Ripheus23

I'm mainly wondering how Sel is supposed to be the "most Realmatically aware" world or whatever. I'm guessing this has much, maybe even mostly, to do with the Ire and their knowledge, plus at least inside its walls, Elantris' magic system seems pretty/potentially OP. So the Ire might somehow know more about Realmatics than most in Silverlight, in the spren cities of Shadesmar, among the Nalthis Returned, and so on and on. This interests me: what did they see, long ago, what did they participate in, that enlightened them so dramatically?

I'd have to work out a stronger theory about how Sel's Cognitive Realm was back then. Right now I have a weak image of just, "Something sorta like the spren having cities in Rosharan Shadesmar," and then I would want to consider if there were seons and skaze, or precursors to those, at that time, with different spheres of political influence, different relationships with the Ire and possible other groups, etc. I also think that the Moon Scepter could function as a "glyph" for Sel's whole moon, with some AonDor-ish applications, and I loved the talk years back about possible "Shardmoons," so it'd be interesting to know how Sel's moon was before the Dor, over on the Cognitive side. Maybe there's a whole lunar civilization, or something like in FF8, going on there.

The only major W&T connect-up has to do with the account of Stormseat's ruin. So, it seems from WoBs and what that Rayse took advantage of something going on between Aona and Skai, to accomplish his goal on Sel, possibly with the "help" of Autonomy. Let's say that the non-hierarchic mindset of Devotion conflicted with Dominion-as-pro-hierarchy, but also with Autonomy vs. the concept of Iso-nomy, which is a similar political concept but with a special emphasis on public equality instead of private authority over oneself. What I would mean then is: the Cognitive side of Selish politics was a major arena of the conflict. We've seen the Ire there in Shadesmar, Sanderson says the only major cosmere faction he wants to still introduce has to do with Threnody (and might be the Night Brigade???), so let's say that the Ire, or their progenitors at least, already had a good-sized political system set up in the Cognitive Realm of Sel, and were divided into factions, say two or three, with two being aligned strongly with either specifically of the local Shards and the third aiming for balance or neutrality. Somehow, the process of this ancient Selish Shadesmar war is what got Aona and Skai killed, why the Ire are so surpassingly knowledgeable (they have scientific records of processes that resulted in the deaths of two Shards and their translocation to Shadesmar as the Dor), etc. More particularly, what if the city of Elantris was itself created in a way mystically comparable to what happened to Stormseat? Because Sanderson has said, contrariwise: So instead, what I would mean is that maintaining a city like Elantris was a Physical manifestation of the very process that dragged the corpses of the Selish Shards into Shadesmar; and then that the endurance of Elantris inversely echoes the desolation of Stormseat by the conflict of Shardic tones. Sanderson also says: So the thinking would have to be more like, "Something about the Ire, about the place in Shadesmar that corresponds to Elantris, etc. was a conduit for the later process." Like if Elantris itself descended into factional conflict, along Aona-vs.-Skai lines, as a spillover from, or itself spilling over into, the hypothetical Shadesmar war there. Kind of like an inverted trope of Shadar Logoth from The Wheel of Time, I guess.

So that would be like some of the numbers coming from indirect/algebraic functions. From Wikipedia, all I could find for 10 by itself was: The Mathematics Stack Exchange has some fun info about the game "4 = 10." However, there is also "mystical" significance attached to 10 historically, per Wikipedia again there.

An example from the Arcanum: I think somewhere in the Arcanum/according to the Coppermind, they mention that Rayse's plan to prevent Dominion and Devotion Shards from "returning to life" has not proven as successful as he wished.

Not all the Shards are said to be have "sacred numbers" for themselves, though. And it doesn't seem that Honor was "the tenth Shard," but rather that he already liked that number, and this played into his attitude towards the Rosharan system, which already featured the number 10 so prominently. If the Shards formed simultaneously, rather than by being drawn one-by-one from Adonalsium, listing them as 1-through-16 would be arbitrary labeling, too. And consider the possibility that e.g. Ruin, if he got a special number, might've gotten a special number like 0, or even a negative integer, for all we know, to reflect destructiveness (though I did see a theory here that his number might be 8, as "16 divided by 2," with division taking the place of destruction, which we see also with Surgebinding, incidentally). EDIT: what would possibly make the most sense is if each Shard got a definitive function assigned to it, and sometimes this function does uniquely compute to a specific number. Like if Ruin got "leave nothing" = anti-everything:: zero, and Preservation got "sustain everything" = all, then we have the antithesis of all-and-nothing turn into an opposition of 0 and 16, or 8 and 16, or whatever along those lines. But maybe Autonomy got a pure variable x, which can take on any numerical signifier, etc.

