Gaming the System in Forging

[Phantom Monstrosity]

I don't really think there's enough additional evidence to be presented to convince either of us, so we can drop it until Brandon lets more info about resealing slip.

[Kurkistan he/him]

Fair enough. I do think there's more to be said about the nature of Resealing, though (if you approach it from the "it's Forging" side, at least). Don't be surprised if I thread this later. . .

[WeiryWriter he/him]

I'm sorry Phantom but could you find a quote where Shai says bloodsealing is a part of Forgery?  I don't remember anything of the sort, in fact I remember her being quite expressive about them being very different things.

[Phantom Monstrosity]

I'm sorry Phantom but could you find a quote where Shai says bloodsealing is a part of Forgery?  I don't remember anything of the sort, in fact I remember her being quite expressive about them being very different things.

 

Shai hissed softly as the Bloodsealer removed something from within his robes. A crude soulstamp created from a bone. His “pets” would also be bone, Forgeries of human life crafted from the skeletons of the dead.

 

 

I suspect if Shai went to Elantris she'd say the entire city was a giant soulstamp.

Edited June 21, 2013 by Phantom Monstrosity

[Thought]

Sorry to open a new line of thought while still needing to address your previous post, Kurk, but the discussion of resealing is quite interesting and, I think, might ultimately bring us back to amputation.

 

Anywho, resealing seems to be forgery that targets a different aspect of an object than forging does (but is still the same magic system). Or to put it another way, Shai forges a person's soul while resealing forges a person's body.

 

Shai makes it clear that she neither has studied nor performs resealing. Given that imperial resealers also appear to be different individuals than those who forge the imperial decorations, this seems to be a profession-wide division. But we have word of Sanderson that resealing and forging are the same, so we must conclude that there are notable differences in technique or form that separates the two in-world. I think the Emperor provides us with an interesting example of this.

 

Why did healing his body not restore his soul? Indeed, why couldn't Shai have just forged the Emperor's past so that it thought it had never been attacked? And why could a resealer's forge be permanent while Shai's could not?

 

I suspect that the answer is two part. One, I suspect that Shai and the resealers are targeting different aspects of a person. Shai said that seals get rejected because a person growth and learns. If a resealing takes, then it seems that it isn't targeting the part of the person that grows and learns. Since we know that resealing does take permanently on a body, we can conclude that it is possible to target a person's body apart from their soul. Although, given that Shai, by targeting a soul, can manifest changes on a body, there is some overlap. We already know that souls and bodies can be somewhat separate (Sazed "resealed" Vin and Elend's bodies but couldn't do anything with their souls), so it might be that a body has its own identity/soul that persists as long as the body persists, while the person is a soul that views itself as having a body, but which can persist after that body perishes. So, two souls: one for the "person" and one of the "body." I'd propose that a resealer targets the body's soul, while a forger targets a person's soul.

 

To extrapolate across the cosmere, I suspect resealing could, for example, restore the structure of one of Kalad's phantoms' bodies yet not change its commands, but Shai's forging might be able to change its commands by targeting its awakened spirit (and probably also affect its physical form, since the two are related).

 

A resealer and forger might also target different aspects of a soul to be forged. I doubt a resealer can just change the past: it seems like a simple matter to forget the Emperor's body's past so that it wasn't hit (or that the injury was deflected by bone, or something else). But it's clear that the best resealers were required to heal the Emperor. Thus, just changing the past must not be enough. Or, more exactly, it must be more involved than just that. Perhaps because a muscle can be viewed as a muscle and not just part of a body, a resealer has to forge the muscle's soul, too, and so on and so forth. Resealers might be able to make more permanent changes because they are working on a very tiny level, while Shai's forging is less permanent because she's working at such a high level that the directions can't trickle down sufficiently to make everything permanent. Yet, as we saw, a resealer's forgeries can't trick up very far, either.

 

As an aside, I wonder if there is any similarity between Shai's forging the Emperor a new soul and mistwraiths being given a set of spikes. That is, was Shai's forgery unblocking the Emperor's body's access to its cognitive aspect?

[Kurkistan he/him]

Do we have WoB that Resealing is a part of Forging? Sure, he discusses it as if it were part of Forging, and has explitely said Bloodsealing is not Forging, but I can't recall a direct WoB saying "Resealing is Forging."

 

I can see a "two soul" discussion of people. It's akin to something that FlashWrogan brought up in the first thread that I tried to tackle Resealing in.

 

I don't think we need to quite so far as you suggest, though. No need to wrangle each muscle's soul into obedience, I don't think. I also don't think that the longevity of Resealings comes from their granularity, as we know that Resealings that don't conform with the body's conception of its own health will be burned off.

 

More likely, changes to a person's past and a person's soul can have some incidental affect on the body, while changes to a body's past and soul are limited to the body just as the body. Just as the mind rules the body, then, the soul of the person rules over the soul of the body, and so cannot be swayed by the body alone--at least not in this case. Also, as an aside, things are probably a bit more muddy than we're presenting it. The Cognitive aspect, at least, seems to overlap both the body and the mind.

 

As for why Resealers need to know muscles and whatnot, it could just be the nature of the game. The body is a bit busy going "OH SWEET ADONALSIUM, THERE'S A HOLE IN MY BRAIN!!!" and could very well just need some very specific instructions to tell it how it is whole again along with how the past was different in order to justify it. Just as Shai couldn't just say "hey wall, you had a painter here who painted you, now you're a painting," a Resealer needs to baby-step the body back to its proper form before it can be "locked in" by the approval of the Cognitive aspect.

 

It seems, then, that the body's Cognitive aspect doesn't do anything to help the job along while your doing the Resealing; instead just making the judgement call at the end of the process. And this makes a certain amount of sense. After all, this isn't AonDor or Feruchemical gold where you're just pouring Health into the body and telling it to heal: Forgery changes the past of objects to change their presents, it isn't really set up for Healing. It's energy goes into manifesting its specific changes, and is simply not of the right type or being applied properly to simply be handed over to the Cognitive aspect to do with what it will.

 

EDIT: Actually, the more I think about it, the more I think this second point is the kicker. Forging is just not optimized for Healing. It simply isn't. Where Feruchemical gold, Regrowth, AonDor, and even Divine Breath (though that one is weird) are all perfectly fine just pouring power on and seeing what happens, Forging has this very odd requirement that you have the slightest idea what you're doing. It's like how Healing would work in a "hard fantasy" setting where we didn't have Realmatics to help us out.

 

Because of this, I'm fairly sure that the above is an adequate explanation for the oddities of Resealing: Resealing is more of a hack than a proper part of the magic system, a delightful consequence of the way that stamps are rejected which allows a very carefully written Forgery that applies to the body to squeak by and be incorporated rather than burned off.

 

---

 

I doubt that there is a correspondence with Kandra. It's quite clear throughout the book that Shai is making a new soul out of whole cloth, not simply reawakening the old. We even have a handful of instances where we are bashed over the head with this, IIRC. Not only would it be going against one of the main themes of the book ("imitation" as a whole and worthy art in and of itself), but we'd have to go against a large amount of in-text opinion. I think the body already has access to the Cognitive, just no motive force or core Identity to do anything about it.

