Ripheus23

I have come up with an argument that Unity is not a reinterpretation of Honor, as follows. First, did Dalinar take up a full Shard at the Battle of Thaylen Field? I do not think so. Though there are visualish similarities between this scene and the one in which Vin was infused with all the mists, nevertheless, Preservation was an intact Shard, whereas Honor is not intact. Also, Vin's physical form was vaporized during her full Ascension, whereas Dalinar is still flesh-and-bones. So, if Dalinar did not pick up a full Shard, would it have been possible for him to have reinterpreted a full Shard's Intent? Even if it would be possible to do so, does Dalinar know enough about Shards, Shardic Intents, Adonalsium, etc. to know how to reinterpret a Shard's Intent? I think not. Consider, Sazed picked up two intact Shards who had emulated Adonalsium to the extent of not just colonizing some already-existing world, but making a whole world out of thin air. Sazed was a scholar, used to analytical thinking. Yet, he learned very little about Adonalsium from the residual knowledge of the subject contained in the two Shards he took up. Even if Dalinar became a Vessel, I doubt he would have had Intent-reinterpretation downloaded into his mind at the time. So, supposing Dalinar took up enough of a Shard to reinterpret its Intent, he would have done so basically by accident. I don't know about you but of the many things in the Cosmere that require you to know, Intentwise, what you're doing, before you can quite do them, changing the interpretation of Shardic Intent seems like it would be near the top of a list of those. Dalinar, without knowing that his god is a Shard of Adonalsium who assigned the Intent of Honor to an ambiguous fragment of the original god, managed to reimagine his god as if it were Unity and not Honor? All he knows about that Shard, without even knowing that it is a Shard, is that it is known as Honor. Now, you might say, well, did Sazed even know, explicitly, enough to reinterpret Shardic Intent, when he became a Vessel? However, Sazed was in a substantially different position. He was not reinterpreting an already-given Intent, but assigning an interpretation to an emerging Intent. Every Intent has to be interpreted, so in the original case of the Shard being taken up in the first place, that vacuum has to be filled. But once filled, it becomes more a decision, what its interpretation will continue to be. Either you can try to hold on to the interpretation, or you can let the Shard reinterpret you, so to speak. Anyway, Sazed, as a Feruchemist, was used to thinking of his power in terms of a balance of Ruin and Preservation, so assigning the interpretation of Harmony to the Intent of his new di-Shard, would have been a natural cognitive move for him to make. Dalinar, by contrast, would have to rather self-consciously believe that Unity was what Honor was "supposed" to be, and so on, in a situation where he doesn't even know that Honor as a Shard can "supposedly" be anything but what it is, as such. This all brings up the second major condition of the argument, which is the massive difference between the Unity-Honor alternative, and the Harmony-Discord alternative. Unity and Honor would be reciprocal. Harmony and Discord, however, are opposites. Unity can be conceived of as a kind of Honor, or Honor as a kind of Unity, but Harmony is not a kind of Discord. Let's say, Harmony and Discord are on the same level of complexity, whereas Unity is a less complex concept than Honor. It seems as if the Intent of Honor already contained the Intent of Unity within its own interpretation as such, whereas interpreting the Intent of Ruin + Preservation as Harmony excludes simultaneously interpreting it as Discord. Granted, we're talking about the difference between a monadic and a dyadic Shard, with different preambles, but together with everything else considered so far, I'd say that, "I am Unity," has a virtually zero percent chance of being an expression of Shardic reinterpretation on Dalinar's part.

