Shardblades and the Cognitive "Complete Identity"

[Otto Didact]

Reading The Emperor's Soul in close proximity to my reread of tWoK gave me what I believe are some good insights into the nature of Shardblades--specifically, why they cut seamlessly through nonliving materials such as stone, metal, hair, etc., while they have a very different effect on living beings. There's been a lot of talk about Shai's lecture on the nature of Forgery in TES where she says:

 

The longer an object exists as a whole, and the longer it is seen in that state, the stronger its sense of complete identity becomes.... That wall has existed long enough to view itself as a single entity. I could, perhaps, have attacked each block separately--they might still be distinct enough--but doing so would be difficult, as the wall wants to act as a whole.

 

That got me thinking about Shardblades. I know a lot of people have theorized that a Shardblade cuts some sort of spiritual link in a person or animal, but that doesn't really answer why Shardblades cut seamlessly and almost effortlessly through inanimate objects. What I've started to think is that a Shardblade severs an object's Cognitive sense of "complete identity," rather than the physical object itself. Thus, if you cut a rock in half with a Blade, you're not cutting the physical rock at all; rather, you're severing the rock's identity in the Cognitive Realm, which in turn causes the rock to split into two distinct and separate parts, each with its own new identity as a half-rock.

 

In much the same way, then, if you slice a person or animal through a vital part (the spine or heart, generally), the Cognitive link that binds that being's spirit to its body is severed. Where before, the spirit and body had been together long enough to view themselves as the same thing, the Shardblade overrides that connection and makes them think that they are separate, much like the two chunks of rock in the previous example. Similarly, if a Shardblade passes through a limb, that limb becomes dead and unresponsive. This is because nothing in the Physical Realm has changed, but the Cognitive identity of the limb is suddenly separate from the identity of the rest of the being--the limb thinks it's nothing but a limb, and the being thinks that it's missing a limb.

 

I'm not sure what the implications of this are, but it makes sense to me. It seems to me, though, that the Blades were created to fight Cognitively rather than Physically, which I take to mean that the way that they kill (eyes blackened and smoking), is more of a Nasty Side Effect than the actual intended purpose.

 

Anyway, feel free to pick holes. If this is true, I still can't quite grasp why Plate and those Half-Shards are able to block a Blade. If someone else has already theorized this, I'm terribly sorry, but I just didn't see it. Feel free to decry me as a plagiarist--after all, what is it that men value most if not innovation and timeliness? 

[Kurkistan]

An interesting theory, and plausible on the face of it.

Sadly, I don't think you're on the right track here, given some (mildly obscure) pieces of evidence.

*Warbreaker Spoilers*

First of all, we know that the black smoke from Shardblades is related to Nighblood's black smoke. Given that Nighblood's thing is eating Breath, and Breath are most likely Spiritual, that implies that Shardblades do some Spiritual damage.

Second, we've recently received confirmation that Shardblades damage souls. Now Brandon may be playing fast and loose with our understanding of the word "soul" here, but, particularly looking at how it's treated in TES, it's fairly likely that someone's "soul" is exclusively or at least primarily Spiritual. So if Shardblades cut souls, they cut the Spiritual aspect of objects.

Edited May 15, 2013 by Kurkistan

[Phantom Monstrosity]

but, particularly looking at how it's treated in TES, it's fairly likely that someone's "soul" is exclusively or at least primarily Spiritual.

 

Not necessarily.  The 'soul' is often used to refer to cognitive stuff in TES.

 

 

Also, bloodmakers can repair it - and if it were spiritual realm damage, that would set a precedent of 'spike a feruchemist barely nonfatally, have him heal up his spiritual damage, repeat'.

[Kurkistan]

As for the first, not really, I don't think. The only one I can recall is Gaotona's "you're implying the wall has a soul" when Shai talks about the wall having a conception of itself as a wall. Everything else is more less Cognitive and connectiony (and thus Spiritual). I am a bit biased in this case, since I have an inordinate amount of theorizing that posits the Spiritual aspect as the primary target of Forgery.

 

On the second count, I don't think so. I've been chatting with Satsuoni about this a bit--and some theorizing has also occurred in the past--theorizing that the extent of the damage that Shardblades do to limbs is simply "severing" some Spiritual connections without harming the "nucleus" of the soul. So where Hemalurgy rips off the piece of the soul connected to some bindpoint, a Shardblade would just sever the connection. Like cutting a rope instead of yanking out what it's attached to. In that case, we're looking at quite a different kind of damage: reestablishing incidental connections versus regrowing a missing chunk of soul. A Bloodmaker might only be able to do the first.

