Ripheus23

I believe there's a WoB about Splintering being similar to the Shattering. Given the role (whatever it is) of fractals in the Cosmere, if you Splintered a Shard into 16 equal pieces, could you "reenact" the Shattering, as it were? What I mean is: supposing that the Shattering had side-effects over and above those that accompany regular Splintering (at least by analogy with the difference between a nova and a supernova, or a black hole and a supermassive blackhole?), would those special side-effects take place during the, uh, Splattering? And if so, would there be a significant qualitative difference between self-aware Splinters of regular Splinterings, versus those of the Splattering? (This question involves a quasi-theory of Autonomic Avatars Namely, that they are extremely special Splinters. Of course all manner of Splinters might be supposed unique and special and whatever, but here the assumption is that there is a meta-level difference between a Shard having x = ~16, and a Shard having x = exactly 16, Splinters.)

TBH I forgot that Oathgates are supposed to move objects in the Physical Realm. I had some weird notion that they were Perpendicularities.

What if you Forged a Spike to be a Spike that had stolen Soulstamping from someone who was a Hemalurgist after having used another Spike to steal Hemalurgy from someone Soulstamped to have been Spiked?

I don't know whether the categories of Intent are "highest-level concepts in general" or "special concepts of the divine nature." If the latter, my hypothesis is: Heaven - Pantheistic World - Hell [Endowment, Cultivation, and Odium] Creation - Conservation - Destruction [Ambition, Preservation, Ruin] Immutable - Impassible [Dominion, Autonomy] Mercy - Justice [Devotion, Honor] Simplicity - Infinity [X, X] Immanence - Transcendence [X, X] Perfection - Redemption [X, X] I'm gunning towards "special concepts of the divine nature" because (i) the Shattering could have unfolded differently, as in (if I recall what I've heard here) a different number of Shards, which wouldn't be as easy to pull off if there was a special set of totally general concepts in play, here, (ii) Odium is descirbed as "God's own divine hatred," not hatred in general, and (iii) the role of perspective/belief in the Cosmere suggests God's nature itself to be subject to subjectivity(!) (if enough people believe it, it sort of becomes real, i.e. Adonalsium was like a spren, so He was the superspren of what people believed God was, to some degree, or something along those lines).

I upvoted Wreith's theory but will argue for my own. I think the Oathgate spren duality is representative of the whole meta-level duality of Physical and Cognitive Realms. The Oathgates bind areas of each Realm together in a way similar to how people can bind to spren, maybe. We might speak of a kind of "sprenspren," then. This might be an inherently dual entity, or something along that line. Or: one is the spren of the Oathgate's presence in the Physical Realm, the other the spren of its presence in the Cognitive, and these two are Nahel-ish bound together, too.

I have a feeling Hoid was being flippant on different levels, so while Dalinar could be called "Gibletish" as a description, I don't know that this would imply anything more than any other merely descriptive phrase would.

If Hoid learns a spell or two or more from each magic system, at the least I feel we'll get an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink (is that the phrase?) battle involving him switching from system to system while fighting someone, someones, or something.

Most analyses of autonomy do imply that an agent can make an autonomous choice to become chaotic, so to speak, but that this results in a loss of autonomy (e.g. as in addiction). So the concept has connotations of rational order and self-legislation as a matter of its consequences as much as the derivation of the corresponding word. Also, this is Sanderson we're talking about, here, so I'm fairly sure he's using the word "autonomy" in the academic sense. EDIT: Moreover, since the issue is reconciling the orderliness of the Set with the freedom-loving personality we suppose Bavadin to have, I would point out that mathematics is a perfect example of a "free creation" with absolute order built into it. That is, mathematicians freely expand upon the ordinary-person baseline of counting to come up with the transfinite order, and so on and on.

What concept of law are you working with? EDIT: Honestly, there is no article or book about moral, personal, political, international, or w/e autonomy, that I have ever read, that implied that autonomy was compatible with chaos more than with order.

Autonomy = auto nomos, literally "the law from oneself." It became popular due to Immanuel Kant's philosophy of "the will as a law unto itself." EDIT: I mean what do you think "governance" is about? Chaotic anarchy, lawlessness? Or order?

By Scadrial Era 2, is there any obscure possibility that Devotion, Dominion, or Ambition might have been resurrected? Also: autonomy doesn't mean "no order," it means giving the law to yourself. So it's still about law, or at least a balance of law and freedom.

