Returned

Lol, so more reliable than the theorycrafting that undergirds ~60% of the most active theorizing here! I should hunt down a copy of Dragonsteel Prime and read it, instead of just meaning to do it as I have been for years.

Are the details in Dragonsteel Prime still canonical? For now it's the only source for a lot of information teased elsewhere in Cosmere works but I never remember if it's official at this point.

Socialism is 100% not the word for it, though I can appreciate how it might seem to be the best fit (especially if you're from in the United States, where the word and concept have been seriously debased for a century). I'll suggest an alternative, "magic egalitarianism", if you like. The point of that arrangement, if I understand you correctly, is that all people get an equal amount of magical capacity and cannot cause that distribution to change. But back to the question in the OP, what criteria do you (OP, but also anyone else) think matter the most and how do those point you to one of these organizational systems as the best one?

Though it was a different kind of Lightweaving, and the Yolish Lightweaving apparently differs in some as-yet unclear ways from Rosharan.

I'm not 100% sold on the groupings either (particularly the Socialism one, which doesn't match the meaning of the word), though that doesn't matter to the ideas presented in the OP. I don't think we can talk about the ethics of distributing magical ability without talking about what values we want to support and/or the effects we want from the distribution, which makes the whole discussion much harder. Without those things I don't think that we can evaluate the systems against each other at all. I have zero faith that any of the suggested systems would maintain itself as intended (aristocracy has never represented the "best" of people; "merit" is something that can often be bought, gifted, or denied; Capitalism has to deal with market failures and trends towards consolidation; Socialism requires people to consistently act in ways that people seem not to) and so (to my mind) installing any of them also requires some secret, extra thing to enforce them. I don't think that any of the systems are particularly good or bad. Each requires the participation of all (or at least most) of the people in the system, and that participation could take any system in a "good" or "bad" direction very easily. I don't want to live in a system where all magic is controlled by people like Torol Sadeas, but such a system could arise in any of the groupings suggested. It's also hard to think through how incentives would play out in each case since there are so many factors within each method of organization. Would someone with lots of wealth and the ability to buy magic power do much to advance knowledge, or just indulge themselves? Would someone with lots of wealth and little ability to buy magic power work to get as much out of the magic as possible, or would they just not bother? What if someone pushed the bounds of magical knowledge, but only in the direction of torturing and immiserating people? What makes the magic so interesting is its flexibility and potential to do almost anything (or at least anything we haven't been told it specifically cannot do) while also being not generally available. That potential makes it fundamentally transgressive: it always grants individuals some ability to do what is impossible for most, and that means that people with lots of magic are just less constrain-able than others. They can be heroes or monsters and are probably going to be hard to compel to do something or refrain from doing something. That strikes me as pretty dangerous. So I would prefer the most distributed and limited option, the third one you listed. People can still band together to accomplish things but there will be fewer unstoppable vigilantes running around doing whatever they want to the rest.

They do have very similar plotting! I even think that the latter Red Rising books (starting with when they go to Jupiter, it's been too long for me to remember the specifics) have a similar feeling to era 2 Mistborn: the overarching plot still exists but gets kind of back-burnered while we go through a new conflict arc which kind of reprises the shape of the original conflict.

The details are hazy on what the Dawnshards did on Roshar (as far as I know). What I'm thinking is more along the lines of them working like a hammer: definitely it can do more than destroy, but if you use one on a window you can break it apart but probably not put it back together. No particular reason to think that that analogy is right, it's just one of the possibilities I've imagined for them. Of course they can. The point is that they have a balance as one Shard, and in that regard Discord is just as valid as Harmony. Even if the theme is contradiction (which I maintain is more about Sazed than the Shards, but I digress) the point is that they are one, combined Shard that can even have a theme, as opposed to a fusion which cannot hold. It will be interesting if sliding into Discord does cause such an issue, though, and the Shards shatter themselves apart. I haven't really thought about that possibility before, I'll definitely mull it over.

Slightly off topic for the thread, but did the original generation Kandra have their own, original bodies? Obviously they were transformed from human by the Lord Ruler. But I wonder if their Kandra bodies counted as still being them (in the same sense that Kelsier's current mode of existence involves pieces of his original body). My understanding of Cosmere principles suggests yes, or near enough, but I'm not sure.