Edited June 24, 2013 by Kurkistan

[Pechvarry]

Why is it that Aons only need drawn once, and their effects linger (iirc), while forgeries require a persistent stamp?

 

I feel like there's some "duh" truth we're missing that separates which of Sel's forms need continual renewal and which ones only need instantiated.  It seems like Resealing crosses that line.  Like, for all we know, they carved small stamps inside the emperor's head, and they will heal normally.

[Kurkistan he/him]

There's a rather easy answer to that, actually: As a rule, the only Aons whose effects linger are Aons that linger. Traveling, fire-blasts, etc. are all single-effect, but you can carve an Aon for "light" into a wall and it'll keep glowing. Healing is different, but, then, it always is.

 

Actually, AonDor is interesting in that it seems capable of both generalized "be better" magic--as when Raoden is first starting out--and more specific "do this to this section of the body" magic--as when Raoden started to get better at Healing. Essentially the difference between Healing as we know it and Resealing, except persistent. But we also know that when things go wrong with the second kind, things go wrong, permanently. That is not the case with Resealing. I suppose, then, that AonDor is capable of permanent changes to Cognitive aspects. Interesting...

 

-Actually, hold a moment. Dilaf's wife might be an incredibly special case (being taken by the Shaod the moment she was Healed or something, and so getting Reodified, perhaps. Or maybe something else). I don't think we actually have enough evidence yet to suggest that AonDor is so special that it can permanently change Cognitive perceptions of health. But, then again, maybe it should be able to...

 

--Aha! Who cares what the Cognitive thinks about a new state of health?! While Forgeries are necessarily impermanent in all but the most special cases, and so the body is capable of "throwing them off", AonDor could be considered more along the line of surgery; it doesn't care about whether your body thinks it has a working heart, because you have one now. While the stamps of Forgeries are made to be taken off, the food an Elantrian makes out of thin air isn't going to pop back into nonexistence any time soon.

 

---BECAUSE Forging alters Spiritual/Cognitive aspects and then lets its effects trickle down to the Physical, while AonDor brute-forces everything in the Physical Realm and lets the other two Realms just deal with it. I give you... AonDor: The most thuggish magic in the Cosmere! 

 

*Takes a Breath*

 

Also, I'm unsure as to where you're going with "they carved stamps inside his head." 

Edited June 25, 2013 by Kurkistan

[Pechvarry]

If nothing else, at least my question seems to have inspired a Kurkistan Brainstorm, so that's something.

/>Also, I'm unsure as to where you're going with "they carved stamps inside his head."

Just that if resealing is at all like forgery, the patient would need a stamp. The best way to hide it would be inside the wound, which then closes around it.

Though I guess that means it needn't fade. Maybe everyone who's ever been resealed has internal scar tissue in the shape of a stamp.

[Kurkistan he/him]

Ah, I see. I actually think the stamp just "goes away" after being applied: either the 26 hour limit burns it off, but its effects linger (because they matched up with the Cognitive aspect) or a successful Resealing is just immediately incorporated into the body.

 

I don't think just carving a stamp into an object itself will have the effect of making it permanent. It doesn't really go with the system-inspiration of Chinese stamps and smacks of AonDor.

[Satsuoni he/him]

It does kind of mesh with my question of blood vessels forming a seal. Granted, the blood vessels are too squishy, but the bone isn't... And properly placed it would wet itself with blood and reapply on the soft tissue...Possibly... I don't think that is how resealing works though... Maybe it is just healing? Seal creates a healthy body, body continues to grow and heal as if you pulled pieces together, and when the seal goes, enough change and normal healing has happened so the body won't fall apart again? Like advanced stitches.

[Kurkistan he/him]

I don't quite think it works like "advanced stitches". Brains aren't in the habit of healing back destroyed tissue: ever. And it's kind of odd to talk about the body healing "behind the scene" when it doesn't really have anywhere to do its work. I doubt that Shais desk kept "stealth rotting" underneath her stamp.

[Phantom Monstrosity]

Brains aren't in the habit of healing back destroyed tissue: ever.

That is not exactly the case.

[Kurkistan he/him]

That is not exactly the case.

 

But, but... Wikipedia...

 

It's my (ignorant) understanding that the brain partitions off damaged tissue, then other parts of the brain start taking up their functions (neuroplasticity or some such). That's not the same as making a new brain again from having a crossbow bolt go through it (which would probably result in something more akin to an explosion than a "wound".

Edited June 25, 2013 by Kurkistan

[Isomere]

Neuroplasticity is a real phenomenon and works both for brain injury and for body injury.

• Body Injury: If you cut off a monkey's finger, the neurons that previously controlled that finger get reassigned and start to control the two fingers on either side. If someone is born blind, the neurons that most people use for sight get assigned to interpret tactile instead of visual input. They can literally "see" with their fingers.
• Brain Injury: After a stroke people often lose the ability to speak. Over time they slowly re-learn to speak by training other parts of their brain to perform the tasks that previously were handled by now dead tissue. 

 

One little known fact, adult brains do continue to create new neurons, but the problem is getting them to migrate to the right place and then connect their axons and dendrites correctly to perform a task.  In a developing brain, the SEQUENCE of growth, chemokines and myelination is strictly regulated and any disturbance in the sequence creates brain damage. Once your fully mature, the new neurons don't have the same signals to direct their growth. 

 

Another problem is glial cell proliferation. Any time the brain is injured there are these pesky cells called Astrocytes that form a huge scar. This creates a physical barrier that prevents axons from growing back through the area of damage and reconnecting to their target.

 

A third barrier to brain regrowth is Myelin. This stuff insulates the axon and helps prevent the electricity from leaking out into the rest of the brain. Unfortunately, different cells create different types of myelin. Brain myelin comes from oligodendrocytes and myelin in your arms and legs comes from Schwann cells. Schwann cell myelin actually helps the severed nerve axons regrow in the correct direction so they reconnect with the right target. In the brain though, the myelin actively inhibits axon growth and makes it virtually impossible to regrown severed connections. 

[Thought]

Okay, this is a lot. Now I know what everyone else feels like when they are confronted with my posts

 

I'm pretty sure you got worse/longer when we were discussing how feruchemical storage works.

 

First off, the window thinking itself to be beautiful was a matter of acknowledged poeticalness on Shai's part, so is a bit shaky, and we oughtn't to use such a source as our sole justification for "desires" as important for consideration above and beyond what we already know about Cognitive aspects.

 

I can understanding your hesitation, except the very fact that Shai thinks she's being too poetic is actually more of a reason to think she's hit onto something. It shows an uncommon level of self-awareness and a willingness to critique her own assumptions. However, poetics isn't a good justification for discarding a supposition (after all, why can't realmatics be poetic?)

 

Furthermore, in this case, Shai's "gut" reaction is actually something worth listening to. This might seem to be an about-face on my earlier comments, but let me explain. If I appeal to your gut reaction to make an argument, then you should disregard your gut reaction because I am appealing to your emotions. If I appeal to my own gut reaction to make an argument to you, then you should disregard my gut reaction because that is an appeal to authority fallacy. But what's the difference between an appeal to authority fallacy and a legitimate appeal to authority? The authority being appealed to: none of us are experts, so appealing to us is fallacious, but Shai is an expert. Or, in other words, she knows enough about forging that her intuition is likely to be correct (much as if a noble laureate has an intuitive prediction about an experiment: they know enough to make a reliable guess, while their summer undergrad lab helper, not so much).