That's because not every Shard has capital-P Purposes. There's almost no way Odium was talking about Honor when Dalinar said, "I am Unity." First, Honor, as Tanavast, was not restored. Tanavast is perma-dead. So the "you!" in, "We killed you!" doesn't refer to Tanavast. Did the Shard of Honor have its own mind, aside from Tanavast's, when Odium Splintered it? That's the only way, even vaguely, that "you!" could refer to a Shard as whatever Dalinar was invoking/summoning. But now it really doesn't appear as if Dalinar picked up enough of Honor's Investiture, to become a Shard. I could see him being a Sliver, like the Lord Ruler, but not an outright Shard. However, if only part of Honor's Investiture was "picked up," then "you!" still wouldn't be able to refer to the whole Shard, so not the whole-Shard-as-Unity. And Rayse might be foolish in various ways, but I think he would be able to tell if Dalinar had actually picked up an entire Shard of Honor/Unity. For that matter, we don't even know if the Shard of Honor can be reforged. So the likelihood of "Unity" being a Shard is fairly low.

Well, if not every Shard has Purposes, then not by doing something to their Purposes. Whatever he did to Aona and Skai was different, on some level or at some stage, from what he did to Ambition, and what he did to Ambition was different from what he did to Honor (at least, it seems like Honor didn't have a chance to run away). Remember, the only scene we've been given, in the entire Cosmere saga to date, of one Shard destroying another, is the scene where Vin destroys Ruin. So the mechanics of inter-Shardic violence are very obscure for us.

So, one of those great paradoxes: if the Shards are everywhere and if the Vessels are "in" the Spiritual Realm, why do we see them fixated in certain regions of space? One explanation: Investiture-as-substance vs. Investiture-as-attribute: the substantial form assigned to each Shard varies in density across space, though the degree of assignment remains Spiritual in magnitude across all cases (except with respect to Devotion and Dominion, say). However, I think there's more to it, something else Realmatic. Shards Invest in worlds. But what is it to "Invest in" a world? When we say such a thing IRL (although not of worlds, so much, usually, as relationships or countries or projects or whatever), we mean that we make it part of our life-story, or we make ourselves part of its life-story, or both, or whatever along these lines. In the Cognitive Realm, it is usually planets that have complex corresponding regions. The Cognitive Realm is absolutely relevant to story-theoretic existence since a story would be a sequence of cognitive representations, Spiritually Connected though to be sure. In any event, I think the reason the Shards often "gravitated towards" already-populated areas was because those areas had a narrative actuality and potential that empty interstellar space generally is lacking in. (Of course some Shard seems to have "made its story" about outer space, and Rayse avoided Investing "too much" in any given world until, maybe, Braize.) Maybe this was even a contributing factor in so many violating the no-team-up agreement: there just weren't enough pre-existent living worlds to Invest in, and the only way to create a whole living world was to team up anyway, so... [I do still wonder why Tanavast claims to be the creator of humankind, at the end of WoK.]

Unity is one of Honor's Purposes. To Splinter Honor, Odium apparently had to "kill" Honor's Purposes. So far, then, at least as per the scene in question, Dalinar has "resurrected" one of the Ten Purposes. If he "resurrects" all of them, this might lead him to take up the Shard of Honor as a whole, but whether this will be so has been RAFO'ed consistently, and strenuously. For all those who see "Unity" as way off Tanavast's mindset, or just a minor subset of a possible mindset of his, or whatever: this is not so, for it was Tanavast who (indirectly) commanded Dalinar: "Unite them." When Dalinar says, "I am Unity," he is expressing his role as the fulfillment of that commandment.

... in my opinion, anyway. "Did you just try to prove the existence of God using your cleavage?" = one of the best questions in any story for all of time Rando theorizing, I wonder if the ratio of the Heightening numbers is significant. Granted, the numbers individually aren't exact, but... 1 : 4 : 12 : 20 : 40 : 70 : 100 : 200 : 400 : 1000 More like rando hypothesizing, I guess.

Hmm... Raoden + Susebron = Raobron, Suseden Raoden + Elend = Raond, Eloden Raoden + Adolin = Radolin, Adoden Adolin + Elend = Eleolin, Adoend Adolin + Susebron = Susolin, Adobron Kaladin + Susebron = Kalabron, Susedin Kaladin + Elend = Kalalend, Elaladin Kaladin, Adolin, Susebron, Elend, Raoden = Kaladosuseleraoden = Adonalsium [I wonder if Sanderson ever makes up new character names by shuffling parts of preexistent characters' names around :P]

Soulcasting: Change You Can Believe In

As per WoBness, we've not quite seen Voidbinding. Ispo facto, when we've seen Dustbringer magic, we've not seen Voidbinding. Nevertheless, it might still be possible for Dustbringers to be using Voidlight that has somehow been hacked---using Voidlight is not the same as Voidbinding (which presumably uses "Voids" like Surgebinding uses Surges).