I have to assume that they could, though their role in the Shattering in the first place might mean that they only work in the other direction. I'm increasingly more interested in what the Dawnshards are and how they work than I am the Shards of Adonalsium. I don't think that there are many issues with the Shards recombining, as @Xanpheon suggested upthread. Vessels might prefer not to combine (like Rayse), and Autonomy might strongly prefer to remain apart (I don't recall Odium-the-Shard caring at all about remaining separate), but otherwise I don't get the impression that Shards' individual preferences are all that well formed nor enforced. Even if they were unhappy (whatever that means for a Shard), it seems like they still find a balance. If Preservation and Ruin can do it, any Shards should be able to do it.

Ati was the one responsible for the change: We don't really know how the specific Shards that came out of the Shattering were defined nor how the vessels chose which they'd take up. The Shards seem to represent abstractions and are not well defined by single words or narrow concepts. Ruin represented/was/is a lot of things, including destruction and entropy (among others). I would describe entropy as the aspect of Ruin which Ati emphasized, and he did so in a way that made it the most prominent expression of Ruin. Sazed is facing a similar issue less successfully (he has wanted to be Harmony but is slipping into Discord instead), so it's not just will but will and successful effort that matter. A Shard becoming sapient itself isn't something we have a lot of details about. Presumably it would exercise its own preference for what elements of its own nature will be the primary, outward-facing ones. But we don't know much about what ideas, values, or patterns of thought a sapient Shard would have compared to a human or dragon. I'm not even sure that a self-aware Shard's expression of itself would be recognizable (or need to be recognizable) to humans as appropriate to the Shard's nature. But a Shard can be influenced by its vessel's perception as well as its own: I don't think that Shards are malleable in the same way that spren are, where human conception fundamentally changes them. Spren exist in the cognitive realm, where thought and conception are the basis of existence. They are investiture shaped by the ideas of other beings. The Shards do not seem to be fundamentally cognitive in that way, at least so far. But that could be for a lot of reasons, including the sheer scale of a Shard versus a spren.