 

I should also note that Shai ascribes the change to the window's desire twice, actually, and discounts only one. At the start of the chapter, when she's giving the history of what happened, she says that when the window was broken, no one repaired it as it was "meant to be." How something should be is very subjective: clearly, no one viewed the window as meaning to be stained glass, or else in the Imperial palace of all places, that would have happened. It's the window, then, that meant itself to be stained glass. It was actively rejecting its present identity (as a non-stained glass window) for an older identity. It had a desire for one identity over another.

 

If it is just identity that's important, then how it was is how it should see itself. But there's a desire to be something in particular (even if that is an old identity)

 

 

 Also, I think you're giving a bit too much weight to "positive" conceptions of oneself (I'm straying away from talk of "desires" for the reasons I've already given). If a body conceives of itself as suffering from a chronic illness, it will fight off a stamp that tries to change it. This is yet another reason why talk of "desires" is misleading: does the body truly want to be ill and ill-functioning, or is that simply how it sees itself?

 

You're the one reading a positive connotation into being beautiful, I'm just arguing that there is an active force (which we lose by replacing "desire" for identity). The window desires to be beautiful, so it resists stamps that don't take that into consideration. I would say that yes, the congnitive/spiritual aspect of a body desires to have a chronic illness. Why should it see the illness as good or bad? That's our judgment, but why should the other aspects of the body share in that judgment?

 

We might rephrase this as saying that an object desires to be true to its identity, but that desire, the push back, is important. "Seeing" is far too passive.

 

I'm not sure I entirely follow your objection to comparing the window's desire with the Emperor's desire. First, let me point out the context that Sanderson himself provides: he bookends the discussion of stamps in Day 30 with Shai figuring out the window's desires at the start, and failing to get the Emperor's desires right at the end of it (the rest of the chapter serves as the starting bookend for Shai's relationship with Gatona, which ends when he burns her notes). The juxstapoisitioning indicates that we are supposed to understand one failure in the light of the other's success.

 

Also, I would object to the claim that the Emperor's motivation being a matter of historical fact. That something motivated him is clear, but the problem is, chances are he didn't fully understand his own motivations, and certainly no one else did. If it's not recorded, it's not history. No part of the Emperor's cognitive aspect should have identified itself for the specific reason. The desire, though, that's more likely something that would be remembered, even if he didn't remember what had caused it, because desires are emotion and emotions make for powerful memories. Shai's task wasn't so much to find out why the Emperor became the Emperor, but rather what produced the desire that motivated him to become.

 

Though I've just spent and inordinate amount of time bashing your word choice, you still raise a valid point when we recast your arguments in terms of identity. Yes, being the Emperor and the reasons he accepted are a very deeply held part of Ashraven's identity. Just like being a Forger is a fundamental part of Shai's identity. But I can well imagine that it could have been changed, were that to be Shai's goal, just as she can change herself. We'll get into relative difficulty in a bit.

 

Here I must reject your emphasis on identity, and will again return to the window to demonstrate why. If the window deeply held Stained Glass as part of its identity, why did it need Shai? Forgery works by changing the cognitive/spiritual aspects, and thereby producing a physical difference. If the window deeply identified itself as Stained Glass, then its own cognitive aspect should have been able to rearrange its physical. That didn't happen. Indeed, that never happens, to anything: identity is relatively weak, it changes sufficiently in the cognitive realm to easily and immediately accept and incorporate physical changes.

 

To apply this more directly to the Emperor, if you are right, then Shai was wrong. The Emperor identified himself as Emperor. Even when he was attacked, that identity remained unchanged. An emperor in a coma is still an emperor. An emperor without a soul is still an emperor. And an emperor with a new soul is still an emperor. If identity is important, then this isn't a point of the Emperor's soul that she'd have needed to forge: that identity was already there.

 

We can see this better with the window. Even if it once identified itself as a stained glass window, it was now a regular window, had been seen as a regular window, etc. We might suppose that it had a dual identity, one of what it had been, and one of what it was, but the point is, being a regular window was part of its current identity, the part that was manifesting in the physical realm. That alone indicates it was the stronger identity. You say that the stained glass part of its identity was strong enough to prevent the forgery to take without Shai considering it. But, if the stained glass identity was strong, why didn't the non-stained glass identity, which was stronger, react when Shai removed that part of it's history? By changing it from non-stained glass to stained glass, Shai was ignoring part of its history. If ignoring one part could prevent a forgery, why could ignoring a different part allow it to happen?

 

I doubt Shai knows how to install fireplaces, build beds, or put in floors, but she was able to Forge those easily enough.

 

Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if she does know how to do all those, conceptually at least.

 

I used to publish with a content mill. It was one of those "how-to" websites. I'm sure at some point one of their authors wrote about something that they actually knew how to do, but that would have rare. Most of the time, the writers just did a quick google search, compiled what random (hopefully reputable) things other people said, and called it a day. From my time in this, I "know" how to do things like build a bookshelf. I can't actually do that, mind you. I suspect that would be enough for forging, however.

 

I think we're still clashing on the level of granularity Forging demands. I think it's a rather straight "what I want changed" <-> "what happened so it changed that way" relationship, with little concern for the interval.

 

Let's consider the mural: did Shai define every brush stroke as part of the "what happened so it changed that way"? We both seem agreed as to the procedural nature of forging, so no. It's more of a "what were the processes that lead to this change." You might notice my theme on movement and motion. It's not "what happened" that I care about (and in turn think  the magic system uses) but rather how things happen.

 

Or, in other words, its "how" not "what."

 

The complexity of the "how" things changed is where I see the complexity comes in. It isn't sufficient to say that the Emperor decided to become the Emperor because of X: anyone could decide to become Emperor because of X. It has to be more person: why did this man become Emperor because of X? What was it about X that motivated him? And, of course, that motivation didn't stop there: how did it continue to influence him?

 

Since we've been talking brain, allow me to try to draw an analogy. Oxytocin is a hormone that is important in forming social bonds. By saying that we just care about what the change is, that's like saying we just care about the fact that oxytocin is there. But, oxytocin is released when we see a baby, it's involved in milk letdown, and it's part of orgasm. WHY the body releases oxytocin is often more important than the fact that oxytocin has been released.

 

So moving on to Bob. Changing his heart so that it wasn't weak would likely change his present, based on how important that was to his development. If a weak heart prevented him from pursuing his dreams, then fixing his heart would have allowed him to pursue those dreams, and should influence his present. If Shai were to forge his heart strong, I suspect she'd have to take his dreams and desires into account (even if just to know that his heart fix wouldn't change those). For a resealer, since it seems that they focus on the body, rather than the person, I doubt that fixing the heart would influence Bob.

 

Shai's eyes, in contrast, likely wouldn't have made much of a difference to her life. Wearing glasses or not wearing glasses, the process of her life would have largely remained the same.

 

Which brings us back to the window: Shai doesn't have to know everything about it's past to in order to forge it, but she does have to know the important things about it's past, because those things reveal the process of the window's desires. Look to what Shai focuses on in her forge of the Emperor's soul: it's not facts she cares about, but the why behind those facts.

