logicalpencils

Forming new Connections, using an Invested Art that can alter a spiritweb, highstorms sending Investiture into gemstones: things in the Spiritual Realm seem to move and change often. How does this square with the Realm's timelessness? Is it because the spiritwebs are tied to temporal beings? And if that's true, do spiritwebs only appear to change but have really always been one constant reality outside of time?

Aha! Let me review your two examples: The first example is saying that, if the Cognitive aspect is deemed plausible enough to fit the Spiritual ideal (e.g. "I am this kind of human" fits for "I am human"), the spiritweb will update to include that self-perception without outside Investiture. So the "filtering of the Spiritual ideal through the Cognitive" will have already happened before any Invested healing is attempted. It's just up to Brandon and general reader intuition to judge whether a certain self-perception is "plausible enough". Otherwise, you get the second example, which is that the spiritweb must be forcibly altered via external Investiture like a Hemalurgic spike or pure Dor, in order to get the Spiritual aspect to accept a radical Cognitive view. So the spirit will naturally try to match the mind (and we would assume, in turn, that the spirit influences how your mind thinks), but if the spirit can't agree with the mind, you need to alter the spirit to match the mind first, and then Invested healing will fit the body to the mind as well. This all assuming we have normal conditions and not something like Yumi's Invested spirit mixed with another body. Thanks for going through all the particulars and pulling up so many sources.

I'm surprised to hear that sex and species are easier to change than adding wings - though maybe that's generous to the human-to-Singer scenario. Sanderson does say it would require "a specific set of circumstances", one of which would be believing yourself to be a Singer. And that's about as likely as believing your body ought to have wings. One of the WoBs says that one's self-perception is recorded in the Spiritual Realm, too, not just in the Cognitive, which further blurs the distinction for me. If the Spiritweb is supposed to be the framework that limits the range of possible states, but then "the way you view yourself" is part of that very framework, the Spiritweb doesn't seem to put limits on the Cognitive at all — healing will always result in "what you think you are", so the Spiritual part is redundant. Well, except that Hemalurgy or Forgery can mess with your self-perception that way. I thought the Spiritual would work like this. Cognitive: "I am a cow." Spiritual: "No, I'm a human, here's all the Connections and Identity confirming that." But it actually goes like this? Cognitive: "I am a cow." Spiritual: "I view myself as a cow; I will heal to this ideal."

I was going to include Yumi in my line of thinking but forgot. I have read everything except White Sand, I'll put that down in the profile. And I would see Ral-na's situation as harm but didn't include it because Brandon doesn't see it that way. And anyways, you're right that health vs harm is an irrelevant question to Invested "healing". It's a matter of Spiritual ideal through Cognitive identity. But that's my key question: I thought Identity was a Spiritual attribute, not Cognitive? And if the Cognitive perception is what ultimately matters, what's the Spiritual doing?

From what I can gather, Investiture healing is an act on the Physical self to align it towards the Spiritual self. The three big limitations are access to Investiture, the magic system's particular rules for healing (e.g. all Radiants can self-heal but only two Orders can heal others via Surge of Progression), and the Cognitive self. What I'm wondering is the distinction between the Cognitive and Spiritual selves. Stormlight Archives frequently comments on wounds being too old to be healed, because the person's Cognitive self has changed to consider the wound part of oneself. Kaladin's scar wouldn't heal itself, again because of a Cognitive impediment: he couldn't let go of what the scar meant to him. Lopen, meanwhile, could heal back a whole arm because he never saw himself as a one-armed Herdazian, and therefore his Spiritual ideal came through. So we've seen good and bad examples of perception filtering the Spiritual properly or else hindering it: but can the Cognitive harm as well, rather than just hinder? For example, you see yourself as one-armed such that attempting to heal takes your arm off instead? I believe Kaladin's scar is in fact a minor example of this idea, but it makes me wonder: how can a person tell whether a healing has worked "correctly" (i.e. the Cognitive is well-aligned to the Spiritual), or if there's been an impediment? Because either way, the result will ultimately align with the person's perception and expectations, so judging by what the person "wanted" to happen isn't a foolproof metric. What's even the difference between the Spiritual and Cognitive self if healing always fits to the Cognitive over the Spiritual when the two are misaligned?

Thank you all for reminding me about the name "Heraldic Epochs". Another question, then: Is there any clear implication for which Epoch Nohadon lived in? He worries about increasing regularity between Desolations, right? And yet it is said The Way of Kings inspired the Radiants, which would have been new at the time. It seems to me that Sixth or Fifth Epoch fits pretty well.

So we know that Hoid has had apprentices studying Roshar for a very long time, and probably that Radiants existed by the Sixth Desolation if Epoch = Desolation. Is there any answer for the event 1173 years before WoK?

The currently releasing #saythewords videos for each of the Radiant orders are in-universe entries by an apprentice of Hoid. The Windrunner entry is dated "Sixth Epoch, year 31, [43rd day of the Rosharan calendar]". It's unlikely to be an offworld dating system given it uses the Rosharan names for month/week/day. But this leaves me with a question: The year is supposedly 1174 by RoW. So has the dating system retroactively been restarted at the Everstorm, or will it change at whatever event ends the next book, 31 years before this Hoid apprentice makes this observation of the orders? Either way this epoch six deal is new — we've never actually gotten an explanation for what event happened 1170 years-ish before the books started (it would be a while after the Recreance, but before the Hierocracy). To say there have been six total epochs... would that include things like the Dawnsinger era, or pre-Shattering history? I guess it's also possible that this date is thousands of years before the books begin — perhaps the sixth epoch began with Aharietiam, and the knights would have still been around to study.