When Ishar helped in a major way with the emergence of the Orders, alongside being the one to gate humanity from Ashyn to Roshar by other, prior great power: for all that, did he subconsciously, or even consciously, embed a "subroutine" into the Orders, whereby those who attained the highest excellence were granted, by the finality of their local "Ideals," the opportunity to partake of another sequence of vows: i.e. the Oathpact? For that is the most of what we are shown about the importance of the final Ideals: when Szeth and Kaladin attain this state, it is in the ultimate context of Ishar finding Heraldic potential in possible new components of a reforged Oathpact. In a similar, but not identical, vein, Dalinar has the chance to participate in a vow even more powerful than those of his Order, the vow that will allow him to take on the reborn mantle of Honor. We have, as it were, a proto-mathematical "leveling" going on: Adolinesque promises The Ideals of the Knights The promissory substrate of the Oathpact The promise of Honor itself I say "proto-mathematical" because I have no sufficient textual proof, as yet, that Sanderson would even have a definite reason to organize the vow-based magic system by a fourfold leveling as such. Tradition tells us that Honor should have situated the above tiers-of-promising according to a tenfold structure. On the other hand, the long mark of Adonalsium is on the Rosharan system, and we have recurring mystical motifs involving e.g. 3 as well as 4. One would hope that it was possible for Honor to replicate, at some deep point, the fourfold manner of Adonalsium. From some "mathematics" POVs, there are many paths from 4 to 10, with different interesting functions. But, I shouldn't overcommit to the above theory. Maybe there should be 10 super-levels of promissory magic. Or five again, as a fractal mirror of the Knights maybe. Does a general argument still stand, though, that the Oathpact's "level of power" is higher than that of the Knights, but lower than that of Ascending to the Shard of Honor? So that it was possible that Ishar believed something like this, at least, and encoded it into the pattern of the Knights' system, as a way to test people across the ages in case the day came when the Heralds did at last fail at their physical task so much that new Heralds would at least have to be a live option? ADDED: partial attempt at "proof" Premise: 5 is important to Roshar just for the sake of the fact that there is an arithmetical symmetry, for 5, in terms of 10. Since symmetry is already important to Roshar as well, it follows that a number which features in a certain symmetry for the primary sacred Rosharan number, 10, would "inherit" some of the grace and value of 10 as such. So, the flip side of this is that the multiplicative such symmetry involves the number 2, which for us IRL is the fact that the meta-ketek of the Archive books/titles is divided into two major arcs, the front and back half. Therefore, the number 2 is also "Spiritually" important, here, on some level. Accordingly, the intricate mathematical relationships and functions between the numbers 2 and 4 are then unfolding in a story where 4 does have extreme importance even in the Rosharan context, i.e. because of the presence of Dawnshards there. So, it would be possible for Honor to "justify" a fourfold sequence of levels of the-power-of-vows, by reference to a pattern like that, or maybe this example itself. Corollary: is this what the spren were inspired by, then? This generalized knowledge that there were already different "tiers of power" based on Honor's commitment to binding agreements? Note also that Ishar was uniquely driven to pathological belief in his being a deity, for all his power, and maybe the Fifth Ideal Bondsmith would be the kind of candidate for replacing him. Which meant Dalinar, then, in the sense that what the Bondsmith trains to do with the godspren is prepare for the taking up of Honor's deity.

I probably don't have a good feel for the concept because I haven't read most of the "usual examples." For now I'm just wondering what relevance the concept has to Threnody and the Archive. I thought that if Retribution's new system on Roshar echoed the desecration of the environment in the second Covenant trilogy, incl. creepy rituals for gaining power, then if the second Covenant trilogy was supposedly "grimdark," then I would be wrong to predict that Retribution's system will echo the one from those other books, per my interpretation of the WoB about Threnody. Like, unfortunately, I've not read ASoIaF or the Hunger Games books. But the definitions you've listed sound reasonable, at least as reasonable as many other attempts to define peculiar notions.