 

Now, Bob's heart condition may or may not be as important to him as having a particular limb. That will depend on Bob. But we do know that limbs are important to people. Having one or not is going to be a fairly large life changing event: having a heart condition may or may not be a life changing event. So, limbs are going to be harder to forge away because they are life changing than giving Bob a heart condition (especially if his life would have never been effected by that heart condition).

 

To note, I will concede that a resealer might have an easier time of ampu-forging a limb than someone like Shai. But then, as per the original supposition, the amputation is really only useful for someone like Shai. Or in other words, if you are forging yourself, you have to care about your life process. But if you are forging your body, you might be able to get away with that. Unfortunately, resealing is too poorly understood to really say for sure, but I suspect regardless!

 

As to the plausibility/necessity of "maintenance notes" on stamps, the more I think, the more I doubt this. I talk more about this below (second to last reply-block), but it all boils down to circumstances. If a Forged object needs to be told that it was maintained, then that opens up some rather unpleasant doors on what else it needs to be told.

 

To note, the unpleasant doors seem to have already been opened: Shai said that its easier to turn gold into lead than lead into gold because "inventing a history for a bar of gold where someone had adulterated it with lead... well, that was a plausible lie." You'll note, even for that one change, Shai indicates she'd have to create an entire history, not just a single switch to flip.

 

Does Shai have to account for every person who touched the chain? Certainly not. For one, only one or two people along the lines will notice the defect (familiarity breeds indifference). But also, she just has to construct a plausible history. If the easiest history will be accounting for each individual to make a mistake, sure, but it might also be how all those people were circumvented in one fell swoop (say, the chain came in a load of three thousand, and no one's going to carefully inspect three thousand manacles, link by link).

 

I've already established rather well (if I may say so) that Forged objects seem not to care about the immediate circumstances in which they "come into being". Sure, a pile of ash wouldn't have been left sitting there for three months. Neither would a rotten bed that someone was supposed to be sleeping in for the last year. The bed simply would not have been left there, just as, on a larger scale, Shai wouldn't have been given her room or many of its contents in their final states (of niceness, not post-jailbreak). I've already cited some other example in my previous post, but it boils down to say that what "ought to have happened" in the interval doesn't seem to matter to a Forgery.

 

I agree on the "come into being" part, but my comment was on its history. A bed can well sit for ages in an unfit state (again, remember that it was useable after being forged, just fragile. Shai still had to fiddle with it to make it collapse). That's a believable part of its history. Ashes never cleaned up is far less believable, not because there are ashes now, but because there were ashes left in the fake history for three years. Look at Warrior Shai: Shai couldn't just make her be a part of that warrior culture, she had to take into account how that warrior culture would have reacted to her (resentment, attempts to kill her, then eventual acceptance). "What ought to have happened in the interval" seems to matter a great deal to a Forgery.

 

2) A bit off, I think. Unless I'm missing something, this is the first time you've mentioned this teleological argument, and I find it interesting. But still wrong as applies to Forgery. Shai murdered her bed. She stole its very purpose. But she left it as a bed. So teleology seems to have very little impact on how objects change over their lives, as with a once-functional bed rotting.

 

Again, the bed worked as a bed, but a fragile one, and one she had to physically, non-forgically, corrupt further. She corrupted the bed, but didn't steal it's purpose. The very fact that she forged it up to a point, but then have to shred the mattress to take it further, indicates that there is a limit. Besides, the teleological statement is just one I pulled from the book. Shai's quite clear that a window knows what stained glass windows are supposed to be, and that Gatona know's what the Emperor's soul is supposed to be. Likewise, lead knows what gold is supposed to be... and it knows that its not that. If the world changed and lead was suddenly worth more than gold, it would likely become harder to forge gold into lead than Shai's present world.

 

Now, questions of initial composition are more engaging here. Shai couldn't turn chains into soap because no one would make chains out of soap, but she could make a chain (or a wall, for that matter) have been made with a weak link. So the it seems that objects needn't have actually ever been functional towards their purpose, but simply that it be plausible that they be created or enter into a flawed state.

 

Not at all, it just requires that the change was never critical to the thing's existence. Shai couldn't forge the chain so that the lock didn't work: she'd have to forge a weakness that she could then non-forgically exploit. If no one ever knew of the weakness, no one could have ever exploited it before, so the weakness would have never become a problem. The chain would have continued to be functional towards its purpose. Again to the bed: Shai didn't forge in the cuts she made to the mattress, she cut it herself. Why? Perhaps precisely because the bed had to remain functional.

 

P.S. On rereading, I see that I made a small mistake in reading you. Unless I'm also mistaken in my memory, you started off by saying that amputating a limb through Forgery was flat out impossible. In this post, though, you imply that, if you account for the consequences, it is still possible. Sorry for acting as if the former was still the case, if my new understanding is correct.

 

Basically, my stance is that it's possible in theory, just not practice. For example, it might be theoretically possible for an Awakener to Awaken the planet itself, but in practice, there are far too many difficulties to actually overcome. But yes, I didn't make this clear in my original post (because the end result's the same).

[Kurkistan he/him]

I'm pretty sure you got worse/longer when we were discussing how feruchemical storage works.

 

So this is revenge! 

 

I can understanding your hesitation, except the very fact that Shai thinks she's being too poetic is actually more of a reason to think she's hit onto something. It shows an uncommon level of self-awareness and a willingness to critique her own assumptions. However, poetics isn't a good justification for discarding a supposition (after all, why can't realmatics be poetic?)

 

So because Shai explicitely rejects her musing as inaccurate and over-poetic, we have reason to accept that very poetic musing? I can understand that we have reason to accept everything else she says in view of this self-awareness, but we should probably include her dismissal of her poetic musings in that "probably worth listening to" category.

 

Sure, Realmatics can be poetic. Our best Realmatic Philosopher saying it isn't is a good reason not to think it is, though. Or at the very worst leaves us neutral. It's not exactly compelling evidence.

 

Furthermore, in this case, Shai's "gut" reaction is actually something worth listening to. This might seem to be an about-face on my earlier comments, but let me explain. If I appeal to your gut reaction to make an argument, then you should disregard your gut reaction because I am appealing to your emotions. If I appeal to my own gut reaction to make an argument to you, then you should disregard my gut reaction because that is an appeal to authority fallacy. But what's the difference between an appeal to authority fallacy and a legitimate appeal to authority? The authority being appealed to: none of us are experts, so appealing to us is fallacious, but Shai is an expert. Or, in other words, she knows enough about forging that her intuition is likely to be correct (much as if a noble laureate has an intuitive prediction about an experiment: they know enough to make a reliable guess, while their summer undergrad lab helper, not so much).

 

By the love of Grayskull man, you're saying my point.   That was the entirety of my argument in favor of gut feelings on the other thread. To go even more off topic, the thrust of my argument was that we are the experts on Realmatics, and so our intuitions are worth paying attention to. *cries in a corner*

 

So far as Shai and her gut goes, I would be fine with this if Shai did not immediately reject her musings. They're not even framed as intuitions, and she goes on to not credit them for the remainder of the book. I'm fine with trusting Shai's expertise (in general), but you should too, and her expertise said her poetry was wrong.

