Ripheus23

Well if a physical person can take up a Shard in the first place, who knows?

My guesses: Rosharspren (the continent and/or the planet, or even the solar system) Moonspren Spacespren and timespren [although these might fall under an already-described sample]

I don't remember if someone has said this yet, but... Who will die? The readers will, waiting for SA10 (at the current rate (3 books in about 8 years) we have what, almost 18 years before the series is over?).

That's open to debate. All kinds of things are sentient/saptient/w/e, in the Cosmere, that aren't IRL. Like pure concepts (spren) or metal swords (Nightblood) or floating balls of light (Seons) or countries (on Sel) or sticks or palaces or mists and so on and on. Since a perpendicularity is made from Investiture, which is naturally conscious when condensed sufficiently or whatever, I don't see why it would be impossible for there to be a sentient/sapient/w/e perpendicularity. In fact I would rather suspect that it would be more unlikely that a perpendicularity was unconscious than not. EDIT: After all, if cakes have souls, so to speak, why not perpendicularities?

Doesn't Sanderson base the difficulty in holding Ruin and Preservation together, partly on actual chemistry? Doesn't he use the laws of thermodynamics in his overall system? Don't actual religious concepts show up in his implicit and explicit descriptions of the religious groups and forces in his story? Denying that real-world philosophy is relevant to the Cosmere seems weird to me. My impression is that Honor deals in covenants. I mean the Oathpact is a pact, after all. A rule you are bound by, by choice, is just a promise. That's what you do when you make a promise: you voluntarily place yourself under an obligation. Some obligations are just there, like, "Don't murder," but some, like marriage, are more dependent on our will. EDIT: Honor bears the weight of God's own divine valor, after all. He's way above just divorce paperwork as well as New Year's resolutions... EDIT 2: I have to admit, though, that I have not given an argument for why Sanderson would believe in the hypothetical-agreement theory of promises instead of the normative-powers one, especially since the Ideals fit to David Hume's critique of the concept of promises on the ground that a promise seems like magic, that just by sheer will you can create a new instance of the most important kind of fact in the universe. However... First, Sanderson seems well-versed in quite a lot of things. Rawls' book that I quoted is arguably the most preeminent such book in the last half-century. The exchange between Shallan and Jasnah over what the different Moralities imply about Jasnah's recent deed, showcases that Sanderson is definitely aware of the academic form of much debate in moral philosophy. Also he calls one of the Shards "Autonomy," and the idea that he would use this word with only a passing awareness of its primary meanings seems doubtful to me. Not that Autonomy is the Shard of moral autonomy at all---that would seem more like Honor, to be honest---but still, Sanderson's personal religion is highly grounded in the concept of agency, of the value (and even glory) of free will as such. More specifically, it has been observed several times that Rawls' concept of the original position bears a striking resemblance to the LDS legend of a council-before-the-creation. Not that they are the same notion in different castings, to be sure, but at any rate I feel like there's a decent chance that a professor at BYU, who is a member of a church that has major beliefs about agency, who knows a thing or two about the details of academic moral debates and terminology, might know of Rawls. That being said, the extra thing---that Sanderson is going with a Rawlsian theory of what promising depends on to "work," versus the more common-sense "a promise is truly made just whenever someone truly wills it to be so"---I have little to no evidence of, as such. The extra-extra question, whether the contest-of-champions is an institute, and whether this implicates institutionalization in Honor's power, or whatever, is not decidable on the basis of that alternative's resolution, though. Barring a near-absolute handwave on Sanderson's part, denying that Honor's power is involved in the contest-of-champions is exceedingly unlikely to be correct. The alternative is that promissory sealing is inherent in Investiture, which far from disproving my point as such, actually just makes it in a wild way, namely it amounts to claiming that the Shard of Honor is most akin to the unified power of Adonalsium himself. (This would have to be the case, because Adonalsium would have been using the most unified form of Investiture, and if the promise-binding power over the Shards (per the Ati-Leras pact or the sealing of Odium, among other things) is a holdover from Adonalsium, as it were, then Adonalsium's nature as meta-Shardic would entail that it is the power of Honor that is most like the meta-Shardic binding.)

Sanderson's metanarrative rules don't allow for too much total rando magic, though. He's said his work as such counts as "science fantasy," so it IS entirely within reason to try to square the way magic works in the Cosmere with the way physics works in our world. That's equivalent (or at least congruent) to the question IRL as to why the "stockpile of mass" in the super-early universe didn't automatically form a black hole, when as far as we know "stockpiles of mass" much less in magnitude than that of the super-early universe itself, automatically form black holes.

That's obviously not the same kind of contest of champions. It might be in a general sense, but not in the particular sense that Honor was talking about. Honor mentioned a procedure of agreement, but the mere agreement would mean nothing if there were not a principle of championship in question also. When the agreement is come to, the champions will have to explicitly claim themselves to be what they are to become, as with a speech-act. Rawls, AToJ, pg. 307: The Shard of Honor is the magical version of the "agreement in hypothetical/pure-possible space." But now whenever there are agreements that depend on magic to be "enforced," they will be routed through the Shard of Honor. Which brings me to the quasi-obvious counterargument to my major contentions throughout this thread, which I am surprised no one else has brought up until this point: if Honor is involved in all Invested promising, then would not Ruin have to be involved in all Invested destruction? Yet it does not appear as if Ruin is involved in this, does it? Of course, I've focused on Shardic agreements to temper such a meta-implication. However, I also do have a theory about that subject, too, namely that whenever a Shard was Splintered/Vessel was killed, Ruin did intertwine with the event. The test for my theory would include whether Hathsin-regrowth is relative to Shard-damage in general.