I was going off an ostensive definition from "paradigmatic examples," i.e. WH40K and the Second Apocalypse books, and the claim I'd seen about the Thomas Covenant stuff. I didn't have a discursive definition in mind, so was claiming that the relative popularity/success of Bakker, Donaldson, and the WH40K showerunners was the basis for calling the ostensive definition the "standard" one. Unfortunately, then, I didn't have a "necessary and sufficient conditions" picture in mind.

I guess, for the sake of this thread's question, I would have to know what Sanderson uses the word "grimdark" for, why he might apply it to a future Threnody novel, etc. Based on the description of Ambition's MTG analogy, I get a kind of "realpolitik/Ayn Rand" vibe, here, so something like, "The Threnodite protagonists will be able to solve their problem, if at all, by expressing Ambition's Intent, in self-interested/competitive behavior vs. the Evil," though making that saga actually work would be a tall order, and maybe Sanderson would instead pull a Bakker and

When Dalinar renounced his oaths. It was so perfect that it vaporized my brain, especially when it dawned on me what that meant was about to happen.

Aside from a wonky idea about getting Retribution to create and over-Invest in a new planet, my reason for thinking they'd make Retribution happen was that Rayse would dislike being made to pick up a second Shard, then after Rayse was killed my reason was, "Taravangian wouldn't be able to handle that kind of power, he'd end up compromised like Sazed is." Also, I felt that Dalinar or Kaladin or whoever, taking up Honor and holding it, would be too much like what happened with Vin, and I assumed Sanderson wasn't going to repeat that scenario, at least not in that way.

It makes sense to me but I would've given Honor to Taravangian, too, had I been in Dalinar's position (it was what I thought he was "supposed" to do anyway). I should say, the trajectory of my theory about the endgame of the fifth book went like so: As of October 15th, 2018, I was willing to flippantly predict that Szeth and Kaladin would fight Ishar at the end of book 5, over the question of becoming new Heralds. I abandoned this prediction to wondering whether Szeth and Kaladin would figure in the contest-of-champions, though. Not much later, "Retribution" was the second name I thought an Odium-Honor di-Shard might have. I mistakenly thought, as of July 2018, that Taravangian would take up the Shard of Odium at the end of the fifth book. I later put this prediction out of my mind because I thought Rayse was the likeliest candidate for the enduring antagonist. After book four was released, I deepened my commitment to the theory that Team Dalinar would give the Shard of Honor to Odium, though the mechanics of how this would bind Odium were not what I predicted. I don't know who came up with that general theory originally, though whoever did, I agreed with them before the fourth book came out and had to rework the reasons for my agreement in light of Taravangian's Ascension, then. I was as certain as could be that Honor's power was what "certified" the contest-of-champions/older binding of Odium. So I didn't predict that Dalinar would abandon his oaths, though I should've if I expected Dalinar to give Honor's power over at the climax of the fifth book.