 

If the Noble laureate biologist has a musing about rabbits evolving to be fluffy because they wanted to be cuddled, we're quite right to may more attention to the part where he laughs at himself directly afterwards.

 

Now you could try to frame this as Shai's musings actually being a hint from Brandon, but that's a whole 'nother ball of wax.

 

I should also note that Shai ascribes the change to the window's desire twice, actually, and discounts only one. At the start of the chapter, when she's giving the history of what happened, she says that when the window was broken, no one repaired it as it was "meant to be." How something should be is very subjective: clearly, no one viewed the window as meaning to be stained glass, or else in the Imperial palace of all places, that would have happened. It's the window, then, that meant itself to be stained glass. It was actively rejecting its present identity (as a non-stained glass window) for an older identity. It had a desire for one identity over another.

 

Is the "meant to be" part the second time you say she ascribes the window a desire? Because I don't read it as such.

 

If it is just identity that's important, then how it was is how it should see itself. But there's a desire to be something in particular (even if that is an old identity)

 

...

 

You're the one reading a positive connotation into being beautiful, I'm just arguing that there is an active force (which we lose by replacing "desire" for identity). The window desires to be beautiful, so it resists stamps that don't take that into consideration. I would say that yes, the congnitive/spiritual aspect of a body desires to have a chronic illness. Why should it see the illness as good or bad? That's our judgment, but why should the other aspects of the body share in that judgment?

 

We might rephrase this as saying that an object desires to be true to its identity, but that desire, the push back, is important. "Seeing" is far too passive.

 

Ah, sorry for accusing you of being positive .

 

I discuss this further below, but I think a passive force is just what we need, seeing as Cognitive Identities need the help of magic systems if they're ever to impose themselves on Physical forms. So yes, the Identity is rather passive, is a case of an object "seeing itself" as something, but being incapable of action. Until you pour on some Investiture and the magic happens.

 

I'm not sure I entirely follow your objection to comparing the window's desire with the Emperor's desire. First, let me point out the context that Sanderson himself provides: he bookends the discussion of stamps in Day 30 with Shai figuring out the window's desires at the start, and failing to get the Emperor's desires right at the end of it (the rest of the chapter serves as the starting bookend for Shai's relationship with Gatona, which ends when he burns her notes). The juxstapoisitioning indicates that we are supposed to understand one failure in the light of the other's success.

 

And/or we're just getting an outline of the magic system, showing how complex it is and how important properly understanding and modifying the core history and identity of an object is for a successful stamp.

 

Also, I would object to the claim that the Emperor's motivation being a matter of historical fact. That something motivated him is clear, but the problem is, chances are he didn't fully understand his own motivations, and certainly no one else did. If it's not recorded, it's not history. No part of the Emperor's cognitive aspect should have identified itself for the specific reason. The desire, though, that's more likely something that would be remembered, even if he didn't remember what had caused it, because desires are emotion and emotions make for powerful memories. Shai's task wasn't so much to find out why the Emperor became the Emperor, but rather what produced the desire that motivated him to become [Emperor].

 

"If it's not recorded, it's not history" is a bit quibbly, Thought. Okay, "personal history". It was recorded by the Emperor's soul and/or Cogntive aspect. It happened and it had important, long-lasting impacts on the Emperor. Just because he might not consciously hark back to his brother's death and regional flag every time he considers what his favorite color is doesn't mean that they weren't the reason he likes green, and I have no problem with some aspect of the Emperor recording/remembering this.

 

As for the rest, it's all based on a "desire based" conception of Forging that I find inaccurate, so I'll just focus on the broader points at other places in this reply.

 

 

Here I must reject your emphasis on identity, and will again return to the window to demonstrate why. If the window deeply held Stained Glass as part of its identity, why did it need Shai? Forgery works by changing the cognitive/spiritual aspects, and thereby producing a physical difference. If the window deeply identified itself as Stained Glass, then its own cognitive aspect should have been able to rearrange its physical. That didn't happen. Indeed, that never happens, to anything: identity is relatively weak, it changes sufficiently in the cognitive realm to easily and immediately accept and incorporate physical changes.

To apply this more directly to the Emperor, if you are right, then Shai was wrong. The Emperor identified himself as Emperor. Even when he was attacked, that identity remained unchanged. An emperor in a coma is still an emperor. An emperor without a soul is still an emperor. And an emperor with a new soul is still an emperor. If identity is important, then this isn't a point of the Emperor's soul that she'd have needed to forge: that identity was already there.

 

We can see this better with the window. Even if it once identified itself as a stained glass window, it was now a regular window, had been seen as a regular window, etc. We might suppose that it had a dual identity, one of what it had been, and one of what it was, but the point is, being a regular window was part of its current identity, the part that was manifesting in the physical realm. That alone indicates it was the stronger identity. You say that the stained glass part of its identity was strong enough to prevent the forgery to take without Shai considering it. But, if the stained glass identity was strong, why didn't the non-stained glass identity, which was stronger, react when Shai removed that part of it's history? By changing it from non-stained glass to stained glass, Shai was ignoring part of its history. If ignoring one part could prevent a forgery, why could ignoring a different part allow it to happen?

 

Perhaps I'm missing some deeper subtlety, and if so, please forgive me, but I find this line of argumentation unpersuasive.

 

Shai changes Cognitive/Spiritual aspects and give a nice dose of Investiture to make things go smoothly, I would imagine. Cognitive aspects don't rearrange the Physical because they simply lack the power to do so, but that does not mean that they just "change sufficiently in the cognitive realm to easily and immediately accept and incorporate physical changes" without a fight. The Cognitive aspects sticks around for awhile, doggedly insisting that an object ought to be other than it is.

 

We know this is how things work: When you magically Heal someone, you are "healing back to the form of yourself; that you know yourself as, as the world knows you as." Despite the fact that your body currently lacks a certain number of fingers, or a brain, or a body (as with Miles) in the Physical, it's Cognitive Identity is still whole. That's just how things work.

 

Even an amputatee without access to magical healing will still conceive of himself as whole for at least some period of time. This doesn't mean that his body isn't, in actuality, missing a limb, nor does it mean that he and those around him do not know this, at least intellectually. It does, however, mean that his Cognitive Identity is still that of a limbed man.

 

This conception of health is not sufficient to regrow a limb, though, and so the limb does not grow back. It's the same exact thing with Shai's window. It's Identity is as a stained glass window, but it's Physical form does not match up to that Identity. Because wishing can't make things so, the window's Cognitive aspect has neither the power nor the impetus to impose the "proper" Identity on the window. It just doesn't have the oomph. Still quite simple.

 

But then Forging is kind enough to come along and give us some oomph. Now the (modified by the Forgery, to some extent) Cognitive aspect/Identity is licensed to impose itself on the window's Physical form. Ta da.

 

The window's period of being regular glass was not an issue because its Identity did not incorporate or accept this part of its history as rightly part of its self. Just as a man who loses an arm will still refuse to conceive of himself as de-limbed. It's not a matter of dueling Identities fighting it out in the Cognitive, but of an improper Physical aspect slowly corrupting a pure Cognitive Identity into being other than it was. With the window, the Cognitive had managed to hold out for long enough to still see itself as stained glass by the time Shai came along to rescue it.