 

Even if it isn't Realmatically necessary, I think it's necessary on the level of writing books, and this, at least, gives us a plausible out besides a simple "the author couldn't do that because it would break the series" ala how channelling was necessarily underutilized in the Wheel of Time.

Edited May 15, 2013 by Kurkistan

[Shardbearer]

I view it thus:

Body=physical

Soul=cognitive

Spirit=spiritual

Body is obvious. Soul is more like your thoughts and emotions. I see spirit more as who you are (Identity, instincts, core beliefs) and what magics you can use.

[Phantom Monstrosity]

As for the first, not really, I don't think. The only one I can recall is Gaotona's "you're implying the wall has a soul" when Shai talks about the wall having a conception of itself as a wall. Everything else is more less Cognitive and connectiony (and thus Spiritual). I am a bit biased in this case, since I have an inordinate amount of theorizing that posits the Spiritual aspect as the primary target of Forgery.

This is literally like, two pages after, and part of the same conversation where Shai is defining what she means by 'realms'.

“You imply that the wall has a soul.”

“All things do,” she said. “Each object sees itself as something.

If she didn't mean 'how an object sees itself' was part of having a soul, she wouldn't give that as her first response. Since she's trying to clarify how forgery works to someone who doesn't understand it, this should have precedences for informing us, the readers, about how forgery works.

On the second count, I don't think so. I've been chatting with Satsuoni about this a bit--and some theorizing has also occurred in the past--theorizing that the extent of the damage that Shardblades do to limbs is simply "severing" some Spiritual connections without harming the "nucleus" of the soul. So where Hemalurgy rips off the piece of the soul connected to some bindpoint, a Shardblade would just sever the connection. Like cutting a rope instead of yanking out what it's attached to. In that case, we're looking at quite a different kind of damage: reestablishing incidental connections versus regrowing a missing chunk of soul. A Bloodmaker might only be able to do the first.

 

Even if it isn't Realmatically necessary, I think it's necessary on the level of writing books, and this, at least, gives us a plausible out besides a simple "the author couldn't do that because it would break the series"

The thing is, there aren't any narrative reasons to make it possible for bloodmakers to recover from shardblades.  It's a really weird thing to happen, so it pretty much has to be the consequence of realmatic stuff.  Saying 'feruchemical health doesn't care about whether wounds are physical or cognitive' is a sensible extrapolation that doesn't require extra explanation. 

 

Saying 'feruchemical health works for spiritual wounds, but has an entirely seperate set of mechanics and limitations when dealing with them' is just inelegant.  It'd require way too much explanation to ever seem logical, and doesn't feel like Sanderson's style.

Edited May 15, 2013 by Phantom Monstrosity

[Kurkistan]

The thing is, there aren't any narrative reasons to make it possible for bloodmakers to recover from shardblades.  It's a really weird thing to happen, so it pretty much has to be the consequence of realmatic stuff.  Saying 'feruchemical health doesn't care about whether wounds are physical or cognitive' is a sensible extrapolation that doesn't require extra explanation. 

 

Saying 'feruchemical health works for spiritual wounds, but has an entirely seperate set of mechanics and limitations when dealing with them' is just inelegant.  It'd require way too much explanation to ever seem logical, and doesn't feel like Sanderson's style.

 

AoL Spoilers, kind of, but not really*

 

First of all, I think Bloodmakers may run into problems dealing with Cognitive wounds, actually, since Healing is based on Cognitive aspects. Based on that, I think any extrapolation which says "feruchemical health doesn't care about whether wounds are physical or cognitive" has some explaining to do.

 

If it helps, I would visualize the difference between Healing different types of Spiritual wounds as how actual physical healing works in the normal world. Normally, we'd expect that simply making someone heal faster would just scar over missing limbs, as opposed to regrowing them. If you have a cut, though, we expect the healing process to reattach the two parts. I'd simply posit that Spiritual Healing can only heal "normally" in the sense of reattaching essentially whole entities, as opposed to Physical Healing's regrowth powers.

 

This is not necessarily demanded by our current understanding or Realmatics, but is sensible enough. Quite frankly, even a handwavium explanation would be sufficient if its stops a Bloodmaker from giving off infinite Hemalurgic spikes. Someone's gonna figure that stuff out, or we'll think their stupid for not figuring it out. At the very least, the AoL Ars Arcanum author has the motivation.

