Ripheus23

I don't like being overly assertive but your probability claim is mathematically ill-founded and we're talking about a timeframe going decades into the future, plenty of time for Sanderson to change his mind to some extent. Besides which, didn't you read what I said about incomplete knowledge in general. EDIT: I mean Kant spent a huge chunk of his life saying we couldn't know virtually anything about the 'Beyond'/noumena but he had doubts about his doubts near the end, in the Opus Postumum iirc.

Yeah, but just because he says this now, doesn't mean he won't change his mind later.

I mean Gavilar's sphere, which according to a very amusing thread on this website has not been explicitly accounted for yet, despite Sanderson's claim otherwise. Due to an accident of my profile picture, the sphere has become a recurring site-trope for me And what I suspect is that Sanderson doesn't want to get into overly technical philosophical discussion just yet. He's gone farther than many fantasy writers, maybe even all of them, in posing questions of this order, without providing a (say) Terry Goodkind diatribe as a settlement. But he might just be laying the groundwork, at least for a technical demonstration of the inaccessibility of the Beyond (in terms of the formal paradox of knowledge/the incompleteness theorems, for example).

No, the first two words in the title aren't really useful except in order to make a really obliquely bad pun. So, question: do you think Sanderson will really leave the question of the Beyond ambiguously/ambivalently unresolved, or do you think that in the nick of time (at the end of time) the black sphere (or whatever) will at last intervene and we will get a twist-ending explanation instead? Like, I feel telling Hoid's story from the inside-out is going to require stepping at least right on to the exact threshold of this question. And I don't know that even IRL humans are so epistemically limited that we really won't ever find a way to know about our own IRL "Beyond" question.

As I have recently discovered, I was willing to try to use The Way of Kings as part of an actual IRL attempt to resurrect someone from the dead (who it turned out wasn't dead), which is an episode of my life I've not the immediate time to explain but there you have it, if a mysterious sphere of aleph-numbers is willing to bet it all on WoK, then either read MBE2 or that.

Swearing using the Oaths is a pretty profane thing, you only want to makes vows with the Oaths instead.

Given the way Sanderson qualifies his appreciation for the conflict theory mentioned to him per the WoB, maybe he's hinting at what you're saying? I do think that Odium might have corrupted Honor, for instance, at least enough for Honor to go insane and die. OTOH the description of the battle with Ambition (AU territory I think?), though vague, refers to some kind of space combat IIRC.

I just want to note that he can't ALWAYS be sowing discord between Shards as his method of attack. We know per WoB that Cultivation fought for Honor and against Odium, and Ambition died without apparent "political" relation to another Shard as such. Also, Ambition seems to have died as a result of an actual battle between Rayse and herself, which counts against the "slowly change the story of the Shard and its world" image of attack. But who knows? "There are some rules we all have to follow" (or however Tanavast said that) sounds like there's a principle in the cosmere that requires Shards to work through story-like Connection sequences on Invested worlds, or something. Also, recurring intra-Shard discord is still an option, here, more or less.

Correct me if I'm wrong: So my guess is that something happened to gravity on Ashyn. Like planet-wide Lashing, maybe. And I think the Dawnshards were Spiritual analogues of the Oathgates (transit via the Spiritual Realm instead of Shadesmar), but their power requirements/side-effects were destructive. So maybe the Dawnshards messed up the gravity of Ashyn by using Lashing to massively bend spacetime, or some such wild thing...

It seems to go either way: one, Sanderson defines his genre as science fantasy, which collapses the distinction; but two, he involves the theory of Connection, which seems inherently proto-narrative, in the mechanics of the system, with Connection resonating(!) with those personal-moment kinds of things. I actually have never come up with a really "good" definition of "magic" in general, besides, "Something that allows willing/feeling to affect the physical world in a 'non-natural' way." For example, divine power would seem technological (God is reasonable/orderly/etc.) as well as magical (God can do whatsoever He can will), and yet also irreducible to either or maybe even to a conjunction of both?