If so, we will have established that characters whose names begin with "M" and end in "sh" are always subject to a compadre::shill-for-evil::redeemed character arc.

Find out how many licks it takes to get to the lerasium-bead center of a Leras-pop.

No one. I want a pacifist resolution to the defining fantasy saga of our generation. Miyazaki FUBARed the end of the Nausicaa graphic novels and I'm still waiting for my spiritual restitution *grits teeth*

My remaining theory about the similarity between Shards and Calamity was that an "ancient" (like, who knows, 12-year-old Sanderson) prototype for Calamity, was also a prototype for a Shard. While there's an obscure semantic manipulation of the WoB that allows this theory to remain possible, taken at face value, the WoB disproves my theory. Take that, myself-as-of-yesterday!

Whilst rereading part of WB this morning, I came across Vivenna complaining about noticing smells more acutely, or something, and she qualifies this not as a smell-related version of perfect pitch, but as a sort of atmospheric aftereffect of holding extra Breath. Since smelling and tasting are similar, I suppose whatever this implies for the one, it suggests for the other.

Maybe. Michael and the Empty are candidates, too (though Ruin = the Empty, probably).

One aspect of the "theory" that underscores my Riphean storyline is the idea that the number of space dimensions can change over time. https://phys.org/news/2011-03-physicists-dimensions-universe.html gives an overview of such a notion within mainstream physics research. One distinction with respect to the Riphean cosmos, or the IRL cosmos if my "theory" applies here too, is that time is not 1-dimensional. https://bigthink.com/philip-perry/there-are-in-fact-2-dimensions-of-time-one-theoretical-physicist-states overviews a 2D-time theory. The philosopher Kant has this to say about the subject (he acknowledges the abstract possibility of higher-dimensional time elsewhere in the first Critique but only describes a possible consequence as follows): This is similar to: And in fact the "prequel" concept for the story of Ripheus rests on a version of the physical universe where time is infinite-dimensional, where every successive set of three time dimensions constitutes a "plane of existence" in the D&D or Magic: TG sense. However, this version of the cosmos is internal to a fictional domain on an interior plane of the prequel narrative itself; the actual world of the narrative is not supposed to be ordered according to such a planar manifold. However, Kant also says that there is a form of space that is given as the permanence of substance in time (as part of the same Analogy of Experience). As per my "theory," this is the inflaton field. Fields in general are derivative of the Third Analogy of Experience (of the community of causality in substances), in terms of a rejoinder to Hilbert's 6th problem (regarding the axiomatization of physics). The idea is that at t = 0, there is one type of particle, which is a particle of pure time, called a "kairon" in honor of one of the Greek words for time. The kairon's activity is dimensionalization of space, i.e. as the kairon field is excited, space increases in dimensionality. The manifold of dimensionalization corresponds to the Planck and adjunct epoch "phase changes" of the inflatonic cosmos, but so far I have not come up with an a priori barrier between general dimensionalization pressure, and the seeming finite number of dimensions the universe exhibits. Indeed, following the "Copernican" principle underwriting contemporary multiverse speculation, and the assumption that time is actually infinite-dimensional at the limit, it would seem rather as if space ought to be increasing in dimensionality always, to approach the kaironic limit. Where does this really bear on the story of Ripheus? So far, I'm not sure. As I said in the thread about the "economies," some of the economies are indefinite, which here translates to expanding,* which fits nicely into the Kantian/kaironic framework at play. However, some of the economies are supposed to be finite, and some infinite, and there's even a "fixed" spatially 2-dimensional subplanar form of reality "behind the scenes" to an extent. Without going off a pure deontic-metrodynamic grounding for the physical structure of the economies, I'm not sure I can easily justify these descriptions. *Kant actually says that past time itself is also indefinitely ranging, so that the Big Bang would not have been the absolute beginning of history, as on Kant's view there is no such thing as an absolute beginning to history. Perhaps we could imagine oscillating spatial dimensionalization, so that we are currently inhabiting a phase of the universe in which it has increased to 3 (or however many) spatial dimensions?

