial decorations, this seems to be a profession-wide division. But we have word of Sanderson that resealing and forging are the same, so we must conclude that there are notable differences in technique or form that separates the two in-world. I think the Emperor provides us with an interesting example of this. Why did healing his body not restore his soul? Indeed, why couldn't Shai have just forged the Emperor's past so that it thought it had never been attacked? And why could a resealer's forge be permanent while Shai's could not? I suspect that the answer is two part. One, I suspect that Shai and the resealers are targeting different aspects of a person. Shai said that seals get rejected because a person growth and learns. If a resealing takes, then it seems that it isn't targeting the part of the person that grows and learns. Since we know that resealing does take permanently on a body, we can conclude that it is possible to target a person's body apart from their soul. Although, given that Shai, by targeting a soul, can manifest changes on a body, there is some overlap. We already know that souls and bodies can be somewhat separate (Sazed "resealed" Vin and Elend's bodies but couldn't do anything with their souls), so it might be that a body has its own identity/soul that persists as long as the body persists, while the person is a soul that views itself as having a body, but which can persist after that body perishes. So, two souls: one for the "person" and one of the "body." I'd propose that a resealer targets the body's soul, while a forger targets a person's soul. To extrapolate across the cosmere, I suspect resealing could, for example, restore the structure of one of Kalad's phantoms' bodies yet not change its commands, but Shai's forging might be able to change its commands by targeting its awakened spirit (and probably also affect its physical form, since the two are related). A resealer and forger might also target different aspects of a soul to be forged. I doubt a resealer can just change the past: it seems like a simple matter to forget the Emperor's body's past so that it wasn't hit (or that the injury was deflected by bone, or something else). But it's clear that the best resealers were required to heal the Emperor. Thus, just changing the past must not be enough. Or, more exactly, it must be more involved than just that. Perhaps because a muscle can be viewed as a muscle and not just part of a body, a resealer has to forge the muscle's soul, too, and so on and so forth. Resealers might be able to make more permanent changes because they are working on a very tiny level, while Shai's forging is less permanent because she's working at such a high level that the directions can't trickle down sufficiently to make everything permanent. Yet, as we saw, a resealer's forgeries can't trick up very far, either. As an aside, I wonder if there is any similarity between Shai's forging the Emperor a new soul and mistwraiths being given a set of spikes. That is, was Shai's forgery unblocking the Emperor's body's access to its cognitive aspect?

GOG... I am assuming you don't mean the Gynecologic Oncology Group. *does an internet search* I haven't been a fan in the past, but it looks like I may well become one in the future.

I'll respond in depth later, but I had to know: Are you discounting Shai's gut feeling?

Phantom, I see that you quoted me. Allow me to draw your attention to the phrase "the person making the claim," as it appears you missed some of the importance of that part. If someone says they have a drug that cures cancer, then the burden of proof is on them, as they are the one making the claim. If they do not provide proof, the rational actor will not consider their claim. But also the rational actor will not believe the opposite, as that is a logical fallacy (the aforementioned argumentum ad logicam). So, the end result would be that the public has neither burden of proof nor disproof. If, however, the public wishes to make the claim that the mentioned drug doesn't cure cancer, then yes, the burden of proof is on the public as they are now the ones now making a claim. They don't have the burden of disproving the original speaker's claim, but they do have the burden of proving their own claims. To sum up, a logical actor will neither believe nor disbelieve an unproven claim. If disbelief in a claim is desired, then belief in a counter claim, not disbelief in that original claim, must be fostered and proven EDIT: Also, extraordinary claims require ordinary proof. If I claim that I have a drug that cures cancer, how do I prove it? The exact same way as if I had a drug that I said cures mild headaches. Clinical trials, biznatchos.