I'm speaking mostly about what magic can be used to do (the problems it can solve on-screen). The mechanism is also important, but a bit less so (fictitious magic will always be arbitrary at some point), especially given the amount of hacks available which allow different magic systems to achieve the same effects or allow one system to exceed its alleged limitations. The proliferation of rules (which you are right to point out) nails down more of the mechanisms (overriding some) but also expands what can be done, which can ultimately be counterproductive to keeping the hardness. Awakening as we know it requires color as a rule and limitation. If the color requirement goes away but Awakening is otherwise the same then the magic is softer than it was: one limiting rule fewer, capabilities unchanged. A coinshot can only push on metal. If it turns out that a coinshot can push on anything at all, provided they are wearing blue pants, then the magic is softer than it was: more rules but expanded capabilities, both arbitrary to the prior understanding, with the expansion of ability being far more impactful than the new rule is limiting. If we want to stay focused on Sanderson's laws, what I'm talking about would be the second one, that limitations > powers. The effective limitations (second law) are receding even as magic directly solves problems at least as often as ever (first law), sometimes via new rules which arbitrarily revise our understanding (as opposed to being direct extrapolations of old rules, which is addressed by the third law). Magic that can do literally anything in one step, provided that you make the right precise hand gestures and intone the right mystical words, has elements of softness (it can do anything, at will) and hardness (the way to get magic to do any specific thing is very rigidly defined). The limitations are only in what the user (or reader) knows, and if a story problem is set up and then solved directly with magic by introducing an as-yet unknown gesture-and-word combination it can be (but isn't necessarily) indistinguishable from an ultra-soft system. It's Calvinball, if anyone still gets that reference. We already have some power-inflation related softness: Jasnah can Soulcast pretty much anything into pretty much anything, and excluding gems from that isn't much of a limitation. Bondsmiths can do some pretty wild stuff, including getting around limitations which otherwise exist. Other softness simply undoes older supposed rules: Shai being able to become an Elantrian is a big deal, but that plus purified Dor means that fewer of the constraints on Elantrian magic truly exist any more (though I concede that Forgery is a special case due to what it is and how it works). It's true that there are new rules surrounding this new understanding but the level and accessibility of magic are higher now than they were before via the new rules-ex-machina arbitrarily changing things, and those new rules just appeared in order to make a couple of plot elements work, overriding the old rules in the process. The reason I brought up Kelsier as an example is that he specifically tells Vin she cannot levitate an object freely, that she can only push and pull relative to her center of mass, which is accurate to his knowledge and experience. But that limitation is already known to be false-- a skilled and knowledgeable enough Allomancer could push or pull relative to their hand, or foot, or whatever. And even more might be possible (though I'm making up the specifics): if the Allomancer could form a Connection to different spots in the area they could perhaps push and pull relative to those spots, which makes the free levitation potentially achievable. For that matter, forming a Connection with the thing to be levitated might allow the Allomancer to push and pull from that thing to everything else, allowing for direct and consistent levitation. At some level of power or mastery they might not even need "metals" to push and pull against. We already know that "magic" is in everything in the Cosmere: things have energy, mass, and investiture as fundamental components, with investiture being as manipulable as the others. We've seen a lot which suggests that specific magic systems are more like interfaces overlaid on that reality than they are standalone systems. We've also seen that it is increasingly possible to directly interact with the magic (i.e., purified Dor) as well as use hacks to exceed what a particular system "properly" can do. It seems overwhelmingly likely to me that these trends will continue, and each magic system is going to be capable of doing more and more beyond what we used to think of as its limitations. Given that many of the limitations we've been presented with have turned out to not actually limit anything I see no reason to think that the rules as we currently understand them will be any more durable or constraining. I think that all of that is built into the Cosmere in the sense that a Shard can do almost anything, and accumulating power and knowledge until one is Shard-like will bring a person close to that same capability, being nearly limitless. Magic doesn't even need to be exercised through the Shards at all, as Hoid and dragons demonstrate. My contention is that the magic systems are becoming less distinctive and more unified, albeit slowly, the scope of what magic can achieve is steadily expanding (regardless of system), and the limitations which used to define Cosmere magic are falling away or otherwise becoming less limiting. It may well be that this was always the plan and we are seeing characters correct misconceptions as they approach the true and always-consistent rules of Cosmere magic. But then my position would be that the true Cosmere magic is softer than what was originally presented. In summary, more scope and fewer limitations = softer magic than otherwise. It's like The Expanse turning into Star Trek. Nothing at all wrong with either but very different from each other in this regard.

Intent was just the most acute example I had of the magic being closer to "whatever you want" rather than "your power is a hammer, only good for nails". I'm not intending to suggest that there are no rules whatsoever, only that the hardness of the magic systems as they were originally presented seems to have eroded a lot. Intent as one of the key elements of magic doing what you want is striking both because it suggests the limitations we've been told of are not necessarily the ones that matter and also because it perfectly suits the "magic does whatever I will it to" form of the softest magic systems. Allomancy may well be the most limited invested art we know about (though I'll note also that you can create new allomantic/feruchemical metals if you have the godmetals to work with, so the limitations of "what a metal does" seem somewhat overstated to me), and I think that most of its development in the books is related to skill and knowledge. We have good examples in Kelsier's ability during his showdown with the Lord Ruler (he's radically better at pushing and pulling than pretty much everyone else). Wax is even more skilled, able to push on specific parts of a bullet and using his steel bubble. We've got WoBs indicating that a skilled Allomancer could even push and pull from different parts of their bodies rather than just their center of mass. Conceivably, contrary to Kelsier's explanation an appropriately prepared Scadrian might be able to actually levitate a metal object around at will (A-iron, A-steel, and F-duralumin might be sufficient to do it), or perhaps not even need something to be "a metal" to influence it at all. Even if you think that's impossible because "the metals don't work that way" we've already seen things which break our previous understandings of the metallic arts, such as the medallions. The only reason people are sure the limitations exist is because we haven't seen anyone exceed them. Yet. The limitations we've already discarded were once at least as rigid-seeming and the only conclusion we should feel comfortable reaching about the "bounds of how [metals work]" is that we don't know what the limits really are. That's the sort of thing that I meant by being able to do more by learning more about the powers-- our understanding is limited, which imposes practical limitations on the powers. As readers who cannot experiment with the magics that's an especially acute issue for us. I'm increasingly thinking that the standard for AonDor (it can do literally anything, you just have to be able to code it) is not unique to it. Metallic arts are beyond what we were told they could be, Forgery has accomplished some pretty wild stuff, Surgebinding seems to have few if any limitations (especially for Bondsmiths). The limitations as per Sanderson's laws of magic seem to be fading even as magic directly solves ever more problems.