 

I view it thus:

Body=physical

Soul=cognitive

Spirit=spiritual

Body is obvious. Soul is more like your thoughts and emotions. I see spirit more as who you are (Identity, instincts, core beliefs) and what magics you can use.

 

Sorry, but this is incorrect. Though Brandon was talking about heritability at the time, he says (paraphrasing) "Biological DNA, Personality/Cognative self, Spiritual Soul". I'm fairly sure I've seen other such examples, but this one pretty much covers it.

Edited May 15, 2013 by Kurkistan

[Phantom Monstrosity]

Sorry, but this is incorrect. Though Brandon was talking about heritability at the time, he says (paraphrasing) "Biological DNA, Personality/Cognative self, Spiritual Soul". I'm sure I've seen other such examples, but this is good enough for now.

But personality is stored by a spiritual metal in feruchemy!

[Kurkistan]

Maybe, *sniff* maybe. Maybe the "personality" stored in Aluminumminds is somehow more fundamental while the Cognitive is fleeting, or Brandon's focus on "genetics" for that quote cast things askew. Or he changed his mind after a year or two. Or he misspoke at one point and/or Crafty made a mistake.

 

Here's some more definite stuff on the soul being Spiritual, if you want to be 100% sure:

http://www.theoryland.com/intvmain.php?i=428#80

http://www.theoryland.com/intvmain.php?i=622#64

[Isomere]

Soul is a fairly loose term in many real world religions, and I bet the same could hold true here. I use it interchangeably to mean either just the spiritual aspect, or the combination of spirit, cognitive and physical aspects.

[Otto Didact]

To clarify/modify my earlier statements, I'm positive that there is some amount of damage done to the spirit through a Shardblade severing, although the point is that this damage is done through the severing of the Cognitive link. A body and a spirit are pretty inextricably bonded together with Identity, so severing that bond is likely to mangle both in the process to some degree. The body becomes spiritually "handicapped" (i.e. dead), and the spiritweb has chunks of it ripped off (which I interpret as the black smoke).

Kurkistan, I appreciate your commentary, and I think it's pretty valid, but on the whole I don't feel like your concerns disprove my theory. Sure, they present challenges, but I don't think we know enough about Nightblood and the nature of the Spiritual Realm to say for certain. I would be all for the "Shardblades cut the spirit directly" theory, except for the difference between inanimate objects and living things. If the Blade cuts the spirit and that causes the death of a living thing without touching it physically, shouldn't it do the same thing to a rock--killing the spirit of the rock without cutting it in half? I don't know that the semantics of "soul" are terribly important. Clearly there are contradictory meanings. I mean, Soulcasting seems to involve convincing the Cognitive aspect of an object to change.

Anyway, I'm glad there's room for discussion! Thanks for your responses, Kurkistan and PM.

Edit: also thanks to Isomere and shardbearer!

Edited May 15, 2013 by Paydirt

[Satsuoni]

Hm? Did someone invoke my name in vain? ... Ah, I see, not in vain. Carry on

Anyway, to topic:

Your theory is ok, but it does not seem to address the issue at hand:  why does Shardblade work differently on living and dead things?

If the Identity is cut off, shouldn't the limb also fall off, like a rock cut in half? What is the difference? In both cases, Identity (not realmatically) would be cut, which should reflect as separation in the physical realm. Soulcasting, for example, doesn't seem to be affected by the small fact that the target happens to be human - a rock is a rock, organics soulcast into rock is still rock.

 

Now, I have a theory about that (and I do believe in Shardblade being Spiritual weapon). I'll try to be brief.

 First, Cosmere gravity is Spiritual. It is quite possible that electromagnetic, etc forces are too. They are, to an extent, what forms Spiritual component of a common rock. They are also, compared to human Spiritual presence, relatively weak. So the Shardblade, which has a strong, blade-like presence in Spiritual realm, would shear through those connections, cleaving rock in half. Something like Shardplate, however, is too dense. It will rebuff Shardblade and shatter after several hits. Living things, however, have additional Spiritual layer which corresponds to the same physical location as the body. The Shardblade damages that, and, in Spiritual, gets stuck/rebounds without reaching physical connections. This looks like a blade "fuzzing", as its Physical/spiritual components dissociate for a moment. A few more hits would probably shear the limb off.

[Senor Feesh]

 A few more hits would probably shear the limb off.

 

I'm pretty sure it would; after all a dead Greatshell is sliced as easily as a rock, but a living one just suffers from limb-death.

[Satsuoni]

I'm pretty sure it would; after all a dead Greatshell is sliced as easily as a rock, but a living one just suffers from limb-death.