Sorry for the delay in responding, Kurk (and thanks for the welcome back: I didn't mean to return, but I wanted to look into something, saw an interesting thread, and got sucked back in). I suspect most our disagreements aren't over what's possible, but how much each factor weighs on the process, and how difficult it would be. My stance is that forging away a limb is technically possible, but so difficult in practice as to be impossible. Much like how an author could, in theory, write a novel that will satisfy every reader, but in practice that just doesn't happen. Anywho, the window provides a worthwhile example, so I hope you won’t mind if I discuss it a little more. In the book, Shai comes to a conclusion as to why her earlier forging attempts didn't work, and why the final one did. She concludes that the issue was that the window, after all those years, still thought of itself as beautiful. That indicates that the issue wasn't that there was a historical inaccuracy in her earlier attempts that was causing a problem, but that she hadn't understood the window's desires well enough (just as she hadn't understood at first the Emperor's desires for becoming the Emperor). If a window's desire to see itself as beautiful could reject Shai's forging attempt, then how much more would a person's desire to remain physically whole reject a forging? It is that a person's sense of limbedness is very deeply ingrained, so much so that attempts to change a person's limbedness are going to be a ridiculously hard sell, as it were. It's going against a very strong desire, and so the forge has to be that much better. Perhaps the best illustration of my objection can be had in the fact that losing a limb causes drastic psychological trauma, while usually scars, disease, hair loss, poor eyesight, etc do not. Not only does a forger have to switch the change their past so that they lost that limb, they have to take into account the medical attention they need, then the psychological damage caused by it, while managing the body's innate desire to refuse to believe that it's lost a limb. As for forgery backstory, we see a little of the answer to this question when Shai forged the wall into a mural: she had two other stamps that directed how the forging was to progress, and she explained that they were to address the skills needed to actually paint the artwork. Given the complexity, it's likely that she provided guidance and the skills, but didn't designate every brushstroke. To me that indicates that Shai's stamp on the table probably included something along the lines of "you received daily care" instead of "you were polished on July 23, 25th, 28th, August 1st, 5th, 11th, etc." This gets to be problematic with a person, though. Let's say that Shai forges someone's past to believe that they had a brother who died. I suspect that if she just said "you were depressed for a while," that would be less likely to stick than if she included notes on the entire cycle of grief, how this particular individual handled it, and what psychological scars were left over. The question of destruction is an interesting one: could Shai forge her desk to be destroyed? I suspect not, since forging just changes a things past, while destroying it removes part of that past. Let's say that Shai's desk was almost burnt to ashes three years ago. She forges it so that it actually did get burned up. Except now she's not working with the desk, she's working with a pile of ash. At least a pile of ash could still have a sense of identity, but would that pile of ash been left undisturbed for three years? That seems unlikely, so the sense of identity would be lost, and therefore the thing that you had forged would have been destroyed. I suspect, then, that the object's will would resist being so changed. I'd propose that a successful forge has to address the following: 1) The object's desires (as evidence by Shai's interpretation of why the window wouldn't forge) 2) The likelihood of the end result/how others perceive that change (gold into lead is more likely than lead into gold, chains have a specific purpose, deviate from that purpose and it makes no sense, so there's clear feedback between viewer and object) 3) What differed in the object's history in order for the change to occur (coal was accidentally mined instead of limestone, for example) 4) Guidelines for how the change manifested, which would include guidelines for complex artistic capabilities as well (as evidence by the forging of the wall into a mural). So, the reason I think that amputation is unlikely to take is because it's strongly against #1 and #4 (the forger would need to know how to treat an amputation, as well as how an amputation would affect an individual's psyche). #2 is a bit up in the air: the randomized amputation process that was proposed should itself be simple enough to change, but what about how people view amputations? I think the feedback from others would make this more difficult than just flipping a switch, as it were.

@Phantom, the burden of proof is always on the person making the claim, regardless of what that claim is. Thus, if someone is making the claim that anthracite is shardic, yes, they have to provide proof. But if you wish to make the claim that anthracite is not shardic, the burden of proof is then on you. You can point out that someone's argument is wrong, but that doesn't allow you to conclude that their conclusion is wrong as well. If you want to prove their conclusion is wrong, you have to provide an argument yourself. Do keep in mind that I am not trying to say that coal is shardic. My original point was that it isn't, and so I provided valid argumentation to that end which was thereto lacking. It sounds like we are on the same page in that regard, at least, and that our divergence is in what makes for proper means. EDIT: Kurk, I agree that intuition should be given its due. We're just in disagreement over what its due is

Aye, in the context of a formal argument, appeals to emotion have no place. Which isn't to say we can't have informal arguments: but then, informal arguments also shouldn't hold as much weight.

Well, it would depend on the separate objects viewing themselves as a single object. If that could be done, then as far as the object was concerned, by touching the remote access ring, the feruchemist was touching the whole, even if the rest of the whole was a dozen feet away and actually unconnected. But, yeah, it can probably never work: getting two objects to view themselves as a single one would likely be impossible.