If perpendicularities have more than one attribute/property/predicate/power/function/w/e, then conceptually for sure they can be divided. Now, also, I daresay if Adonalsium could be Shattered, why not a mere perpendicularity?

Well then, here's my amended version of my theory: there is a weather phenomenon on Braize that is comparable to the highstorms, and somehow this is related to the Unmade.

My memory of that battle is rather fuzzy but I don't recall it being implicated in a divine being's being trapped by binding. The situation regarding Odium is directly caught up in issues of Honor, the Heralds, and so on, so the notion of Honor's possible champion being able to assume his role without a background institution in place seems weird to me. (Now by the way, a background institution needn't be something like a written constitution, it could be something abstractly/tacitly consented to.)

I pronounced "Kaladin" like "Saladin" (DEEN instead of DIN) until the passage in WoR where Rock's(?) pronunciation distinction is mentioned.

It was at one point. There are nine Unmade because Braize is 9-centric (per a WoB). If the Unmade were made on Roshar, there would be ten of them, so they were made, and then unmade, on Braize. Now, the Stormfather transfers Stormlight through a perpendicularity, so Ba-Ado-Mishram seems likely to transfer Voidlight through a perpendicularity. But I think all the Unmade represent aspects of Odium's Perpendicularity, so BAM is just the one who specifically represents the Physical-Spiritual vector (there'd also be a Cognitive-Physical and Cognitive-Spiritual vector, I suppose, so maybe the three highest Unmade correspond to these three vectors of the perpendicularity). Now, another premise for the theory is that the Unmade are Splinters of Odium, which I'm not sure has been confirmed (IDK if there's a WoB to this effect, and the stuff in the books themselves is ambiguous IIRC). If the Shard of Odium itself caused the perpendicularity originally, it might not be too much of a stretch to say that the perpendicularity was originally part of Odium's soul, so fragments of it would count as Splinters, I suppose.

Not at all. Red still looks red in the Cosmere. Promises still function as binding in the Cosmere. If it is by definition impossible for a promise to be binding without an institutional background, this will be so in and out of the Cosmere. Otherwise we might use the word "promise" in both contexts but we will not be using words quite so correctly as we might. Now, it might not be definitive of promises that they require an institutional background, but I suspect Sanderson might have some familiarity with the notion of institutionalization (at least in the form of divine covenants) and even if he doesn't as such, still, the contest of champions is institutional in form.

Black Sphere: explain yourself.

I got the impression that the highstorms carry partial perpendicularities with them: So my theory is that Odium had a perpendicularity for conveying Voidlight, and this was broken into the Unmade---on Braize (for there to be nine of these beings). The Unmade who can provide Voidlight does so by being the specific sub-part of Odium's Perpendicularity that bridged the "region" with Voidlight (in the Spiritual Realm) with the Physical Realm (other Unmade correspond to other attributes/parts/powers of Odium's Perpendicularity).

I think that the Beyond is where the explanation of the black sphere exists.

OMG yes

It's supposed to be a series written entirely about black spheres, where instead of page numbers it has the letters R, A, F, and O repeating until the end. There will be a character in it, who is also a location, a magic system, a god, and a theme, called "Xav."

There's always another black sphere.

Well I'm assuming promises are promises, so whatever is essential to a promise will be true of those in the Cosmere as much as in the real world. The color red has extra properties in the Cosmere, but it's still red. Likewise, promises can't exist as real things without background institutions (although see https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/promises/#NorPowVie for the hypothesis that promises can be genuinely authored by sheer fiat). And a contest is usually at least quasi-instituted, so to speak. It is a quasi-abstract structure with variables that get filled by people who are not identified by name or definite description beforehand. For example, the contest of champions doesn't presuppose that any particular person has to be a contestant. It is an institution in which people can participate without being absolutely essential to it.

"We had the wrong pronoun all along." ~ Zased

In the real world, there were several stages of what is called decoupling, when two formerly conjoined forces/fields/w/e turned into two separate ones. But there was no stage per se when the concept of matter and the concept of energy were perfectly coupled, as far as I know. It seems to me that if there was a Big Bang in the Cosmere universe, there would've been a decoupling period, though, because the division of unified substance into matter-energy-Investiture sounds similar enough to the IRL division processes. True, that's all IF the Cosmere is part of an inflated/expanding universe. However, there is some reason to believe that the laws of chemistry and so on, as we know them, wouldn't exist as they do, unless they unfolded from an inflation episode or whatever. To the extent that these laws of physics are present in the Cosmere, that's evidence that the Cosmere's encompassing universe resulted from an inflation episode.

According to John Rawls' theory of promissory duties in the actual world, promises are morally binding because of both a background institution that justifies making promises at all, and then actual use of such an institution. Honor's power forged the "institution" of the contest-of-champions, and even with the founder of the "institute" dead, the structure remains in place. So it's still Honor's power that is binding Odium, not just a mere agreement with a mere man. Promises aren't binding "just so," I guess you'd say.

I believe I'd seen speculation to this effect.

I can agree that Tanavast per se isn't still "directly involved" in Odium's binding. But I think the Shard of Honor, though severely damaged, is still powerful enough to maintain the binding of Odium, or that some network of its Splinters does so, or whatever.