I gave you an upvote but I will also disagree, Amara = Cultivation!!!

Truest words ever spoken by Sanderson.

Proof: Sanderson went to the Nightwatcher and asked to be able to write all the stories he had ever thought of. The curse is that all the stories are secretly the same story.

Well, I personally happen to think that Christianity is true.* As far as the saga of Ripheus goes, there's an implied argument that if the IRL audience were to look at the story of Earth, they'd recognize that Christ is the main protagonist in the story. Since Earth is not actually fictional, then... But on another level, the Trinity is supposed to exist in the Riphean cosmos as such, under the title of "the Game, the Joke, and the Test" (these are the words used to refer to the three divine persons), because the Trinity is a necessary being and so exists in all possible worlds. I guess one way to look at the use of Christian imagery, here, is as a balance between Narnia on one hand, and His Dark Materials on the other. So not quite dismissive, but also not quite orthodox. (There's actually an entirely other level of the narrative having to do with a video game I want to design and a series of films I would hope to be able to direct someday, in which the philosophical subtext in each representation in each medium, adds up to an IRL argument in which the concept of the Holy Spirit plays an integral role, but 'tis another story for another time... I will say, though, that I am going in part off a harmonization of, "Let your light so shine..." and, "Do not let one of your hands know what the other is doing...": the first refers to storytelling in which virtue ("your light," the ability a priori to imagine light itself, as a pure symbol of free will and hence the substrate of all grace and virtue) is described "before everyone, that they may see [in their minds' eyes] good works and then glorify the Lord" whereas the second refers to actual external behavior.) *EDIT: Or, specifically, I think the following propositions, among others, are true: The doctrine of the Trinity is true. The doctrine of the two natures of Jesus Christ is true (and Christ existed, He is not a myth). Although the Bible is not inerrant or completely unique as "the word of God," it is being used by God in a special way, across history. EDIT 2: The 4! sequences that define the economies are derivative of the concepts of punishment, apologizing, forgiveness, and redemption. These are all under the heading of the concept of amendment. The categories can be put into orders of priority, and some orders of priority are closer to the ideal than others. Each phenomenal economy is defined in relation to one of these orders. There is a "shadow" form of each order, in each phenomenal history, in which the places of each concept can be switched, so that economies that start out from the worst starting point, so to speak, can improve. In relation to the IRL world, the idea is that there is a Song of the Order in the IRL world, and Jesus Christ was the one man empowered to "play the Game of the Order" and rearrange the transcendental priorities. His final enemy ("the last enemy to be vanquished") is Death, which is Destruction, or the Destroyer, Apollyon, who represents the priority of retribution (I am... well for now the best way I can put it is "trans-universalist" about salvation). (The priority of retribution is intuitively evil also in that it empirically leads to totalitarianism, which is the state of absolute political power over the means of destruction; this is known as "retributive tyranny" since it is only punishment, of the categories of amendment, that physically requires some people to have political power over others.) EDIT 3: I found some interesting information about icositetragons, namely their relevance to the concept of a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrie_polygon which indicates that 24-sided figures have something of an intuitive "bridging" role in geometry. There's also something about a tessellation (I think it's a tessellation) involving a triangle, an octagon, and an icositetragon, which fits the mechanical aspects of the interplanar system of the economies (there's a simultaneous reality, "below" the 3-dimensional forms of the cosmos, that consists in an infinite expanse of triangles; and on the "higher" side of existence the 24 worlds can be juxtaposed with special sets of eight of these [there's a reason for the universes in which the Septatheon have appeared, being those universes: there are eight finite, eight indefinite, and eight infinite universes, and the Septatheon occupy seven of the eight infinite worlds, with an eighth entity of their nature being manifested [this is a subplot of the entire saga] in the eighth infinite world]). Rankings of the planes: Noumenal plane [the Eternal City, and the university of the Noumenal Artificers] 24-fold phenomenal cosmos <The Islands [a region of space that stochastically shifts from one economy to another]> Triangle-scape [loop-keyed to the noumenal plane, for the Keyscape] & the incomplete musical worlds Demiplane of Apollyon (the anti-song) EDIT 4: In relation to 24-sided things, http://mathworld.wolfram.com/SmallTriakisOctahedron.html provides this interesting image: I'm trying to come up with a visual for the creation of the Keyscape and I believe this structure will play a role... Also this: EDIT 5: Regarding deontic-modal complementarity This is an axiom of the system that says, out of different possible geometries satisfying the metaphysical parameters (simplicity, tessellation, etc.), those are to be selected as truly fundamental, that correspond to the symmetry that obtains between the diagrams of deontic and modal logic. For an indicator as to how complex these diagrams can get, I submit the following (which is from Alessio Moretti's work): [The objective relevance: going purely off simplicity + tessellation, say, we would suppose that the fundamental unit of matter/field excitation, in three spatial dimensions, was cube-shaped. This is because cubes are the simplest structures that independently tessellate 3-space. However, starting with deontic logic, we would derive a tetrahedron and an octahedron (there is a precise reason for this), and then take note of the tetrahedral-octahedral manifold, as an alternative, relatively simple tessellation, and posit this of physical 3-space. Narrative relevance: in the symmetrical story (not that of Ripheus&c., but the universe storywise corresponding, externally, to his, in the tri-media meta-argument), one of the major factions during the pivotal war, "hacks into" the "programming" of the universe, to avail themselves of cubes of fundamental destructive force; they hack these into existence, that is, by messing with the principle that tessellates the universe in the first place.]

