Ripheus23

If the speed of light could be magically made variable, and magic could increase or decrease it, would that be at least the outline of an interesting attempt to explain how people might go "faster than light"?

I did a short search for someone else with a thread arguing the same thing, but no dice... So, gonna throw this out there: one objection to trying to go FTL is that mass increases towards infinity the closer and closer an object gets to the speed of light (by acceleration), or some such thing. But don't Allomancers or Feruchemists (or both?) have some power that allows them to decrease their weight? Suppose, then, that Era 4 Scadrians invent artificially intelligent Hemalurgic ships (made of Invested spikes) that have copied the weight-decrease power. Would it be possible to use that power, maybe, to "fend off" the increase in mass during acceleration towards light-speed?

[I think this is worth standing as a Cosmere-level thread due to the descriptions of Nightblood as a "robot spren" and Adonalsium as "something Rosharans would think was a spren."] So, philosophers believe all kinds of weird things about all kinds of weird things. One question is, are there Platonic Forms, or only individual objects, or anything in-between or around those two or what? One answer that some philosophers have offered to that "or what" is as follows (from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on tropes): Spren are, I think, sentient tropes. They are not perfect Forms, but they are not like normal particular objects, either, and they are quasi-repeatable. They seem, in fact, to be tropes that can only be instantiated in normal objects (be physically truly predicated of such objects) by choice, at least if the Nahel bond is more than just a raw association between a physical agent and a spren. If Adonalsium was their original source, I think he must have done something to the level of reality on which the difference between universals, objects, and tropes has its own place,* in order to separate a great number of pure tropes from the mass of possibility, yet unassigned to specific objects. (Messing with the logical order of predication in physical reality itself does strike me as a divine kind of thing to do...) *We can map this onto the three Realms, then: universals are of the Spiritual Realm, objects are of the Physical Realm, and tropes/spren are of the Cognitive Realm, as such.

@Child of Hodor haha, a Stormlight sa'angreal, eh? The Choedan Kal strikes again! Forgive me if I'm wrong, but does Lews possess Rand at the end of the penultimate WoT book? Was that one written by Sanderson? I guess I could look it up quick but I am gonna be lazy... Anyway, if I'm not mistaken, the problem was that Lews was gonna use Rand to use the Choedan Kal to rend the world. IDK if Sanderson would closely map the threat of the Dawnshards onto that kind of danger. I think the binding power of Honor's power is very intimately tied to the power of creation that Adonalsium would have originally used, in the sense of an LDS-esque deity (not the same thing exactly, to be sure!) being one that creates not from absolute but only relative nothingness, i.e. demiurgically. The LDS Church tells its priesthood that they are using a fraction of the same power as God used to create the world, when they exercise the offices of the priesthood. Now in philosophy there's this thing about how "propositions" are supposed to be bound, i.e. what is it that ties subjects and predicates together? Since propositions reflect the form of reality (the mathematical-Cognitive Realm?) in this way, the form of propositional truth would be related to the power of creation, or an example of it that is. (A theological aside: if God is a simple force, and yet has a truth to It, then Its truth is not divisible into a complex of a subject and a predicate, but is as one, so maybe it is the alethic simplicity of God that causes created subjects to fuse with created predicates, as Its unity affecting their plurality.) And the concept of binding forces is a major aspect of nuclear physics, of how different parts of matter become atoms and molecules and systems of these and so on. So, to create by binding, is not only the moral office of the Church (via the priesthood and e.g. the binding sacrament or covenant of marriage), but of God as such, so that moral bindingness is identical to propositional and physical bindingness, from God's vantage. I suspect that it would be terribly difficult for the Radiants to even have a type of attack that, if amplified too greatly but within their range of enhanced ability, would devastate the planet, at least as far as amplified Surgebinding goes, because this would contradict Honor's power in the world, and in them, too much. I foresee more in the way of "out-of-control spellcasting spirals that alter the highstorms" or similar environmental-level interactions, being more likely candidates for the way the build-up of magic will endanger Roshar as a planet. How literally, though, are we to think of the devouring-void imagery Dalinar has seen in his visions? Also, I think there's a clue to the endgame in the account of the gloryspren gyring around Dalinar. We've seen that spren being drawn to things is a crucial form of imagery in this series. A gravity well from Investiture might be conceived of as a great attractor for spren per se, so that the increasing density of the spren causes the Investiture well. So, let's say lesser spren gravitate around highspren, Cognitive-Realmwise that is, so that the Unmade, trapped or not, are like gas-giant planets relative to the solid planets of the highspren, and so on. So, at some point, a great number of the spren, maybe nearly all of them, begin to be pulled towards a Cognitive-Realm Investiture well (caused either by some density of the Unmade or drawing the Unmade towards it, as well), and I can just imagine the kind of delight Sanderson would have in playing with that kind of scenario, as a source of meaning as well as plot action.