 

As for the emperor seeing himself as emperor: your point? I said it was very important, not the only thing that mattered at all. You can't just stick a random soul in there and say "oh, by the way, you're an emperor" and then have that be enough to get it accepted. Just as Shai couldn't reasonably be expected remake her window into a full-scale replica of the Rose Window and justify it by saying, "well, the most important thing is that it's still stained glass." 

 

Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if she does know how to do all those, conceptually at least.

 

I used to publish with a content mill. It was one of those "how-to" websites. I'm sure at some point one of their authors wrote about something that they actually knew how to do, but that would have rare. Most of the time, the writers just did a quick google search, compiled what random (hopefully reputable) things other people said, and called it a day. From my time in this, I "know" how to do things like build a bookshelf. I can't actually do that, mind you. I suspect that would be enough for forging, however.

 

That's rather interesting, but wrong, I think. Gaotona and Shai make a point of the fact that she has the technical skill and know-how to have painted that mural perfectly, all by herself, if she'd just been given some paint and brushes. Having a general idea of it doesn't seem to cut it. 

 

Let's consider the mural: did Shai define every brush stroke as part of the "what happened so it changed that way"? We both seem agreed as to the procedural nature of forging, so no. It's more of a "what were the processes that lead to this change." You might notice my theme on movement and motion. It's not "what happened" that I care about (and in turn think  the magic system uses) but rather how things happen.

 

I may have to go all Formic on you here. Just off the top of my head as regards to the "desk vs. mural" debate, I would say that Shai's mural was actually an original work, never before seen. Neither she nor "the universe" had any idea what it would look like; neither had anything to copy off of. An attempt to access some "this artist's style" Form would probably result in some horrid mess, rather than artistry. So Shai needed to get a bit procedural. However, she/the universe knows a bit more about creating and/or maintaining more "generic" items, so Shai needn't provide nearly as much of the "how".

 

Or, in other words, its "how" not "what."

 

The complexity of the "how" things changed is where I see the complexity comes in. It isn't sufficient to say that the Emperor decided to become the Emperor because of X: anyone could decide to become Emperor because of X. It has to be more person: why did this man become Emperor because of X? What was it about X that motivated him? And, of course, that motivation didn't stop there: how did it continue to influence him?

 

So throw in some procedural generation in order to get your intended effects. I've been saying that Shai can go into as much or little detail as she wants to, and clearly such foundational events and Ashraven's reactions to them are the kind that require quite a lot of detail, if she wants to make anything but a homunculus. 

 

Which brings us back to the window: Shai doesn't have to know everything about it's past to in order to forge it, but she does have to know the important things about it's past, because those things reveal the process of the window's desires. Look to what Shai focuses on in her forge of the Emperor's soul: it's not facts she cares about, but the why behind those facts.

 

I say foundations of core identity, you say desires. Ball's in your court.

 

To note, the unpleasant doors seem to have already been opened: Shai said that its easier to turn gold into lead than lead into gold because "inventing a history for a bar of gold where someone had adulterated it with lead... well, that was a plausible lie." You'll note, even for that one change, Shai indicates she'd have to create an entire history, not just a single switch to flip.

 

No, she actually doesn't necessarily indicate this. Forms, my dear foe, Forms! "A plausible history" could very well be as simple as the desk's "plausible history" of "someone took care of it"; "Bill the unscrupulous treasurer adulterated this bar of gold" ought to work just as well, I think. A tad more than a switch to flip, but not by much.

 

Does Shai have to account for every person who touched the chain? Certainly not. For one, only one or two people along the lines will notice the defect (familiarity breeds indifference). But also, she just has to construct a plausible history. If the easiest history will be accounting for each individual to make a mistake, sure, but it might also be how all those people were circumvented in one fell swoop (say, the chain came in a load of three thousand, and no one's going to carefully inspect three thousand manacles, link by link).

 

I'll refer you to the point later in my previous reply where I proposed a fool-proof anti-Forger cell: Just pay attention very very carefully as a matter of course, and you win. Gaotona could have rolled in with some normal chains in a normal room and said "these chains have just been delivered under armed guard from a master smith, inspected by hand by 3 dozen other master smiths and the entire government, and is now being attached to you by my own hand with 5 loyal men watching to make sure I do it right. And we followed similar procedures with everything in this cell. Now you have fun for the next year, I have some tanning to do." You can and will go the extra mile with Forgers if you know you'll be holding one for any amount of time, and I think it's reasonable to say that Shai's captors in TES would have done the best anyone could have.

 

I agree on the "come into being" part, but my comment was on its history. A bed can well sit for ages in an unfit state (again, remember that it was useable after being forged, just fragile. Shai still had to fiddle with it to make it collapse). That's a believable part of its history. Ashes never cleaned up is far less believable, not because there are ashes now, but because there were ashes left in the fake history for three years. Look at Warrior Shai: Shai couldn't just make her be a part of that warrior culture, she had to take into account how that warrior culture would have reacted to her (resentment, attempts to kill her, then eventual acceptance). "What ought to have happened in the interval" seems to matter a great deal to a Forgery.

 

No, not really. That thing flat-out collapsed when evil-Striker hit it, falling into a pit in the floor, no less. I doubt Shai engineered it with anything but a hair trigger: her "rot" Forgery was strong enough to let her knock down a door that she temporarily whammied with the same stamp.

 

Shaizan is supposed to be a complete, thorough, and infinitely useful and real alternate personality for Shai. You have to account for these things. Just as Shai could have made the Emperor a robot if she chose not to go into all the details, I'm sure she could have made Shaizan less complex if she had so desired.

 

Again, the bed worked as a bed, but a fragile one, and one she had to physically, non-forgically, corrupt further. She corrupted the bed, but didn't steal it's purpose. The very fact that she forged it up to a point, but then have to shred the mattress to take it further, indicates that there is a limit. Besides, the teleological statement is just one I pulled from the book. Shai's quite clear that a window knows what stained glass windows are supposed to be, and that Gatona know's what the Emperor's soul is supposed to be. Likewise, lead knows what gold is supposed to be... and it knows that its not that. If the world changed and lead was suddenly worth more than gold, it would likely become harder to forge gold into lead than Shai's present world.

 

Actually, reading the passage, she Forged the bed frame and slashed the mattress: two separate objects. If you insist, I'll just say that she murdered the bed frame, and call it a day. I imagine that slashing the mattress with a knife was just easier than messing around with Forgery, while hacking at the bed frame to achieve a similar effect to her stamp would have been somewhat more difficult/obvious. She slashed the mattress, Forged the bed frame. Easier to slash than Forge a history where she slashed it, pure and simple.

 

So far as windows knowing windows and lead gold: Forms, again. I'm not sure you can justify your teleological approach from that, though given bed frame (and floor, and door, actually, even if that last one didn't stick) murder that has already been committed with Forgery.

 

Not at all, it just requires that the change was never critical to the thing's existence. Shai couldn't forge the chain so that the lock didn't work: she'd have to forge a weakness that she could then non-forgically exploit. If no one ever knew of the weakness, no one could have ever exploited it before, so the weakness would have never become a problem. The chain would have continued to be functional towards its purpose. Again to the bed: Shai didn't forge in the cuts she made to the mattress, she cut it herself. Why? Perhaps precisely because the bed had to remain functional.