Aluminum is a popular topic on this website, such that there is a secret subforum here called "the Aluminum Shard," accessible only to Alumancers. J/k but go to the Arcanum and search for "aluminum," you'll be rewarded.

I have an IRL theory about the words "Abaddon/Apollyon" in the Bible, that prompted me to use the word "Apollyon" to refer to a mysterious, superpowerful entity in the story of Ripheus. Since the word means "the Destroyer" and the entity in this story is the equivalent of the Platonic Form of Destruction, it fits at least to that extent. I've toyed with the idea of the entire sage being titled Ripheus et Apollyon since their battle with each other forms the ultimate problem of the saga, although this wouldn't be clear until the actual final confrontation in the last entry in the story (I don't know how long it would be although I've wished I could come up with enough material to cover 24 entries). Also, in the story of Ripheus, Earth itself is "just" the most popular fictional world in history.* Ripheus was not born from actual parents but somehow materialized from out of the fiction of Earth (he is the man-of-justice from lost Troy---actually it turns out that Apollyon is supposed to redeem Itself and had the power to create something from nothing, and did use this power to create Ripheus, who is therefore Its "Son," but that's a thematic element I haven't developed enough yet). But this means that the religious content of the story of Earth, represents subconscious forces at work in actual transcreation. For example, Ripheus and his friends created something known as the Keyscape in order to make access to magic more egalitarian, but far in the future seven people known as the Septatheon "hacked" the Keyscape to become quasi-divine beings. An agent of the cosmic police who is investigating the Anomalies is supposed to find a correlation between the seven-headed Beast from the Sea in the legend of the Book of Revelation, and the Septatheon, in that the seven heads represent seven false moral theories and each Septumvir "hacked" the magic system using a false, or at least incomplete, moral theory (the entire system runs off ethics). Later (much later), Ripheus is supposed to be inspired by the prophecy of the Tears of Esau, to sacrifice himself to something called "the Sea Alone," the prophecy being from the Earth-story and going, "When the last of the tears of Esau have been shed [when the quantity of suffering in history has reached a specific number], the Messiah will come." (Ripheus thinks this means that he needs to hurt himself so much that his pain satisfies the parameters of the quantum of suffering; I still haven't come up with a reason why he thinks this will work, though, as far as stopping the Anomalies goes.) [*Indeed, there's supposed to be a prequel novel, In the Name of Reality, where the story of Earth is introduced. The main layer of the novel, then, involves people on some world known as Co'ovantica, trying to avert a nuclear-like war, by creating a theatrical production in that world, to inspire the people of that world into redeeming themselves. So they come up with the story of Earth, and there's supposed to be a scene near the end where entities known as the Valoquescent are confronting an evil known as the Host of the Sindred-heartened, and when all seems lost the Messiah appears and explains to the other characters that the Trinity prepared for this day long ago, setting in motion a plan to defeat the Sindred-heartened, who upon being defeated kneels before the Messiah. (Peter and Melchizedek are also supposed to show up, or I mean among others, I have specifically designed scenes in which they appear.)] Re: supertasks: I am slightly familiar with the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on the topic, and although there are examples of mathematical handwavium I could employ to solve the narrative problem, I'm under the constraint that I can't have the Anomalies spilling over everything too quickly, so (almost?) any solution that fits into that constraint is fine for now.