[This thread is loosely inspired by actual letters spoken in a row by Sanderson. Any similarity to real places, fictional or imagined, is and is not coincidental.] Alternate meanings for RAFO: Really angry ferret oligarchs. Round aliens frolicking organically. Renegade amnesia from orbit. Ridiculously awesome flat oranges. Ribald angels formulated oil. Rapscallion aardvarks for order.

Kaladin all day every day. EDIT: Actually Adonalsium, then I could tell Sanderson to RAFO [read a f%^&ing owl].

After doing some mathematics having to do with forms of the "will to evil," I came up with a problem: for this to apply to a story, I would need roughly nine names for the evil beings who satisfied certain parameters for this willing. There is an overarching protagonist in this context, known as "the Sielier." Though what that title means, I haven't decided yet (it's not an elf-like take on "someone who seals evil away"). So, one quick anti-name, here, is "Xielier," as long as the quasi-evil connotations of the letter "x" are taken into account. However, the primary strategy I've come up, to assign the nine their names,* is something like Mr. Auschwitz Ms. Treblinka Lord Sobibor Cardinal Kolyma Captain Jasenovac ... as well as, for now, Doctors Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. The in-world reason for these words is not the literary reason; that is, Earth's history is not part of this story. So, the first name on that list, and the names for the doctors, are indicators of what category I'm drawing on, here. The highest of the nine, so far, isn't on this list. I mean, part of me would just have "Mr. Auschwitz" be the name for the ultimate foe, but I'm toying with phrases like "Echthros-champion" also. However, if I were to pursue the theme, I'm not sure what to do as "Mr. Auschwitz" sounds (i) horrible (horribly evil) but also (ii) subordinate somehow. And I know I could find plenty of names for atrocity-sites IRL but I'm not supersure if any others would have as horrific connotations as the ones I'm already working with ("President Dresden" isn't very intimidating, for instance). A theological variant would be something like, "General Golgotha," or, "Prince Calvary," or something, but again, not menacing enough to my ears... *The Nine Commanders of Darkness is my tentative title for the entire set. The mathematical details allow these nine to rule over seventeen others in an encompassing set of 26, with several ranks within the range of the nine. (There's supposed to be a genre-level Easter Egg in this, with the main evil being the nine "servants of evil" (e.g./c.f. the Nazgul and the Unmade).)

That means Voidbinding would have to do with Odium Investing in Roshar and not Braize, then?

My original impression of Aons was that they were similar to ... but now I am thinking they remind me of these [which might be similar to the other option, and therefore probably wrong, but IDK yet]: At least to some extent... I feel like there's some quasi-natural basis for Aons, aside from the particular geography of the country, or something... Maybe I should look into electronic circuitry designs. EDIT: This is from something called knot theory. This might be better... And these are Venn diagrams. I think I've seen some Top Ramen-looking kinds, too, but I'm not sure. Altogether these resemble Aons to some extent, maybe.

Maybe Voidbinding isn't Odium's magic system. Why are there supposed to be 10 levels of Voidbinding if 9 is Odium's number? I think that Voidbinding is perhaps the magic of the Dawnshards specifically. The Dawnshards might be like sa'angreal for the Surges, so related to the Surges, but not identical to their usage. So activating them might require, so to speak, an entire magic system of its own, even if this is used to fuel Surgebinding?

In Kaladin's defense , I think that if he has trouble letting go, it's because he doesn't see people as replaceable. Or, he doesn't think the vague motive of "trying to be happy" is grounds for emotionally replacing people when the loss of others is causing unhappiness, or whatever. He appreciates the uniqueness and individuality or whatever, of everyone, as an objective fact (after all). It's certainly idealistic but I daresay he wouldn't be the kind of Windrunner he is without it...

She's a double-agent for Adonalsium Hoid doesn't know it yet, but she's playing Odium off against Shards who want to limit magic in the Cosmere, or Odium turns out to favor extending his personal magic system to as many people as possible, or something along those lines. Or RAFO...