Sanderson's reasons for writing this story are grounded, in part, in his religious outlook. There is a whole Spiritual Realm in the cosmere, where the core presences of the Vessels of the Shards exist. So which is more Spiritually valuable, and therefore expressive of magic's nature in the cosmere? (A) having characters "level up" and get "cool new abilities" as they "unlock achievements," or (B) having characters embody Sanderson's narrative laws of magic, for example his law about when having too powerful a magic system means that you should make having the magic itself into the problem of the story? In The Hero of Ages, for example, Neither Dalinar nor Kaladin nor Szeth nor anyone else had need of swearing their fifth vow in the standard sequence per their Radiant Order, to accomplish anything other than the Spiritual things they accomplished thereby, even in rejecting the promise of their vows in the selfsame deed. In fact, given the role of the Spiritual Realm in the logic of all the magic systems in the cosmere, it follows that the process of rising in power, from one vow to another, would be mirrored in an ascent from outward Physical power, through inner Cognitive power, up into the sphere of Spiritual Light par excellence. You want to know what abilities Kaladin, Szeth, and Dalinar got by reaching their ultimate ideals? The chance to do the unique acts of power that they engaged in, from helping generate a new di-Shard to overcoming the darkness of the Heralds. Unrepeatable moments of glory and transcendence, not mere "moves in a clever game." EDIT: in the case of e.g. Szeth, what opportunity did swearing his fifth vow give him? Well, it gave him a great influx of sheer power. Probably more power than would be compacted otherwise into a singular maneuver or even set of maneuvers. His "skill-set portfolio" would not be determinately extended, but the sheet of paper would read "and he suddenly gained the ability to do so many mighty things that it would be pointless to confine the list of them to a few scant options." However, then, and especially from the narrative angle, the sensible thing was to renounce his oaths, because that was a way to exert control over his enormous new power, to signature effect. This is why the story has Adolin dwell on the philosophical difference between promises and oaths, why Honor thinks that oaths involve abstract mathematical order somehow/are expressions of this somehow, etc. Szeth "becomes" his own law: then he turns the power of this law upon itself, tests itself against itself, like a logician trying to figure out, "This sentence is false."

I think one of the messages/lessons of W&T is that the system of gaining more and more power through oaths was so deeply flawed that surrendering such power was ultimately better than keeping it, at least in some contexts/to some extent. Sanderson wasn't trying to do a lore dump for "what if so-and-so fought such-and-such" scenarios, that arguably would've been spiritually immature of him. Think of it like the classical theory of Jesus: having the status of God Incarnate but sacrificing so much even so. Reaching Jerusalem, proclaimed king: then just letting it go. Would that storyline have made more sense/been better had Jesus fulfilled the old vision of the Messianic prophecies and used his immense might to liquidate the Roman occupiers and their collaborators in the holy city?

Hmm, that makes referring to the Covenant books as "grimdark before the fact" potentially quite inaccurate, then, since there's always hope somewhere in those books, too. Ironically, there's a spell of dark energy in the second Covenant trilogy that's literally named "the Grim," though I wonder then if we're being told that the second Threnody novel, or at least the relevant story however it ends up being told (indirectly through other books maybe), will have a borderline "the Big Bad wins" outcome. So far, in the Second Apocalypse, Thank you! I was having a hard time figuring out how to Google the MTG info I was looking for, didn't seem to be getting any detailed/official results.

The Coppermind says that a future Threnody novel might be the closest thing Sanderson will write to a "grimdark" book. Maybe a peculiar definition of "grimdark" is in play, IDK, I was trying to find out what a "mono-black" deck in MTG would be since the Coppermind also mentions that Ambition's deck would be mono-black, I saw a list of affiliated themes/tribes that includes vampires, so I guess undead stuff, which fits to Threnodite shenanigans well enough, except also to the Fused, so... ... yet for all that, will neo-Roshar not be so grim, not be so dark, after all, despite the Night of Sorrows? The phenomenon of praying to Retribution for Warlight reminds me of how, in the second Covenant novels, And the second such trilogy has been called "grimdark before the term was coined" IIRC. I mean, the bridge-running scenario in WoK was pretty grimdark, wasn't it? My go-to examples of the genre would be either WH40K, or the Second Apocalypse books, which aren't too far off from WoK, or OB for that matter (isn't murdering children and your own wife by fire pretty grim/dark??? though see about Peter Orullian's work, which I guess Sanderson knows since Orullian was listed in one of Sanderson's acknowledgements somewhere, I think for OB or something no less*). So is there a nonstandard definition of "grimdark" in effect, or will Roshar be less dismal than it seems like it will be from our current vantage? I kinda wonder if what was meant was something more like, "The future Threnody book will be an example of the horror genre," and an off-key word was used in the anticipation instead. * * * * * *I.e.,

Tangent, but I'll see your crackpot theory and raise you a hopefully worse one: when Odium fought Ambition, he was wounded in a way that played into the making of at least some of the Unmade. Generally, he became Connected to the fact that he had murdered Uli Da, and the Deepest Ones on Threnody are, in fact, the Deepest Ones from Roshar. The reason being that, w.r.t. the Shadow-substrate of the Fused, sometimes the circuit that runs the makay-im to Roshar, from Braize, "short circuits" and transfers the Shadow, through Odium's Connectivity/Spiritweb, to Threnody instead. Going back to the matter of the Unmade: the Evil is an effluence of Midnight Essence, related to if not caused by Re-Shephir, and the Unmade are not only the Ringwraith/Forsaken counterparts in the Archive, but all the meta-series