I'll just leave this here: Chaos went with his gut, he was wrong, so I take it that you are surprised. To be fair, given the time that the statement was made, I think someone could have made a very strong and logically sound argument for the same thing. Logic isn't a guarantee that you'll come to the right answer, and using a logical fallacy doesn't guarantee that your conclusion is wrong, either (that would be the "argumentum ad logicam" fallacy!). But it is a way of evaluating what arguments are reasonable and what ones aren't. To note, Sanderson has specifically said he likes breaking expectations (and yet he still had the mentor die in Mistborn). So, we actually have decent reason to not trust our gut reactions: if we feel it, Sanderson probably felt it, and would have wanted to avoid it. Or not. Because he's Sanderson.

I'd assume that a pile of dust can't be a metalmind, because each grain would act as a separate storage device, but all of them would probably be too small to do anything. That would imply, in turn, that a tattoo couldn't be a metalmind either, because it's not a coherent piece of metal, rather it's a bunch of separate bits of metal. However, to give a counter argument, if forging concepts can apply to feruchemy, then the pile of dust might not work because the dust wouldn't see itself as a coherent object, but the metal in the tattoo would probably be stable enough to see itself as a whole, thereby binding all the different specks together, realmatically, and thereby providing enough storage space to be useable Actually... I like that forging perspective. That would help explain why, say, the copper ring a ferring is wearing doesn't give them access to the thirty lb block of copper in their backpack. Not only are they separate, but the objects see themselves as separate. But if they could be made to see themselves as the same specific thing, then maybe remote feruchemical access might be possible.

@Blackmagic, it sounds a little like you are saying that Ralkalest doesn't forge because it is, well, unforgeable. I suspect I'm just misunderstanding your point, would you mind rephrasing it? Perhaps we aren't talking about the same thing, but an argument from incredulity is a specific version of the appeal to emotion logical fallacy. By definition, logical fallacies are invalid arguments. If all things are equal, yet one side appeals to a gut reaction, then things are still equal. That said, intuition can motivate a person into forming a logical argument, so it has a use at least.

Go to the Google Play store. There are dozens of hundreds of fistfulls of podcast programs (I use podcast addict). Select one, download, install, subscribe to writing excuses. You can then stream them to your phone (I download because it's more reliable, and then I can easily re-listen later). Unfortunately, only the ten most recent episodes tend to be available to load up on your postcast program. If you want the rest, either buy a season or download them per cetriya's directions.

Kurk, do you remember the window that Shai forged? She had tried dozens of times, but it didn't work until she discovered that it used to be stained glass, then it worked on her first try. If she couldn't get a glass window to be whole unless it got to be a stained glass window again, how much more stubborn would a body be about something important? Hair, scars, these are minor things, and ones that people believe are relatively ephemeral. We cut our hair, we grow it long, we dye it, we style it: it's about as constant as the clothes we wear. We might notice horribly disfiguring scars, but most of them are easy to ignore, both by others and ourselves. But limbs? They're how we experience and interact with the world. Removing them is removing part of that experience. And so, it seems like it would be very difficult to forge them away. It's not an issue of how probably the forgery is, but rather how desirable that forgery is. EDIT: I should note that I suspect this has a lot to do with how we view a person's connectedness to their limbs differently. As noted, I take phantom limb syndrome to be evidence that, even with limbs gone, the body still views itself as having them. Getting the body to view itself as not having the limbs, so that the limbs "disappear," seems to be the opposite of what we see. But that's not an absolute argument, in the least.

Nah, it's just that "h" isn't a real letter, but a heavy breathing sound. Some languages leave it out entirely, and even English slaps it around a lot: for example, we say "an hour," "an herb," etc., instead of "a hour," "a herb," etc. If H were a real consonant, the latter would be correct, but it's not. So Valhav might better be represented in English as Val'av, but English speakers have no idea what to do with that: most of us would just pronounce it Valav, which it isn't. "Sh and "th" are different, however. They're single letters that English, in its crazy-pants wisdom, represents as two letters each. "Th" is a great example, because so many languages use it. θ, ð, and þ can all of which get translated into English as "th." So when working backwards into Rosharian, it's likely that their native language treats them as single letters too. Alethela would probably be cleared written as Aleðela, but much like a heavy aspiration mark, English readers have no idea what to make of that.