Investiture tends to make it hard for other Investiture to interact with something, so even if infusing the ground wouldn't lock the Deepest Ones in place I would bet that it would cause a big problem for them moving around. I have two questions which might impact the tactic: How much matter is infused via the mechanism you describe? It might be just surface level, though we also haven't seen anyone break free of being bound that way while tearing up any of the thing they were stuck to. So maybe there's more to it. But if Kaladin can't just infuse a prism of volume in the ground it may not work the way you imagine (though maybe it could work in other ways). Is it worthwhile compared to other options for fighting and especially using Stormlight? It takes Stormlight to do the infusion and to keep the effect going. In the way I'm imagining this working it would only confine the Deepest Ones rather than killing them and so might not be the best way to use Stormlight in combat-- a Shardblade into the ground is almost as easy but could kill or wound the Fused.

Taravangian is one of the smartest and most forward-thinking characters in the entire Cosmere, possibly ever. It's implausible that he has simply forgotten about Nightblood or that he has no plans (contingency or otherwise) which relate to him. I'll challenge an assumption that's been made a few times in this thread: to a Shard, Nightblood is more useful than he is dangerous (even though he is very dangerous). That Nightblood is dangerous to Taravangian also means he is dangerous to everyone else, and not any more so against Odium than the others. Even less so, frankly, since the danger to a Vessel requires physically manifesting in the place where Nightblood is which is definitely avoidable. Taravangian already has a history of using dangerous tools (Szeth, Odium, the Radiants, El) very effectively. Nightblood is much the same in that respect. Retribution is already locked in serious, perhaps mortal, struggle against pretty much everyone else both by temperament as well as by maneuver (the much over-credited Sunmaker's Gambit at the end of WaT). So he's already got everything dangerous to him in the Cosmere after him, is one more being (and one with little agency) really altering the calculus much? Finally, even if you don't agree with any of that, trying to destroy Nightblood would also substantially increase the likelihood of Retribution having to interact with him, which increases the danger rather than decreasing it. And it's not like Nightblood has anything against Retribution or Taravangian, so he's not especially a target. There is no pressing need for any Shard to destroy Nightblood (whether they would prefer to or not), and trying to do so would imperil them in ways they can easily avoid by tending to their actual business instead.