Premise (guess/assumption): there's still a ketek in play, only it's folded in on itself, like the double-eye of the Almighty, and zig-zags on the inside for each set of the three middle books per five-book period. Rules: "H" can be used at any relevant point, the prepositions/connectives don't count. So: WK WR OB (I say this because I can't come up with any good words that start with "O" that would make for a good book-8 title except maybe "Origins," like if someone goes to the Origin) RW WT TW, or HW, or TH WR (flips RW for (4), but also copies over from (2)), or HR, or WH BO, or HO, or BH HW (I'm set on this one using the "H"-rule) KW, HW again, or KH So in total the ketek is acronymed as WKWROBRWWT::TWWRBOHWKW Argument for (9): it's Taln's flashback book (I think???), he's the Herald of War, (4) was Rhythm of War, so (9) = Herald of War Guess for (10): something about kings, Heralds, Honor, or wind, like The King of the Wind maybe 'cuz Kaladin and Co. save the world. If (9) is Herald of War, I'd not expect (10) to have the word "Herald" in its title, though. General counterargument: would someone write an in-world book about Taln, though? Or Kaladin again? We already have Knights of Wind and Truth as an in-world book, would be kinda odd to duplicate that vs. WT/KW, unless the multiple-symmetries idea holds that deeply.

The year is 2072. Sanderson has finally finished MBE7 with the help of time-dilation technology that allows him to write more books than it was thought he'd be able to. He has altered his intended plotlines so many times in so many ways, thrown out so many red herrings and retconned so many alleged or plain inconsistencies, that both every theory and no theory about the cosmere has some evidence for it, in some sense or other, by now. He has even changed his mind about time travel, believing himself to have found a way to write plausible time-travel shenanigans. But there are those on the 17th Shard who still think that theories about the cosmere are to be judged the way scientific theories are, as absolutely "falsifiable by evidence," even when the evidence base can mutate unexpectedly, when the number of planned books can keep ballooning indefinitely, or contracting (except with the dilation tech, of course, Sanderson found time to write every book he ever wanted to, and then some), even when the very scale of the cosmere itself has changed again and again, from a possible multiverse to a small galaxy to a small star cluster, back to a whole galaxy and then a confirmed multiverse created by enough people in the cosmere believing in other universes. More seriously, though, the fact that the content of any series of books by a living author can be revised ex post facto, and that in the decades it will take for such content to be finalized in the endgame of a series the author might change their mind about various things, does kind of testify against taking crackpot theorizing too seriously, from either a supportive or a critical angle. For example, we might find out that Koravellium Avast herself is not much of a long-term schemer, all things considered, but that her Shard has been developing its own mind and did have elaborate conspiracies in play all along, etc. EDIT: and Kor's Shard having its own feelings/goals here would be like Tanner's having such, but in Magic: The Gathering it's not about playing a totally new card every time, it's more about the order you play your cards in. And card games are notorious for having practically unrepeatable hands that can be dealt, and series-of-moves-played (aren't there something like 52! ways to arrange the Hoyle-style deck?).

IIRC, five is important relative to Endowment. But I don't know that this is confirmed to be in the way that nine is important to Odium and ten is to Honor, etc. Hmm. A good candidate now for a Retributionblade, then, though...