Preservation would seem to understand it, I suppose... But then again gods have been wrong before in this world and his metaphor/analogy does leave unexplained what the light itself is, and how the combined framework surrounding the light's path ranks in relation to the source of the light. EDIT: But I feel like Pattern would not be totally out-of-the-loop, so to speak, either, and he seemed to refer to fundamental truths of reality in a Cognitive way. Or that was my gloss of one of his remarks somewhere (I wish I remembered where). My impression of the overall system is not a straight line made from three segments but a quasi-triangular loop. The whole system is fundamental, and we might think of matter, energy, and Investiture as indefinite permutations of the whole. I.e. matter is where physical existence comes before cognitive and spiritual forces though it includes those in itself, energy is where cognitive existence comes first but includes physical and spiritual information, and Investiture is where physical and cognitive information are ordered after spiritual information. So the three forms of information are more or less strongly correlated with the different matter-like categories without being identical to them (except overall): M : p, c/s E : c, p/s I : s, p/s Or something like that... EDIT: Another idea I have, is that the Transcendental Aesthetic, the Transcendental Analytic, and the Transcendental Dialectic, in the Critique of Pure Reason, would correspond to the physical-cognitive-spiritual trichotomy, while leaving open the question of a "Beyond" (the noumenal realm of transcendental ideals in themselves). The Spiritual Realm becomes an intrinsically "mysterious" place in the sense that it represents our ability to question the other Realms and point towards an outer domain, a focus imaginarius. In some sense it can be considered "fundamental," at least if the meanings of individual sentences depend in all ways on the meanings of questions ranging over sets of sentences. But even here I'm not sure such would be so, in that it seems like individual sentences can be meaningful in themselves, at least to an extent.

What about Adolilinarnah?

Here's something I wonder about, then. Let's say possibilities are the main "objects" in the Spiritual Realm. I don't think actuality can emerge from possibility alone, but I don't think physical actuality would emerge even from possibility as a dynamic source. If the Spiritual Realm is fundamental, then the reality is that the other two Realms are just subplanes of it. Now this might be so if the term "subastral" (I've seen this somewhere) determines not just the relative but the absolute rank of the Cognitive Realm, since the Spiritual would then be the astral, and the Beyond the superastral [in principle], and that would be the order of definition [with the Physical being "sub-subastral," then?]. Here, the "Astral Realm" would be lead to the definitions of the other Realms. However, the nature and power of the other two Realms, in relation to the Spiritual, seems too much for them to have come from it alone, and if they are all perpendicular to each other, or perpendicular to something that runs through them all, or whatever, then they are not subplanes of each other, as such, at all, that is each has unique elements that are internal to their "purpose" and their regions do not directly overlap parts of each other [at least from some specific higher-dimensional vantage]. [So the Cognitive might be subastral not because being astral is definitive of the Spiritual Realm, but because the difference between the subastral and astral planes independently corresponds to the Cognitive-Spiritual relation.] EDIT: This reminds me of The Neverending Story. However, a correspondence, even a one-to-one one[!], still seems to me to put a distance between the levels of objects in each Realm, such that there still has to be a possible outside framework to which all three Realms are "subordinate." [This is similar to the problem of trying to decide whether "all possible worlds" count as a hyperworld, in contemporary modal logic.] That is, there is something in each Realm that is not really just Spiritual on some deep level, or else there would end up just being a Spiritual Realm with Physical and Cognitive subregions. EDIT 2: I just remembered why I thought matter would be tied to space essentially. Descartes talked about res extensa and res cogitans, IIRC, and so as these words/concepts evolved a little more, the word "material" got assimilated to res extensa's meaning, the idea being that matter is, by definition, that which "fills up" space or is extended in space.

@Yata, I think the avatar/Splinter/w/e thing, is the best she can do now to fulfill her original dream, maybe. Reworked idea: not so much that she's trying to spread Shardic power as such, but make a lot of magic systems that a lot of people throughout the Cosmere can access. Her avatars are somewhere between herself and a Splinter, maybe, as conduits for different systems, or whatever (however the Shard-magic system relationship works). She wants as many people as possible to be able to use magic.

Random question, but what would happen if Kaladin and Syl got married? Could that be his 4th or 5th Ideal or w/e? Or some totally newfangled Honor-bond... (Kaladin would be able to get rid of his dread about Syl "rooting him on," sort of, too )

Isn't that still a temporal, or time-like, scenario/state? Even if it involved "skipping over" an infinite amount of physical time? (Personally, I think talk of "outside space and time" is better rephrased as talk of "higher-dimensional space and time." Like, as per Flatland (I think), if a being could perceive 2D time, they could see "all time at once," in the sense of seeing a string of individual moments as a single line. So if they could perceive 3D time... and so on...)