It means Tien has Horneater ancestry somewhere, which means he was part-singer, which means Kaladin is part-singer

I was thinking, what if the cosmere is made up of the 50 to 100 star systems closest to the center of the encompassing galaxy? Or, they're just adjacent systems in some "random" pocket of the galaxy, which seems dubious to me. So my actual hypothesis is that the main gravitational link between the cosmere-stars is Spiritual. That is, the effect of mass-energy-Investiture on the curvature of spacetime is part of the cosmere's overarching gravitational binding. So, perpendicularities are connected to the gravitational binding of the cosmere, maybe. Like Physical-Cognitive nodes in a Spiritweb for the cosmere as a whole, maybe... (some special Realmatic unity).

Well since there's both DNA and sDNA in the cosmere, I don't see why sDNA couldn't get transferred down the line to (mostly) invisible, but wide, extents. EDIT: Also, I'm talking about people who would have farther removed ancestors of immediate ancestors as singers, not close relatives for singers. So a lot more diffusion (there wouldn't be cloistered retention of traits in a more homogeneous population or whatever, but still more alternative sDNA than "lighteyes" have, maybe).

That's why I said it wouldn't have been obvious. I don't think Sanderson has to be implicitly quasi-racist* about how his ethnic groups appear, does he? It could be that there are people who have a "lot" of singer ancestry (on some level) but no "normal" noticeable outward signs of this, or whatever. *EDIT: As in the "they all look the same" way.

I'm wondering if there's a more subtle relation. Moreover, we KNOW there's a deep background here, what with Shallan's hair going back to Horneater ancestry, no? What I'm thinking is that it is possible to have a lot of singer sDNA without being visibly singer-like, so to speak. In Kaladin's case, this explains how easily he heals towards his Spiritual ideal of having the brand. Because I don't think that level of Cognitive influence is normal. I'm not saying Kaladin is like Lift, or maybe I am, but I am at least saying that maybe the sDNA component of the darkeyes manifests outwardly just as their dark eyes (and the eye-lightening is a comportment towards an idea of lighteyes being more purely "human"), but otherwise involves a significant ancestral relationship with the singers (assuming, as noted, that we're not talking about an engineered crossover via Cultivation/the Nightwatcher, although that description seems "wrong" to me). Indeed, maybe it wasn't even possible for humans right out of the "Tranquiline Halls" to bond with spren? Maybe they HAD to admix with the singers, over time. I wonder how actually strict the hyper-ethnic distinction really is, here, by now. We've seen that marriages can be highly Invested affairs on Roshar, I think. Or, at least Dalinar and Navani's was, but this is a proof by example. We also know that Honor and Cultivation were romantically united. So I daresay, early human-singer marriages might have been routes for a major sDNA transfer between the populations. So, some of the transfer is normal genetics, some is Invested genetics. Some crossovers are Physically emphasized (Herdazians, Horneaters, who else?) while others are more Spiritually manifest (darkeyes and lighteyes?). Traces of gemheart biochemistry allow spren-bonding among the neo-humans. Although, I would have to also figure out how the Iriali fit into this scheme... among others...

I was thinking of his brand not going away, for one. His affinity with the oppressed everywhere... Hey, maybe him being darkeyed even, is related.

Technology involves causes that can be mass copied, but magic seems more personal by itself, maybe, like the effect needs to happen only at some unique time maybe, to even happen at all.

So we know singers and humans can have children in general, there are major known cases, etc. What if it still sometimes happened, say within two hundred years of Kaladin's time? Maybe down the road, idk... Basically, what if Kaladin has more singer sDNA than humans usually have on Roshar? By extension, too, either or both of his parents even more. And what about people like Nohadon long ago?

Maybe Nohadon had close singer ancestors, but it wasn't obvious like with regular Herdazians or Rock's people?

As far as I know, the natural speed of light does not limit magic in the cosmere absolutely... I think the suspicion is that Scadrial spaceship shenanigans will end up Alcubierre-y, in part per WoB iirc due to a step we don't know yet.

Well the Dor is starting to make the surface of Sel come alive or what so maybe there would be a mass perpendicularity bleedthrough?

Mmm Nonor/Hohadon 'ship, mmm...