Hmm, I would counter, though, with: getting Nightblood into position to strike Rayse took a certain effort, and I wonder that Taln would have been given to manifest in the Spiritual Realm in the appropriate way? I also find it weird that, in the scenes we get with Cultivation, she never seems to indicate anything relevant to what happened with Taln long ago. She either forgave him early on, or found his attempt too inconsequential to be more than amusing, like a little ant bite or something maybe. At any rate, she doesn't seem overtly worried about Taln eventually trying again. So she has a reason for this, and one reason for this might be that Taln's own attitude changed back then, like whatever made him upset enough with her to attack her was something he got over to a good enough extent. So, it seems possible that the method of attack was tied to the kind of opportunity Taln thought he had. He had every reason to be incensed enough with Odium to go after that Shard had he the means to go after any. Ditto for Honor. So why Cultivation instead? Wild guess: something about the Night's fading from Roshar tugged at Taln, due to his Spiritual sense of Stone (i.e. the predisposition to his patronage of the Stonewards). The role of the Nightwatcher in the drama of the departing Night made him mind something about what was possible in this context. If Taln knew of the boon/bane principle, might he have tried to use the Nightwatcher to kill Cultivation, by performing a sort of "reverse word-trickery genie" maneuver on her? I know the lore says that there's no "make sure you word it right" rule in effect, in actuality, but do we know whether everyone has always known this? Maybe Taln, at that time, thought that the Nightwatcher was tricky to deal with. But that doesn't need to be the point: we could say just, "The trickery was on Taln's end, this idea he might've had that he could ask the Nightwatcher to destroy Cultivation, or perhaps even ask Cultivation to do this herself. He might've overestimated the mandate of the giving of boons and banes, mistakenly conceiving that the Nightwatcher (or Cultivation) had to do such a thing," or even more indirectly, "He might've thought to ask for something that he thought would lead to his goal."

So are there the ten Honorblades and the one Honorspear? But then eleven "Honorweapons" in some relevant sense? Here's some Coppermind lore: Suppose, for the sake of crackpottery, that the Honorspear can interface with the Oathgates to access this "eleventh factor" or whatever. Or, I mean, might there be a previous "eleventh Honorweapon" too, but which was destroyed in abstract counterpart to Jezrien's future destruction (and in spite of not being his Honorblade, after all, beforehand, but a currently unknown, unWoBed weapon)? At least, are there any other Rosharan/Archive contexts in which eleven is important in the way that nine and ten are, on different terms though then?