As part of https://www.17thshard.com/forum/topic/73129-an-incoherent-problem/ I have the system of that cosmos as a 24-universe multiverse. There are also a demiplane and a transcendental plane. The 24-fold order is given from a set of 4! concepts, which are represented as music-like structures with cosmological narrative value. In short, each of the 24 universes is like a story unto itself, under the heading of the story of the multiverse. The totality of planes is transcreation as a set of "places." (There is also transcreation-the-activity.) Now, one of the core themes/problems of the story is that of the Anomalies, which are distortions in the fundamental factual relationships of things in these worlds. For example, one Anomaly would be laughing in place X at time Y causing otherwise unrelated event Z (say, laughter in said realm spontaneously causing water to burst from sculptures therein, on a given day of the local week). Think the SCP Foundation (http://www.scp-wiki.net/) merged with something like the Cosmere. A subproblem of the Anomalies is: someone or something threatening to accelerate their spread. Indeed, the idea that the Anomalies might intensify across transcreation so as to dissolve all knowable reality, is the danger that motivates the primary character-antagonist (Vyrian Armirex) to risk the awakening of the Song of Destruction, the Dirge of Apollyon, so as to fix the source of the Anomalies by a convoluted anti-ontological "proof" involving Apollyon's transdestructive might. However, my first notion of the universes in question was of infinite expanses. So how would the Anomalies ever grow to devour all of an infinite set of infinite sets of facts? My idea now is to have the "phenomenal economies" (the individual universes, where "phenomenal" is Kantian parlance and "economies" is a close application of obscure Catholic theological vocabulary) differ in size based on the categories of "metafinity." Qualitatively, the relations would be finite, indefinite, infinite, and transfinite (where the last is technically, and exactly, only the absolute aleph-number of Cantor's paradise). Now the phenomenal economies, due to the Kantian restriction on infinite synthesis of empirical magnitudes, cannot be transfinite in themselves. Accordingly, some are finite (but unbounded, due to other Kantian restrictions), others indefinite (expanding or contracting or both, or whatever), or infinite (but as a result difficult to access for normal mortal beings). So, the Anomalies can, by repeated appearance, slowly but steadily overtake the finite economies. If their rate of intensification outstrips the expansion of the indefinitely expansive universes, then they can eventually devour those universes too. The trick is to come up with a mechanism for them to consume the totality of the infinite realms. What I'm thinking of is that once the Anomalies fully suffused the finite economies, their rate of increase in the indefinite ones would reach the degree at which they expand over those ones entirely, and once those are "taken care of," the rate of increase in the infinite universes itself becomes infinite. Like water filling up three different reservoirs by overflow from one to another, so to speak.

I was confused, Shallan only mentions them together, but doesn't say anything about them being conflated.