Do you think that the hardness of magic in the Cosmere has changed over time? For my part I think that there has been a bifurcation, and the magic is as hard as it ever was in theory but in practice has become much softer. There are rules which apply nearly all of the time but relying on them seems fraught. The magic definitely seems harder in the sense that we know more about it and its underlying components, but that's a function of us now knowing enough about different systems to appreciate rules that might have always existed. For example, the specific mechanics of Allomancy in Mistborn era 1 weren't all that important and were referenced but rarely important to the plot. We got a bit of conversation around the Lord Ruler and Vin being inherently stronger Allomancers than other people, some examples (explicit and implicit) of savants, but for the most part the stories turned on cleverness rather than technical details of Metallic Arts. We knew little, there was a lot of mystery, and the scope and scale of magic felt undefined (even though we were told and shown that it was very well defined). The magic felt much more rigid (to me) in early Stormlight and Mistborn era 2, but in a very organic way. We were seeing people with much more limited power sets trying to accomplish similarly spectacular goals and so the particulars of how they used those powers mattered a lot. Szeth showed up and had access to three lashings, all of which he used to great effect in clever and, above all, physically defined ways. When we saw Kaladin learn about the lashings we got even more detail like this as he experimented his way to understanding what his powers let him do. On Scadrial the very fact that Metallic Arts were such an... accessory to society and life that they could hardly have limitless power. So at this phase in the novels the magic is very sharply limited in what it can do, but almost limitless in what a person can do with it. That's this forum's overall favorite situation as we think through interesting applications and wonder about increasing the marginal efficiency of a given system by a few percentage points. At present, I feel that we are at kind of an odd point. There is a lot of magic that has been pretty thoroughly defined in ways that don't allow for a lot of flexibility (very hard magic) but the books' plots aren't equipped for general mastery of magical knowledge to be available outside of deity-scale characters. That, along with other (good) reasons seem to have led to some meta-softness creeping in. Allomancy used to work some specific way (rigid rules), but now it doesn't (different rigid rules), and a lot of the old rigid rules stopped applying for reasons that feel more like a much softer magic system to me (Sazed just willed the change into existence). That's OK, and at least it gives the Shards something to do other than just talk to people. But my final item is one which has been creeping into greater prominence for years: intent. What originally seemed like a quirk of Awakening is increasingly a fundamental element of all of the Cosmere magic systems. To my eye, "intent" is now the thing which primarily defines what magic can and cannot do, as opposed to the older (apparently) arbitrary rules-based systems. Things that used to be impossible for magic to do now are achievable, provided that the magic-user wants those things strongly enough and in a precise enough way. All of this leaves me with the feeling that magic is harder in the Cosmere than it used to be, but that that hardness is not reliable. We can (and here, we do!) obsess over the minutiae of individual magic systems and how they can be applied but those rules themselves seem like we can't count on them to actually limit those systems much in any particular case. Sort of like an inverse of the authority of the Prime Aqasix as it was explained to Yanagawn: your authority is unlimited, right up until you try to use it (at which point it turns out there are a lot of limitations). Some of this is probably planned (like Awakening). Some of it is probably a necessary evil-- with so many magic systems interacting, sometimes there will be a collision which can't be resolved without an arbitrary thing that arbitrarily resolves it (like the infamous atium retcon). It has left me feeling a bit rudderless, that all my thinking about Cosmere magic is mostly only good for correlating to the various ars arcana in the books. But we're a lot closer to "magic can do whatever you want because you want it" than we used to be, even as the day-to-day details of magic have become more defined. More time and books can shift this feeling in any direction, of course, so I'm not despairing. I'm curious about others' perceptions of the hardness of Cosmere magic. What do you think?

I don't mind the hard magic systems, though I think we've reached a point in the Cosmere books which will make the magic a lot less interesting and a lot less dynamic. We aren't going to get the same feeling from Allomancy or Surgebinding going forward as we did in The Last Empire or Way of Kings. Not my favorite situation, but so it goes. I don't mind the idea of contracts either, but that might be because I feel that thus far very little of the stories are reduced down to that. The major reason for the "legalism", as the OP has described it, is because otherwise there isn't any real limit on what a lot of the major characters (and especially Shards) can do. One Shard has infinite power, so why don't they just vaporize their opposition in a conflict that matters to them? There has to be some reason, and "Shardic promises are binding" is as good of one as any. The actual legalism itself doesn't seem to matter so much outside of this. The restrictions on Shards and Hoid are really important but they don't matter very much for people like Vin, Kelsier, or Shallan. I'll even argue that they're not very important for Radiants. So I will disagree with the OP that these contractual terms govern the conflicts as they play out in the books. They primarily keep the otherwise obviously dominant players from annihilating any chance of a story before it begins and provide exposition for why things are as they are. I do have some concern that various cross-pressures will lead to future books having kludge-style solutions to problems, which tends to encourage shallower stories. We've already seen a little bit of that, and an inviolable contract certainly fits the bill. But if the books have more of that sort of thing then the specifics of the kludges won't matter to me nearly as much as the fact that any kludge was used at all.

It could have been virtually anyone since we don't know how much the outline diverged from the final book. Top guesses from me are Szeth, Ishar, Nale, Shallan, Moash/Vyre, Lopen, Yanagawn, Adolin, and Gallant. All of these characters matter, but they've already done an awful lot of what mattered in the world and aren't obviously set up for the back five books (and so are fair game for being killed off at the end of the first five volumes). I think Szeth is the most likely by far, since he faced an existential crisis at the climax of WaT and turned away from the duties and magic powers that defined him previously. He had no denouement after that climax and the "what happened to him after" section felt tacked on.