Well, dead, yes. The thing is, I am pretty sure there was no scene of somebody trying to hack a single limb off a living human - after all, if he can't use it, there is not much point of working on that during battle. Also, we don't know what happens to the limbs after - are they dead enough to rot, for example, or just kind of paralyzed, etc. Hence, doubt. (pretty sure, though)

[Senor Feesh]

Well, dead, yes. The thing is, I am pretty sure there was no scene of somebody trying to hack a single limb off a living human - after all, if he can't use it, there is not much point of working on that during battle. Also, we don't know what happens to the limbs after - are they dead enough to rot, for example, or just kind of paralyzed, etc. Hence, doubt. (pretty sure, though)

 

Yeah, sorry, wasn't trying to imply that we had evidence of this, just that I agree with you on that count - it seems very likely.

[Satsuoni]

Yeah, sorry, wasn't trying to imply that we had evidence of this, just that I agree with you on that count - it seems very likely.

No worries. I was afraid I was unclear is all. Overclarification is my bad habit

[Otto Didact]

Huh, that makes a lot of sense, Satsuoni. I like the idea of severing electromagnetic bonds. However, my gut just can't quite agree that that's what's going on when a Blade cuts a rock. I have no hard evidence, just a personal inclination. But what does my gut know, anyway? I do agree that we'd have a much better idea if we knew what actually happens to a limb when it's Shardblade-severed.

In answer to your question of why an arm doesnt fall off while a rock gets sliced--my idea is that an arm-slice severs a sort of cognitive "nerve" that allows the arm to see itself as part of--and be controlled by--the individual. The arm is very used to being part of the body, whereas a rock is pretty used to having its cognitive identity changed and doesnt identify itself as an integral part of any whole, so it's not as easy to physically sever the arm as it is to physically sever the rock, just by cutting the cognitive link holding the two together. Kind of like a Forgery that doesn't take--the arm has a hard time "believing" that it suddenly isn't part of its body anymore, even though that cognitive nerve has been cut.

Well, that's how I explain it in the confines of my theory, anyway. I'm sure we'll all be surprised in some way when Brandon comes out and tells us what's really going on, but it's fun to extrapolate the bits tha we have and try to make it fit into Realmatics.

As an aside, if Shardblades really do cut those spiritual "scientific" bonds like you theorize, wouldn't it be cool if you could cut someone's spiritual gravitational bond with a Blade? I can just see Adolin out on the Shattered Plains, sending Parshendi floating willy-nilly off into space.

[Phantom Monstrosity]

Note that 'carapace' counts as nonliving, even on a living greatshell.

 

I believe you could actually use a shardblade to shave.

Edited May 16, 2013 by Phantom Monstrosity

[Otto Didact]

Haha, or to clip your toenails.

[Shardbearer]

Note that 'carapace' counts as nonliving, even on a living greatshell.

 

I believe you could actually use a shardblade to shave.

 

Not that you would want one of those things anywhere near any important organs!

[Satsuoni]

We know some things: (from Reddit ama)

Kurkistan: Does a limb that has been "severed" by a Shardblade have any Hemalurgic bindpoints? If the same limb was then cut off more conventionally, would a Bloodmaker ferring be able to grow it back?

 

Brandon: A severed Shardblade limb needs repair to the soul before it would function again. A Bloodmaker would be able to heal it without needing to grow it back.

Whatever that means.

I am still pretty convinced that "soul" here refers to Spiritual entity, though that can be debated.

As for gravity - I am relatively sure those bonds would regenerate, the same as the rock can (in theory) be made whole again if you push halves close enough... in vacuum... before they are contaminated... without breaking it further. For gravity, you are already close enough, and the link is huge enough, so the effect will probably be insignificant.

[Leuthie]

Brandon seems to refer to soul when he's talking about parts of people outside the Physical. So soul refers to both Cognitive and/or Spiritual.

[Kurkistan]

Brandon seems to refer to soul when he's talking about parts of people outside the Physical. So soul refers to both Cognitive and/or Spiritual.

 

Or it depends on the context, which is annoying, but not insurmountable. In certain contexts, he talks about the "soul" as both (afterlife), in certain contexts he talks about it as the Cognitive ("poopspren"), in certain contexts he talks about it as Spiritual (Hemalurgy).

[Otto Didact]

It seems like there's an important distinction between objects and living things. The soul of an object is the ideal that it aims to emulate, filtered through its Cognitive perception of itself, whereas the soul of a person is his actual spiritweb and sDNA, which is nailed down to his physical form by identity.