I thought it would be Szeth, was surprised it turned out to be Taravangian (after Dalinar!).

The moral theory surrounding the absolute-proof theorem equates morality with promises to a very great extent, in the sense that the mental activity involved in making a promise is similar to the primordial energy of free will per se. So, in a way, those who can sufficiently commit themselves to doing something, can gain the power to go where they need to go to do that thing, or something along those lines. But promissory energy isn't in equilibrium when people are randomly using it, breaking their promises, etc. so there are some restrictions on what people can promise to do such that magic will emerge from the act. Magic acts as a recursive filter, you might say, on the morality of its own usage, which affects how it can be summoned at all, and so on. Anyway, the overarching story is divided into several stages: The namesake protagonist, Ripheus, wanders through a strange sequence of mythical wars before discovering that he is actually inside Apollyon's mind. Ripheus "awakens" back into transcreation (a 24-universe multiverse, with 24 the number of universe because = to 4!, which is the number of sequences of 4-fold histories). Then he remembers that he voyaged into the demiplane of Apollyon to investigate the Anomalies, which are the distortions of reality (say laughter transforming into something that was able to eat people, or whatever). Meanwhile, an investigator in the multiverse at large tries to find out what is going on with the Septatheon, who are seven divine beings whose powers come from being personifications of different moral theories (e.g. Utility is utilitarianism incarnate), i.e. they are people who somehow have tapped into the Keyscape much more strongly than others do on average. Ripheus remembers that when he and Armirex and the others of the host of the Last War constructed the Keyscape, they sealed this act with the Erev Halaeon, the Promise of the Final Power. This was the use of the Keyscape to promise the multiverse that one day (the hour unknown to Ripheus and the others as such), a final, special power would grace all of existence by the light of the Keyscape. Until near the end of the story, when the advent of the Final Power takes place, what this magic is for is known only in the abstract, namely that it is an energy that can be "transecrated" (similar to "consecrated," as in one person can consecrate/transecrate their share in the Final Power to someone else, if they so elect to do so). Since Earth is a story in this world, eventually it is discovered that the story of the Bible (for example) is a symbol for the days of the Septatheon inasmuch as these are the seven heads of the demon-Beast. The prophecy of the Messiah descending when the tears of the world have been shed enough, is imputed as to its fulfillment to Ripheus, who comes to believe that he must suffer to an extreme degree in a unique way, in order to "dry up" one of the 24 universes, a realm called the Sea Alone (the idea is that his metaphorical tears will be "drops of the Sea"), and that this will somehow be relevant to the Anomalies. [I have no idea why specifically, yet, I just like the chain of images a lot.] Followers of a being known as the Precentor of Despite, look for a stone tower known as the Typhon or the Typhoaeus. They carry small bricks on their persons, which when broken apart channel the power of Apollyon from Its sleeping estate into the 24-fold cosmos. The Typhon is an entire tower made of these bricks, which are pieces of the image of Apollyon the City. (If the Precentor can shatter the entire tower at once, it might be able to incite a new war, thus overcoming the victory of the Last War, namely that it truly was the final such conflict in history.) There's also a university, in some universe, where there's a teacher of a class on preparation for the advent of the Final Power, who is trying to corrupt his students so that on the day of that advent, they use their final might for evil. Meanwhile, Armirex actually is tricking Ripheus without knowing it. The fact is that Apollyon is fused with the Form of Retribution, so that when a just man is punished, It feels his agony personally, wherefore when Ripheus allows himself to be tortured in order to drain the Sea Alone, yet instead his suffering resonates with the heart of the Destroyer and awakens the City of Destruction. Armirex believes that Ripheus is undergoing the ritual of torture in order to do this, though that is not so. There are also people who have come back from the dead, known as the Broken Ones, who have some odd relationship towards the eventuality of the Final Power, but how/why I haven't decided (or don't quite recall). After the Final Power finally arrives, Armirex draws Apollyon to the noumenal plane, to do battle with the Forms themselves. He can do this by transecrating his quantum of the Erev Halaeon unto the Destroyer (which of Itself is the one being who is not otherwise given a share in such power).