Cadmium is pretty expensive (for the era 2 setting, certainly). I don't think you have to worry about the self-sustaining portion too much, since agents outside of the cadmium bubble could resupply the pulser very easily. The biggest issue, to my mind, is going to be the self-sufficient business/passive income part. There would be a lot of work involved in setting up the business in the first place, but let's assume that's already done. Then someone will have to actually run the business day to day and the risk of betrayal seems high-- the pulser would not have any way to know about embezzlement, corporate politics, or external events while they're burning. Passive income outside of a business is going to have some issues too: bank interest and disbursements from stocks (if there is a robust, publicly accessible market for them in your setting) still require a large amount of principal for the returns to be meaningful to a person's life and also carry risks due to the pulser's lack of direct attention and ability to intervene where necessary. If we're talking about runaway compound growth you're going to need a very, very long time for a modest initial amount of money to become much more than that. The big benefit would be that your living expenses would be a fraction of what they would be if the pulser lived in real time, since they're only "living" a small portion of the days that everyone else experiences. Major downsides are that you would be totally isolated from human relationships, you still need agents to attend to your interests outside of your bubble, and you would be very vulnerable to interference from other people as well as major socio-political events. Plus you wouldn't even get to enjoy much benefit of the wealth, since most of your living time would be spent in the cadmium bubbles.

Maybe Vasher is wrong. But he's one of the most knowledgeable people in the entire Cosmere on the subject, studying it for centuries, and one of the only ones we've heard say anything on the topic at all. If there is any clear, in-text basis for thinking that he's wrong here it's not coming to mind for me, and without that nothing about his description seems obviously incorrect (by not matching anything else we've seen or known). The only counterpoint I can think of is a description in Warbreaker which I could not find while typing out this post and might not be authoritative. I will say that the annotations for chapter 47 in Warbreaker do suggest to me that Vasher is wrong (the way Sanderson describes Calmseer's motivations for returning, and indeed the entire concept of "returning", suggest the "soul" departs and then returns). But at the same time I think that a perfect copy of a person's mind could do the same things in the same ways for the same reasons. Could you expand on the reasons you think he's wrong? I don't think that Kaladin would be a copy of his original self. Like the other Heralds his "soul" never passed on to the spiritual realm, even if only because he hasn't died yet. I imagine it's like what we saw with Kelsier: the "soul" could pass on to the spiritual realm (which is something we saw Vin, Elend, and Rashek do) but doesn't do that and instead remains. It seems more like the "soul" becomes bound to a mass of Investiture in the same way it was previously bound to the physical body (and metaphysical mind?), so it's more of a state change than a copy-and-paste. Very similar to what happened to Szeth and Hoid, except they were re-bound to physical bodies rather than an accumulation of magical power. The idea of a perfect copy that is substitutable for the original is one that I think is pretty clearly shut down by what we've seen in the Cosmere so far. The description of a "soul" as a thing which exists in a person and leaves for the spiritual realm upon (proper) death suggests that any copy would be just that: a copy, and not in any sense the original. I am curious to see or read about what effect a Herald's death has on a bonded spren. That will provide a lot more substance for our guessing. As for the conversation between Vasher and Kaladin, maybe we should call it fore-cognitive-shadowing?

I'm not suggesting that materialism is incorrect (I am a materialist), only that being falsifiable is not the same as correct. Lots of things were true before we had any ability to observe them, and the falsifiable positions people held in ignorance of those unobservable elements were sometimes both (1) consistent with what they were able to observe, and (2) incorrect. It's less that dualism is likely to be correct (which, again, I do not believe) and more that the specific properties of what you think might underlie consciousness and identity are not particularly likely to be correct just because they are consistent with materialism. Phrenology was all the rage, once, and was preferred by some to religious explanations for behavior. Well, except for the time you spend sleeping your consciousness is continuous . But I know what you mean. However, I find your "evolving version of me" to be a something of a cheat. It suggests that your identity changes over time as you accrue and lose memories, but that those changes don't really count as being different because of the continuity of consciousness. If that's the case, wouldn't the continuity of consciousness be the thing that matters? Maybe I'm not getting what you're describing. I don't understand your basis for insisting that one "version" of a person takes over-- it seems to me that upon integration neither previous version even exists in your framework. This ties directly back to my first section of this post, above. What you describe is consistent with materialism but also makes very strong statements about specific elements of identity in a materialist frame, and those strong statements seem arbitrary to me. If, in the description I quoted just above, all of the memories exist, are recalled, and integrated into the same person with (let's presume) continuity of consciousness, how would that not give rise to a third, different person? What is the basis, materialist or otherwise, for that inviolable and immiscible segmentation? If I'm understanding your position correctly (a shaky assumption!), it's that identity is based on a being's perceived, continuous experience of consciousness which is represented as an amalgam of memories which exist in any present moment. Full separation from that amalgamation of memories shatters the continuity, which is not recoverable, and few (if any) traits will persist through that separation, none relevant to identity. I'll hold off on more maundering until I feel more confident that I'm getting what you're saying.