 

There is a pit in Shai's floor, under her bed. She Forged it there, and it stuck. Would you put a prisoner in a pit-floor room? Would you let a pit-floor room keep being pit-floored at all, even in a random part of the palace? No, you wouldn't. That pit-floor would not have been allowed to continue to exist, would have "become a problem" in any world. If things were as easy as "would it become a problem?", you wouldn't need 44 types of rock to keep a Forger imprisoned.

 

Let's go back to the beginning, actually: Shai could have Forged her cell such that it was made out of coal. She was daunted by how hard it would be, and probably needed more information than she ever would have been able to access, but she could have done it. She could have made it such that the palace had a "Forger cell" that they'd just put a Forger into which was made out of all one rock, with that rock being coal. To that I say "no", if we're to accept your model. That's the kind of thing you notice.

 

I've already offered a more plausible explanation for the mattress, so I think we should hold off on using yours as any kind of evidence for the time being.

 

Basically, my stance is that it's possible in theory, just not practice. For example, it might be theoretically possible for an Awakener to Awaken the planet itself, but in practice, there are far too many difficulties to actually overcome. But yes, I didn't make this clear in my original post (because the end result's the same).

 

Okay, good to get that cleared up.

Edited June 26, 2013 by Kurkistan

[Phantom Monstrosity]

we are the experts on Realmatics

Hardly experts. I doubt anyone would've guess that atium+lerasium = planet-threatening nuke.

[Kurkistan he/him]

This is in the context of an ongoing discussion with Thought about the validity of citing intuitions when discussing theories. Experts in a relative sense. Also, Atium+Lerasium nuke? 

[Phantom Monstrosity]

This is in the context of an ongoing discussion with Thought about the validity of citing intuitions when discussing theories. Experts in a relative sense. Also, Atium+Lerasium nuke? 

According to Brandon, people who study realmatic theory in universe conclude (for lack of an opportunity to experiment) that alloying atium and lerasium would either make you an atium misting or "create a substance so volatile that it would have world-ending repercussions".

 

Note that excludes shards and splinters, who can (at least, to some extent) intuit that stuff.

[Kurkistan he/him]

Ah, interesting tidbit.

[Thought]

Revenge, my dear Kruk? Certainly not. Just an indication that you should know better than to expect short replies! Anywho, I'll endeavor to be briefer, else we might be writing books soon. I can make no promises.

 

Regarding Shai's dismissal of her own supposition, allow me to quote: "Or maybe she was just getting romantic again." There's nothing explicit about that, and she isn't saying her original supposition was wrong (or, indeed, even poetic, which I had missed before). That's implied only insofar as we assume that romantic notions must, a priori, be invalid. Shai isn't even convinced of her own rejection: she's not saying that she was being too romantic, just that it might be a possibility. Discounting her insights because of a half-arsed single sentence full of self doubt and a weak argument that, even if right, doesn't disprove her original supposition is unreasonable. If Shai rejected her supposition based on a counterargument, then we might have reason to doubt that supposition. But being romantic? That's not a legitimate criticism against her supposition.

 

Also, no, no one here's an expert in realmatics. Well... let me take that back. Peter Ahlstrom likely counts, but he doesn't tend to weigh in on such discussions. At best were at the amateur historian level. Only, you know, with realmatics instead of history. I'd happily defer to Phantom's quote from Brandon about this.

 

Regarding the "meant to be" aspect of the two mentions of the windows desires, yes, I am reading that as desire, but specifically the action and will behind that. Why should the window have "meant to be" a stained glass one? If that was what people wanted it to be, then in the Imperial palace of all places, that would have happened. We have to conclude, then, that it was the window that saw itself as meant to be something different than what it became. The phrase "meant to be" reveals intent, intent reveals desire.

 

Ah, sorry for accusing you of being positive .

 

Good. Because I'm an eternal pessimist, and as we all know, pessimism is the best outlook, because you're either always right or pleasantly surprised

 

The problem with passivity is that it can't resist. We know that objects can resist and reject stamps. Thus we know that they aren't entirely passive. They aren't active enough to force the change themselves, of course, but they're active enough to make a forger's work easier or harder, depending.

 

And/or we're just getting an outline of the magic system, showing how complex it is and how important properly understanding and modifying the core history and identity of an object is for a successful stamp.

 

And. Definitely and.

 

"If it's not recorded, it's not history" is a bit quibbly, Thought. Okay, "personal history". It was recorded by the Emperor's soul and/or Cogntive aspect. It happened and it had important, long-lasting impacts on the Emperor. Just because he might not consciously hark back to his brother's death and regional flag every time he considers what his favorite color is doesn't mean that they weren't the reason he likes green, and I have no problem with some aspect of the Emperor recording/remembering this.

 

You misunderstand my point. I'm saying it wouldn't have been recorded by the Emperor's soul at all, because nothing was aware of it. Not the Emperor personally, not his cognitive aspect, not his grandmother thrice removed. It's like an archeologist who find a shard of pottery: nothing will tell him about the history of that pottery, but he knows that something created it, and he can start to deduce certain things about it. The Emperor's soul has been wiped clean, so Shai's job is to put a new shard of pottery in the same place and make certain that an archeologist who sees it would make the same deductions as with the original.

 

The problem with the historical record model is that it'll be impossible to forge believably. There would simply be too many details that Shai has no way of knowing, if specifics are truly necessary, and there'd be no way to fit all that information into a single carved stamp. To be practical, forging has to work at a generalized level. Again, Shai doesn't have to identify every brushstroke in the mural, even the critical ones. She has to identity how those brushstrokes were chosen to be made.

 

You brought up the door to the Emperor's chamber that Shai forges and breaks through. That's a wonderful example of why historical facts are less important to a forge than the processes behind them. Shai used the same stamp to rot the door as she used on her bed. Under what insanity could we suppose that the door and bed frame had a similar history? If Gatona's soul could let Shai test the emperor's soul on his because he was familiar with the Emperor's soul, how familiar should a door be with a bed? The stamp didn't take long, true, but since every relevant historical fact was wrong, it shouldn't have taken at all. Unless its the processes, not the specifics, that are important.

 

Shai changes Cognitive/Spiritual aspects and give a nice dose of Investiture to make things go smoothly, I would imagine. Cognitive aspects don't rearrange the Physical because they simply lack the power to do so, but that does not mean that they just "change sufficiently in the cognitive realm to easily and immediately accept and incorporate physical changes" without a fight. The Cognitive aspects sticks around for awhile, doggedly insisting that an object ought to be other than it is.

 

Given what we know about the realms, the Cognitive aspect should be able to rearrange the Physical without needing to resort to extra power. To illustrate, if Jasnah's physical aspect travels across the physical realm from Roshar to Sel, we'd well expect that her cognitive aspect likewise travels across the cognitive realm from Roshar-Shadesmar to Sel-Shadesmar. Mere movement from point A to B is clearly not the sort of change you're referencing, but it illustrates that there is a direct connection between the two realms. That is, Jasnah doesn't have to worry about the force to propel her physical aspect as separate from the force needed to propel her cognitive aspect. Move one, and the other moves, like a spanreed. If one turns, the other turns. If I rearrange your physical face, your cognitive face will eventually be rearranged to match. Yes? Even if we quibble about the time it takes for those changes to become incorporated, the fact that they'll be incorporated, without the addition of shardic power, is agreed upon, right? So the inverse should be true: if I rearrange your cognitive face, your physical face should get rearranged, too. If I neuter your cognitive aspect, your physical aspect should get neutered, too. We have no reason at present to believe that change is limited to one direction naturally.