I think the Old Magic might be the leftover magic system of Adonalsium himself, from his creation of Roshar. This involved the spren, so when Cultivation came to overshadow the spren ecology, her powers became affiliated with the prior order of Adonalsium as such. I think the Ryshadium might be related to this state of affairs, too. If they have bonded with musicspren, they might be the equivalent of "Knights Radiant" for Adonalsium himself (maybe there's even an implicit relationship between the words Adonalsium and Ryshadium). EDIT: I can't believe I said "boned with musicspren." Now if THAT isn't a terrible image...

I was thinking, Odium would be a foe likelier to inspire someone else to destroy a world, than to directly destroy it himself. Or, there's some chance of that. Think of the end of OB, for instance. He thinks of himself as "Passion" in some way, and the Unmade are related to various passions (e.g. the Thrill). The Dawnshards can "bind" beings and one of the Unmade has thusly been bound. Odium is interested in the tower of Urithiru. So, theory/guess: Odium will betray all the Unmade to the Dawnshards, which will bind all of them, but then when they are brought together to be contained in Urithiru (think Ghostbusters maybe ) their power will intensify too greatly and form an Investiture-gravity well that will literally start fulfilling Dalinar's vision of the world being devoured.

One system I came up with treated magic as an individual object (or, a disjunct between one object in one universe, and a myriad of individual objects in a parallel [the only parallel] reality). Literally "the Object of Magic." It was sort of like a crystal, or like something in the same meta-category as space and time, yet distinct from those. The main story-related uses were for changing oil into spell-oil, which was useful for making spellswords that could burn with fire for longer than normal (and diminished the need for gloves in handling these swords), and pushing on other objects (like a Force Push where you "push on" the Object of Magic in your mind, and the part of physical space "overlapped by" the Object is then pushed by the Object). The pushing-power was very important(!) because eventually there was a sort of magical nuclear explosion that some of the protagonists had to form a circle-of-sorcerers around, pushing inward, to hold back the nova. (It was an army of a circle, so that the story-arc involving the nova was supposed to go on for a while, the explosion being nuclear kind of like in the way that H. G. Wells, IIRC, thought a nuclear weapon would repeatedly explode, rather than unleashing the extra differential of energy over conventional explosives at once.) EDIT: I remembered, there was actually more of a theory to it. The idea was that magic-users were those who could somehow use the principle of unrestricted composition in mereology, to make objects into parts of each other or new objects, in the abstract, mediating the composition using the Object of Magic as a tertium quid, so it say. That was how spell-oil was formed (one specific use was: various oil-lakes in the world had been ignited with different fires, i.e. the literal fires of Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell, so there were in fact three special spellswords for each plane of the afterlife, the sword of Hell being the most dangerous, in that the fire of these swords had been made "part of" the ignited oil-lakes, as it goes). (Also Hell was filled with oil when God went there after being killed (as a man) by being thrown into a volcano, and so His human form set fire to that oil, causing Hell to go from cold to hot. He used a candle he carried into the afterlife or something to do this, IIRC.)

I remembered another thing... I don't like the word "slatrification" too much...

There must be something wrong with me, because I don't feel like Sanderson has ever done anything wrong Let's take a gander at a disagreement... least some quibbling... I felt like was a little deus ex machina-ish.

I'm trying to find a reason for Sanderson to have tapped(!) aluminum for such a role, and the only thing I can find that sounds... not quite similar, exactly, but... relevant?... is this from the Wikipedia article on the stuff:

So, crystals are famously related to magic, throughout various examples of fantasy literature. So my first impression of the relationship between Stormlight and spren on the one hand, and gems on the other, was that Sanderson was availing himself of a common visual trope. But by now of course I know better than to assume so little of Sanderson's self-awareness of his stories' dynamics and so I am wondering... There is a peculiar theory in modern physics, something to do with a "Planck-Kleinert crystal": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_crystal As the Wikipedia article link name has it, this jewel is the world or universe, more than less. From one of the cited articles, the abstract thereof, it goes: Now anti-gravityspren are attached to chasmfiends, such animals (them and their cousins, so to say) are the sources of gemhearts, Surgebinding can affect one's relationship with gravity, and so on and on, so I am wondering if Sanderson might be aware of the Planck-Kleinert crystal model and has assimilated it, to some degree or other, to the structure of the Cosmere. This might help explain why Stormlight and spren can be caught in crystals, as well as the references to Shards and a Shattering of Adonalsium. That is *drumroll drumroll* what if Adonalsium was a sentient crystal dwelling in the Spiritual Realm? And his Shattering into Shards is literally true?

"Soul Calibur"

I'm just wondering if Nightblood could... evolve, as it were. Think: Adonalsium was like a spren (or, "Rosharans would think He was a spren," or however the WoB goes), spren are the source of Shardblades, Shardblades were the prototypes of Nightblood (or was it Honorblades at least?), so... if Nightblood is sprenish, he might be able to become Adonalsiumish, except... evil...?