I used anthracite as an example of how investiture can preempt some of the ideas about what is or isn't a manifestation of a shard's power. The fact that anthracite is coal is not particularly important, and doesn't preclude Windrunner's OP suggestion that it is the Devotion/Domination/Odium equivalent of lerasium/atium. While we might be incredulous at the idea that Sanderson would make a real world material into a physical aspects of a shard in the cosmere, we can't conclude anything from our doubt (to do so would be to commit the appeal to emotion logical fallacy). To put it another way, people had believed the right thing (that anthracite isn't a physical shard) for the wrong reason (because it's coal). I tried to provide a right reason.

Why? Investiture doesn't come out of thin air: even if a forger could make a bit of cloth THINK that it's been awoken, the fact is, the cloth would still lack the investiture to actually be awoken.

I suspect that forging wouldn't work for losing a limb, although it probably does work for restoring one. The reason is simply the phantom limb sensation: I take that as evidence that the body would strongly see itself as having a limb. Trying to say that a foot had been cut off would be rejected, not because it wasn't probably, but because it's so against how the body views itself. In contrast, for the same reason, restoring a limb would be easier, because the body wants that limb to still be there (although it sounds like resealing is crazy difficult in its own right: my point is just that for a lost limb, the body wants the resealer to succeed). Keep in mind that essence marks (which is what I think this would count as) are very difficult to make. I suspect it'd be more worth your time to forge yourself into someone who has the skill to escape on their own. Also, a forger should always carry around a paperclip. If MacGyver taught us anything, it's that a paperclip is all that you need to get out of any situation. Combine that with a forger, and you have an unstoppable magic user.

I'm a bit late to the party, but thought it might be useful to reconsider some of these questions based on the issue of investiture. Let's take anthracite as an example: even if it was created by Brandon, it couldn't be part of a shard. Why? Too low investiture. We know that investiture interferes with magic. We also know that Shai either could forge rocks into anthracite, or that it is so possible that no one batted an eye at the idea that she could. So, since Shai's not a shard, she can't be putting shardic levels of investiture into an object, so she shouldn't be able to make anthracite. To provide an analogy: do we think that Shai could forge iron into lerasium? I'd think not (but of course could be very wrong). Ralkalest is more interesting, although as Windrunner noted, Sanderson has already done the "physical solid aspect of a shard is a metal" bit. Additionally, that might mean that Ralkalest has the shard holder's name in it, but we know the name of all the shard holders who have (at least as of the time of Elantris) interacted with the planet. That aside, I do think we can conclude that Ralkalest has a high level of investiture, which is why magic won’t work on it. I suspect that an allomancer would have difficulty pushing and pulling on it, as well. Now, the aluminum objection might be brought up (aluminum stops magical effects), but I think that saying that Aluminum has a higher than normal (for allomancy) level of investiture is likely. We do know that it can be used to cleanse the body of impurities, and it affects an allomancer's connection with their metals, so that implies a not very physical level of effect. So, I suspect that aluminum has a high level of investiture, and in turn, so does Ralkalest. As a side note, if Ralkalest is a manifestation of a shard's power, then the meteorites that Shai's people worship can't be part of a shard (else she should know that they are also Ralkalest). And vice versa: if the meteorites aren't ralkalest, then she wouldn't think that ralkalest is holy (and she doesn't, so I suspect this is the truth of the matter). Also, just because someone calls themselves Hoid, that doesn't mean they are the "real" Hoid. At least, I think Sanderson has warned us that not everyone by that name is actually the Hoid we don't know, but would very much like to know and love. I'm a bit suspicious of this actually being Hoid, simply because he's already been the Wit for a different ruler. None of this is proof that he's not, of course.

I'd love it is Copper had more to it, although the fact that Sanderon didn't give Vin a teacher for it indicates that it's just as binary and boring as we fear. Hopefully, he'll reconsider, and in the future we'll see Smokers who can vary the strength and size of their cloud, exclude particular individuals from protection, and mask other magic use (hey, if Seekers can learn to detect Feruchemy, then Smokers should be able to learn to hide Feruchemy).

Meh, I thought that Moiraine was handled fine. After all, Rand and the others had grown too much to really need her anymore. This is the classic "you can never go back" element. Children grow up and beyond the protection of parental figures. By Moiraine helping in the Dragon's Peace, we get a hint that a parent can still be useful, even after their children are all grown. For her to have had a more important role would have been to undermine Mat, Rand, Perrin, Nynaeve, and Egwene.