I think it's somewhat strange that Odium being in a system where multiple Dawnshards were popping up was not more concerning to e.g. Endowment. Arguably, the Shards don't fully know the locations of these, though e.g. Honor/Tanavast seems to have been aware enough of them to surmise that Rosharans no longer could avail themselves of the things to fight Odium. So, I'm not sure how much the Shards are worried about the Dawnshards in general. I also don't know why they wouldn't be worried, though. Now something about Reason is getting to me: in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, he identifies reason as the "faculty" that motivates people to try to come up with all-encompassing theories of reality, to "think through infinity." So Reason in the cosmere might motivate its Vessel to try to form an all-encompassing theory of Realmatics, one that would effectively settle the question of the Beyond. (Kant says that we can't accomplish this kind of goal, though, and that the result of trying too hard to do so is "transcendental illusion.") One of the ways in which Kant's pure reason tries to compass the cosmos is by deciding the extent of space: finite or infinite. Strangely, the cosmere is not only finite but if Reason wants to hide and survive, why not leave the cosmere? If the cosmere is contiguously embedded into a galaxy, for example, rather than being mystically assembled from discontiguous regions therein, and the average galaxy has way, way, way more than 100 star systems in it, wouldn't there be more than enough space to escape to??? On the other hand, I don't know that there's a WoB saying what the true extent of the space is like outside the cosmere. I think there's something acknowledged about there being such an outside, but not how much it extends. But so let's say Reason is motivated to comprehend, not only the totality of space in the cosmere, but also of the universe into which it's embedded. Now, as of Einstein and Co., we realized that Kant's dichotomy was too limited: another option, for example, is space being finite but unbounded. Like an old-school video game where, when you go off the edge of the screen in one direction, you "wrap around" to the same angle on the opposite side of the screen; but so like that, in three dimensions instead of just two. So, what if there is a warping of the space at the "edge" of the cosmere, that has a similar effect? So that you'd have to "teleport through" the "edge" to get to the rest of the universe, which is why the Coppermind says only, "At least one person has tried to leave the physical bounds of the cosmere, with unknown results.[22][23]" I tried analyzing the thread about the secret of the Roshar map, to see if I could fit any of that into this, but no dice, I assume it's at least technically relevant but I'm not competent right now to really say why. So anyway, there are Four Antinomies of Pure Reason, of which the spatial-extent problem is the first example. Let's suppose that there's an obscure correlation between each Antinomy and each Dawnshard: The First Antinomy: the extent of space and time: either infinitely outwards and backwards, or finitely outwards and backwards. "Solution": spacetime is not absolutely real/substantial, and extends indefinitely in all directions, so neither finitely nor infinitely (in the appropriate sense). Modern update: spacetime can be finite but unbounded. The Second Antinomy: the divisibility of matter: either continuously to infinity, or with a proper "smallest scale." "Solution" (again): the divisibility of matter is "indefinite" and matter is not completely and utterly real (it's partly real, partly non-real). The Third Antinomy: the regress of cause-and-effect vs. strong free will: either there is an unbroken, unending chain of causes and effects going backwards, or there is spontaneous causality. "Solution": as above again. The Fourth Antinomy: the regress of modality, of necessity and contingency. So, either an infinite sequence of contingencies dependent on other contingencies, or a necessary source. "Solution": ibid. Offhand, modality has to do with the concept of existence (esp. as the concept of actuality, though this conflation is disputable, see e.g. the SEP entry on possible objects). Change has to do with cause-and-effect and willpower, though there is also an "argument from change" to the necessity postulate modulo the Fourth Antinomy. Anyway, then, the other two Dawnshards, if so correlated, would be for concepts pertinent to the totality of spacetime, and the divisibility of matter. If Reason held the Dawnshard correlated with the totality of spacetime, this could be relevant to the process of trying to escape the bounds of the cosmere. But what would this be? For the Dawnshards are Commands, used to create the cosmere as a totality. So I could see Adonalsium saying, "Exist," unto the cosmere, to make it exist in terms of the regress of modality; and saying, "Change," unto the cosmere, to make it change from cause to effect to cause to effect, at indefinitum. But what would be the Command for the boundaries in the extent and composition of this structure? "Extend"? "Compile"? Well, if that could be how it goes, then let's say that Reason has the Extend Dawnshard. Sidebar: one of the Dawnshards is "not like the others." Incidentally, so is one of the Antinomies, the fourth one, because this is the one that leads to the contemplation of the "Beyond" (not Kant's exact term, but equivalent in meaning to what Sanderson is talking about when he says "the Beyond" as an unknowable domain). If Hoid wants to deal with the concept of "the Beyond" in terms of bringing someone back to life or whatever we think he's thinking along those lines, and if the Exist Dawnshard were Antinomic in principle and specifically correlated with the Fourth Antinomy as such, then Hoid's is the one that's "not like the others" in that regard, maybe.

We see, from Hoid's getting zapped, that there is a danger of Dawnshards coming under some form of Shardic control. Like, that's what Hoid is doing with Sigzil then, trying to prevent his Dawnshard from falling into someone else's hands, someone under the control or influence of Retribution, or even the new Shard itself. I am willing to guess that the Change Dawnshard is the specifically most dangerous of them even "by itself." So if Reason had one, perhaps this would be one that the other Shards did not perceive as threatening. Even Exist, for Hoid and Sigzil, results in them being severely compromised as to how much Physical damage they can do. So perhaps one of the two unidentified samples covers an arguably even less potentially destructive concept, like, "Hope," or, "Believe," or who knows what. (Indeed, imagine the mystical irony of the Shard of Reason coming dually equipped with a Dawnshard of Faith, say.) In other words: it's an extremely intriguing possibility, with a huge amount of thematic potential, especially from the POV of an author with a deep religious and philosophical background. I wish I could find more evidence to back up your prediction, and maybe I'll even spend some time trying to on the Arcanum and the Coppermind. Bonus points if I can go to my own familiarity with academic philosophy, e.g. theories of reason, to try figuring out what Sanderson means to indicate about that Shard and its Vessel by giving it the Intent that he has (there's a WoB where he mentions Kant and Descartes in the same breath, for example, and Kant's layering of information/concept-types in the Critique of Pure Reason is isomorphic to the Physical/Cognitive/Spiritual/Beyond layering in Realmatics; and I think I've even seen Sanderson use explicitly technical type-theoretic language, but I'll have to double-check).