No, you've gotten the point I'm superworried the scenario that I'm using as the endgame for this story, is an unintelligible scenario. One suboption I'm bandying about in my mind turns on a variation on the above themes: Morality/ethics/w/e is about priorities. Or, at least, those are one class of thing that this hath to do with. So, the way the philosopher Immanuel Kant puts it in Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone is that the fundamental moral choices we make, have to do with how we put certain concepts into positions of logical priority relative to each other. The example he uses (the only one, really, or: all there is to it, as he seems to say) has to do with the concepts of happiness and virtue, i.e. both involve reason, so reasonable beings have to intend them both, and the problem arises over whether we choose to make happiness depend on virtue, or virtue depend on happiness. (Kant thinks evil-in-itself is impossible, so evil is not choosing evil as such, but just choosing a warped order of reason over the natural one.) I think this notion of priority-problems is much farther-ranging. Examples I've come up with include: Creation - Destruction (being destructive to an extent seems necessary if entropy is everywhere and inevitable, but people sometimes use this fact as license to justify outright murder, for instance) Necessity - Possibility (in technical modal logic, it's possible to define the □ and ◊ symbols/operators in either direction, but I think possibility is metaphysically prior to necessity) Concept-of-good - Concept-of-evil (sometimes people seem to emphasize "Thou shalt not" over "Thou shalt," which is quite misguided in my eyes) And then, for the sake of this Apollyon story of mine: Essence - Existence ... which is a Sartrean question, after all. Now, to turn the issue into a fantasy-scenario issue, my idea is to have Armirex command Apollyon to destroy/transdestroy the order of existence-over-essence. That is, to make the Form of Essence prior to the Form of Existence, which would negate all existence as we know it. OTOH, Apollyon doesn't seem like the kind of entity that Armirex would want to use to do this (the City of Destruction is not the City of Orders of Priority, after all), but for the aesthetics of the tale, having Apollyon be the final threat, somehow, is pretty much required (It looks like a city made of/set on fire, that is constantly attacking other cities; this is my image of the most-evil-looking-thing-ever). Also, the reason Armirex wants to alter the Form of Existence/Nonexistence/w/e, has to do with something known as the absolute-proof theorem, upon which the Anomalies arising from the Keyscape depend. So, to take some steps sideways/backwards: In the world in question, magic depends on morality. Hoid's power to "be wherever he needs to be"? A standard ability of magic-users, here. Actually, most magic-users, prior to an event known as the Last War (literally the last war fought in the multiverse), were beings known as Noumenal Artificers, who dwell in the transcendent realm. Armirex is one of these, who long ago betrayed the cosmos but later redeemed himself by allying with the other champions of the Last War to (A) silence Apollyon and (B) construct the Keyscape. The Keyscape was meant to take the rare power of the Artificers and make it accessible to the common folk of the multiverse, as it goes. However, since magic is morally explained, this meant that the creators of the Keyscape had to use advanced, convoluted moral theorizing to make the Keyscape work. The pivotal notion of the system has to do with the following subject/theory: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/weakness-will/#DavPosWeaWil Nutshelled: Socrates claimed that people who know what is good, wouldn't do evil. That virtue is knowledge. Yet people do seem to act against their "better judgment." How? By having imperfect/non-absolute proof/judgment of what is good. So, if you knew (had a lot of strong evidence), but didn't have absolute proof, of what is good, you could still act "against your better judgment." (Davidson explains all this in terms of all-things-considered vs. all-out thought/judgment.) So, Armirex and Co. programmed the Keyscape with a reliance on the absolute-proof theorem. However, they forget to program in an absolute proof of that very theorem itself, hence the Anomalies (the Keyscape misfires when trying to channel magic into people, causing warps in reality). Armirex, at the climax of the story, gets it in his head that if he can absolutely prove the Form of Evil to be equivalent to the Form of Nothingness/Nonexistence (the doctrine of the privation of being/goodness as in some Christian theology, for example), this will absolutely prove the absolute-proof theorem, sealing the rift in the essence of the Keyscape and stopping the Anomalies before they spiral out of control and devour the multiverse. Well, actually, he's been aware of the problem for twelve million years and has been working on a way to awaken Apollyon (not an easy task, given the method he and Co. used to put It to sleep in the first place) ever since the end of the Last War.

Just sayin'. (Having an object whose sole purpose is destroying evil, become the ultimate destructive evil, would be Sandersonian irony par exellence, no?)