This seems like begging the question. You're making some unfalsifiable assertions about what egos and conscious experiences are, how they work, and what they mean with regard to the concept of identity and personhood. All in a highly presentist-materialist frame and responsive to your "taste" in assessing the truth or value in a claim. Do you feel that "your" (sorry for the scare quotes but I think they're necessary here!) identity has no persistence? That identity changes meaningfully over time? How do you respond to my movie example? I'm not trying to prod you into addressing anything I've written, just to keep discussion going.

If pressed, I would think of it like translating an idiom. Idioms often can't be translated word-for-word but situations common enough to have an idiom might exist in more than one place resulting in an idiom for each. So one idiom in English might be translated into another language's corresponding idiom but have no words, phrases, or structure in common with the translated output. It's not literal translation, formal equivalence, nor metaphrasing. With idioms you can't necessarily just substitute a word here or there: your "peso-pincher" example is dicey, though probably serviceable among native English speakers because the "penny-pincher" idiom is so widespread. It wouldn't work as well translated to Spanish. An Alethi equivalent might be something like "sphere squeezer", "chip clencher", "mark mordant", "broam binder", or more abstract options with totally different structures like "he who parts with money only reluctantly". They key would be that the Alethi version also be an idiom with a similar meaning. The specific words can be anything, since we know nothing of Alethi nor how people actually use it to communicate. Since we don't know any specifics of the languages on Roshar the fix for your distress becomes easy. Either assume that English and Alethi happen to have words with similar sound-and-meaning relationships in every expressed case (but perhaps no other cases), or assume that the "translation" to English is emphasizing expressing the pun rhyme over the particular linguistic features of Alethi and so is translated to an English pun. You might think of it as primarily translating the wordplay rather than the specific words. Cosmere books aren't fake archaeological items (like, say, The Book of the New Sun, which I appreciate and respect but disliked in its commitment to the "this was found, not written for you to consume" conceit) but are written in English for English readers, so any ideas of translation are going to be tenuous at best. If you can't get past it, here are some totally unsupported possibilities for the overlap: It's idiomatic translation and has little or nothing to do with the actual Alethi words or phrases used, up to and including radically changing the joke Different Rosharan languages, including loanwords into contemporary Alethi, provide a lot of words Shallan might choose from when making her pun. Shallan's literacy provides a vast array of options for her to make jokes in this style Alethi has tons of accents and dialects, providing a lot of recognizable pronunciations to choose from when rhyming, but the accent-and-dialect elements of her jokes are never mentioned nor discussed Alethi has a different accent structure such that this type of wordplay can be done in more dimensions than just rhyming, while rhyming is the closest equivalent English structure Shallan is preposterously unfunny and so her puns are worthless in Alethi (though technically valid attempts) but suggest a rhyme in English because her incompetence is hard to translate linguistically (so the only way a reader would know she attempted a rhyming pun at all is to present her comment as one) Shallan's particular circumstances have her accessing Connection so hard that magic is doing the work here as you read. You can't separate the magic from the effect happening any more than you can separate magic from Soulcasting and still explain it

Thanks! Though I just re-read a section of Rhythm of War to check something and I have to amend my earlier post: Vasher's current "soul" isn't his original one but a power-wrought duplicate created quickly at his death. So, fitting into my previous outline, Vasher is still a person but one individual and distinct from the original as his "soul" is specifically not the one he started with (and regardless of whether or not his body is). The theological question in the Cosmere is: if/when Vasher is permanently destroyed, will he continue to exist in the spiritual realm in any sense? Or will the power constituting his "soul" disperse, and his memories and identity along with it? I'll wager that he will-- I don't think that Sanderson will want to dive into sapient but soulless beings, especially with so many heroic characters as cognitive shadows. But who knows?

Are they? Interesting, I missed that explanation. If you have a link to it handy that would help me remember for next time; the major thing I always remember about Returned bodies is their plasticity.