 

As for Sanderson's note, amusingly that supports my original supposition, that amputation via forgery is unlikely to take. It'd be moving you away from how you know yourself.

 

Also, it looks like there are two slightly different things in action here. We know that the cognitive aspect is in part determined by how other people view things (stated by Shai without even the slightest reservation). Being injured affects how other people view you, thereby affecting your cognitive aspect. But that doesn't preclude healing, either. Therefore, we can separate the cognitive identity into two closely related (and often overlapping) concepts for this in particular: how you actually are, and how you believe yourself to be. For someone like Sazed, these two have merged, which is why "how he is" (a eunuch) can't be healed: it's the same as "how he believes himself to be." But again, we are getting at desires here. "Knowing yourself" to be something that you actually aren't? That's a very strong desire, not an identity. Or, perhaps we might say, a very strong desire for a no longer accurate identity. But it's the desire that's important.

 

The point about the Emperor is that identity isn't enough. Which we seem to agree on, until you start making arguments against desire.

 

So throw in some procedural generation in order to get your intended effects. I've been saying that Shai can go into as much or little detail as she wants to, and clearly such foundational events and Ashraven's reactions to them are the kind that require quite a lot of detail, if she wants to make anything but a homunculus.

 

Sounds like we're largely in agreement, except that I'm saying that the reaction (and original action) to the foundational event is far far far far far far far far far more important to a successful forge than the event itself.

 

No, she actually doesn't necessarily indicate this. Forms, my dear foe, Forms! "A plausible history" could very well be as simple as the desk's "plausible history" of "someone took care of it"; "Bill the unscrupulous treasurer adulterated this bar of gold" ought to work just as well, I think. A tad more than a switch to flip, but not by much.

 

Clearly, that's not all that's needed, elsewise Shai wouldn't need to know the history and nature of an object in order to forge it. To forge her original prison, for example, she needed to know the nature of the rocks so she could know where they might have been mined (the Laio quarry for the grindstone, for example). If all she needed to know was that it was grindstone, for example, why couldn't she have then just said that someone accidentally installed anthracite in its place instead? The nature of the grindstone, it seems, extends more than to just the fact that it's grindstone. Its origin is part of its identity. If Shai has to know its nature to get the forge to work, then that information has to be represented in the forge itself somehow. Shai couldn't forge the grindstone to be very poor quality, little better than dirt, for example, without knowing where it was mined, and in turn using that knowledge in the forge.

 

It seems, at least, that you're discounting all the research that Shai's very clear she has to have.

 

The reality that all these facts must be known and included should make us realize that there is far more than a single "someone took care of it" command involved. But if we both agree that the forging process is still largely procedural, then we must conclude that the facts (and lies) themselves aren't key (as that gets away from procedural generation), but rather guides. You have to know the past so you know how the narrative flows, so you can know where and how to nudge it in the desired direction.

 

A reasonable objection at this point would be that my proposed model (that process is more important than events) seems to discount events as well. However, my model accounts for the need to know history because the history is needed to determine the process, and so gets represented in the process. It's not important to know, for example, that the Emperor skinned his knee when he was five, but rather the narrative flow of how that affected him. Without knowing the Emperor's own narrative flows, Shai has to look at the events and from those deduce the flow, much like a geologist might look at sediment and deduce from it the flow of water that created it.

 

I'll refer you to the point later in my previous reply where I proposed a fool-proof anti-Forger cell: Just pay attention very very carefully as a matter of course, and you win..

 

Far too implausible to ever come close to thinking about working. The human mind simply doesn't work that way: we're all about shifting unimportant details out of our conscious experience. If something's been unimportant the last 100 times you've checked, it doesn't matter if your life is on the line, your mind wont think it's important that 101st time. The chain knows no one is going to pay that close and consistent attention: the forge would evaporate before it even had a chance to take hold.

 

Also, to my understanding, we've never seen what happens when two separate forges are working against each other, so we don't really know if forging the lie into the building would prevent a forger from making an exception. That would be fun to find out, though.

 

No, not really. That thing flat-out collapsed when evil-Striker hit it, falling into a pit in the floor, no less. I doubt Shai engineered it with anything but a hair trigger: her "rot" Forgery was strong enough to let her knock down a door that she temporarily whammied with the same stamp.

 

She clearly said it was fragile, not broken. Consider how someone can lay on a bed of nails while being punctured by a single nail. A fragile bed could easily support someone when they distribute their weight while not being able to support someone (a larger someone, no less) when they jump on it. That's only a hair trigger if we're talking about a brace of coneys (okay, sorry, bad pun). The key is that the objects are strong enough for normal use, but not strong enough to take intense abuse. We don't see Shai ever forging something in a way that renders it actually useless, just close.

 

Actually, reading the passage, she Forged the bed frame and slashed the mattress: two separate objects. If you insist, I'll just say that she murdered the bed frame, and call it a day. I imagine that slashing the mattress with a knife was just easier than messing around with Forgery, while hacking at the bed frame to achieve a similar effect to her stamp would have been somewhat more difficult/obvious. She slashed the mattress, Forged the bed frame. Easier to slash than Forge a history where she slashed it, pure and simple.

 

Good point about the bed frame (though mostly an aside, as this gives evidence that things don't have to be forged in whole, which gets back to resealers working on a body apart from a person). But it's very explicit that she just made the frame fragile. You might have a glass jaw, doesn't mean you can't eat with it.

 

So far as windows knowing windows and lead gold: Forms, again. I'm not sure you can justify your teleological approach from that, though given bed frame (and floor, and door, actually, even if that last one didn't stick) murder that has already been committed with Forgery.

 

Oh, it's easy to justify, given that no murder ever happened. As described in the book, the objects were still perfectly useable. Having cancer isn't the same as being dead, having rot isn't the same a bed being murdered. Your arguments just don't fit with the text.

 

Also, regarding the mattress: what's more probable, that Shai decided to cut through it with guards in the room watching her, thereby running a high risk of exposure (cutting a mattress ain't quiet, it ain't easy, and it ain't subtle), because she couldn't be bothered to forge it, or she knew that the safe, forge route wasn't an option? Unfortunately, your explanation is highly implausible.

 

No one notices things that aren't noticeable. The success of a lot of Shai's forgeries, both mundane and magical, seems to be summed up right there.

Edited June 26, 2013 by Thought

[Kurkistan he/him]

Just a fair warning that I'm going to take a day or two to reply to this. That last reply took it out of me. Have no fear, though, I will show you the many ways you are wrong soon enough.

Edited June 26, 2013 by Kurkistan

[Thought]

Quite understandable! Though I suspect we might be reaching the point where we're not going to convince the other to budge.

[Kurkistan he/him]

Oh, I reached that point long ago (moment of birth, if you must know)

 

At the very least, we're both developing our models much more thoroughly than they would have been if they just sat half-formed in our brains.

Edited June 26, 2013 by Kurkistan