One of the stories I'm working on apexes with a scenario that I'm not sure is coherent, or even if it were, that it would actually be so terrible to deal with. The idea is that the fabric of reality is warping due to a mistake during the construction of the magic-source (a hypermachine called the Keyscape), the mistake being an abstract one related to the mathematical programming of the system. To try to "fix" this mistake, a character named Vyrian Armirex awakens the incarnation of destruction, Apollyon, and commands Apollyon to transform the Form of Evil (as in the Platonic Form thereof) into the Form of Nonexistence. However, the dimension of the cosmos this takes place in, is the transcendent one, so we're talking not just destruction, but transdestruction. The climactic problem arises because Apollyon's sole desire is transdestruction, so It proceeds to destroy the Form of Nonexistence, which having merged with Evil has it so that all previously nonexistent evil is recreated with that Form---and then Apollyon continues to cycle the Forms of Evil and Nonexistence back and forth into and out of each other, so that all possible evil is "transcreated" at once. Now purely in poetic terms, that sounds like the worst possible thing of all time. However, (a) I don't know if destroying/transdestroying Forms is an intelligible activity at all, much less if the Form of Destruction, which might be defined as the Form of Causing Nonexistence, is used on the Form of Nonexistence itself, and so on, and (b) even if there's some sense to be had, here, wouldn't the continuous cycling of these Forms put the immanent dimension in the same position, ethically/spiritually, that it was in already, i.e. if Evil is flickering into and out of being on the transcendent level, over and over, wouldn't that "look like" Evil just being an abstraction, still? The story scenario only works if for some reason the people in the immanent worlds have some concrete experience of the cycle that "makes a difference" to whether their world is in a concrete good or bad state. EDIT: tl;dr joke: what if Nightblood is the final Cosmere villain ?

I feel like part of the Archive is a philosophical analysis of how people acquire moral knowledge. At least, the intellectual relationship between Kaladin and Sylphrena, and various other things to this effect in OB, indicate this. Like, how really do people know right from wrong? There's the simple kind of question, "Is it objective or subjective, absolute or relative?" but I think Sanderson is wise enough to appreciate that, like everything else, morality is a little of all those things. So, anyway, I feel like he will pursue this theme more and more, and use Taravangian as the representative of what happens when moral theorizing goes terribly, terribly awry (or, Sanderson has already been using Taravangian to showcase the deficits in a naive utilitarian/nationalistic outlook, for instance). I could see Taravangian being duped (maybe even by a dying Rayse?) into taking the Shard of Odium for some supposed "greater good," but also out of envy: he's so hung up on how smart he was on Diagram-day, and then Rayse is all like, "Hey, look at how much smarter I am!" at the end of OB, so...

I hadn't even thought of that question (about Cultivation having a champion at all).

So I was thinking about how the Archives are to be split into two 5-book arcs, how Taravangian is developing (Odium's champion), and how Sanderson seems possibly inspired by the Final Fantasy games. (I don't have the time or the immediate memory to explain this impression; just trust me ) So, in Final Fantasy 6 we have a crazy evil wizard transform into the final villain. This occurs halfway through the game, when the world is drastically reconfigured. So, what if in SA5, Rayse-Odium dies? And Taravangian takes up the Shard of hatred/revenge? Or, maybe the plot of 6-10 will be someone trying to pick up that Shard, and Taravangian will turn out to be the one who does?

Isn't there a WoB that goes, "Adonalsium was Shattered because he was killed," though?

It's called a "Djson" sphere, actually, because in this world when they made an English-like language, they used "j" for a "y" sound a lot more than in our world. As far as who has existed there, who has existed also here, well: EDIT: Also, without explaining how, I will say: there's a hypertwist at the end of the story, related to the concept of a multiverse, so you might say it's set in a primary and a secondary world together.

Sorry that it's flipped, I don't remember why I uploaded it to the Facebook page for the story in the way Anyway this is for that ridiculous magic-architecture adventure I mentioned in the "your own magic systems" thread.

There are a lot of aliens and spaceships in the story, a Dyson sphere that can change the speed of magic as well as do this: ... and there are other threats to the universe. And trains, a magical Internet system called AURYCLE (a play on AURYN from The Neverending Story) which in one chapter the perspective characters actually enter (like that show REBOOT or something), artificially intelligent spellkeeps, giant mechs. But there's also a lot in the way of nature-adventures, such as deep underwater (even into/through the planet's mantle), in giant forests, on a plains-ish region outside sjl-Jlljhad. And then there are planar quests in pocket-dimensional labyrinths or the dreamworld or whatever.