Fabricating Spiritwebs for Breath

[Trusk'our he/him]

Breath is probably one of the most versatile, easiest to transport, and space efficient Investitures in the Cosmere; you can easily obtain it as long as you have a willing Nalthian, it's Identity re-keys itself to you so there's no Identity contamination to worry about, and, unlike with Stormlight it's Intent/Connection doesn't prevent Worldhopping. Plus, no Perfect Gemstones are needed to carry at least tens of thousands of BEUs with only the storage space on one person. 

Only hard part is, it's an innate part of Nalthians, and removing it noticeably reduces their quality of life. No matter how you spin it, traditional methods of gathering Breath have a real cost, one usually paid by those too destitute or otherwise pressured to have any other viable options. 

So, to combat this bleak scenario, what if you didn't need to harvest Breath from people to obtain it?

In the Cosmere, it seems likely that true AI will always require a Spiritweb to exist, just like any other sentient thing.

My thinking is, what if you were to create an Awakened or perhaps just highly advanced machine that could fabricate a Spiritweb by mimicking the natural process humans and other biological organisms use. They don't require an external injection of Investiture, they seem to draw it from the SR itself, so this machine likewise wouldn't need any extra Investiture beyond any needed to make it in the first place (if any). You just need to make sure the Spiritweb formed is properly Connected to Endowment during its creation. 

If done correctly, the process would yield a Spiritweb that drew a Breath from Endowment, adding more to the system. You then embed a Command in the artificial Spiritweb during its creation to have it give its Breath to either a human operator or another cognizant machine. Finally, you break down the Spiritweb's leftover bits and recycle its Investiture to begin the process anew.

And. . . As I'm writing this I'm beginning to see another set of moral implications that I don't particularly like. 

So, ideally, maybe you don't even need a true Spiritweb, but just a fragment (kind of like lab grown meat,  but with souls) that could trick Endowment's Shard into giving a Breath, even a smaller or weaker one, without killing any sentient/sapient being. 

If such a thing is even doable, I suppose era 5 Mistborn would be the earliest it would be developed; it's just too game breaking otherwise. 

[Malim he/him]

It is definitely an interesting idea, and I can 100% see this being tried by one of the Cosmere's mad scientists at some point.  It does raise some questions though.

1: Would Endowment even allow it?  Assuming that they would know of this attempt to hack the system, would they even be ok with it?  It seems that for whatever reason, they are about giving a piece of themselves to humans, and I don't know if they would be ok with this extra Investiture going to non-living beings.  Of course there are Lifeless, so...

2: What would be the ethics?  I got from your post that this may have occurred to you, please correct me if I am wrong.  But if you build an artificial Spirit Web, and pump in Investiture, how long before it gains at least some sentience?  If it does, does that mean that you can't take that Breath and end the Spirit Web?  This topic has come up on the real world with things like Stem Cell lines and fetal manipulations, neither of which will I comment on here, but it does raise the same type of questions.

3: Yumi Spoilers:

Spoiler

We saw with the Father Machine a similar idea and it didn't end well at all.  I would think that that level of Command would have to be very carefully worded to prevent the same thing from happening. 

All told, interesting idea.

[CtrlAltDepressed]

Oooo I like this idea!

 

To expand on it, I thought of an easy way to do this. Modify the original Koloss race to produce faster than they already do, and neglect the strength part as it isn't really important for this, but keep the trait that they can eat anything.

 

Then you set up a koloss farm on nalthis or close enough to qualify the koloss for breath. The only trouble I see here is the method of convincing them to give up their breath. This is so so so unethical but as a thought, you could offer them a tasty food instead of the dirt they were raised on in exchange for saying a simple phrase.

 

I think the awakened AI to generate new spirit webs and then take their breath and recycle them is a good idea, but I feel you might end up with a situation where it starts pulling existing peoples spiritwebs, rewriting those, and then giving you their breath.

 

I also think that at a certain point Endowment would certainly get involved as creating a farm to harvest breath inherently goes against her Intent.

[alder24]

7 hours ago, Trusk'our said:

Breath is probably one of the most versatile, easiest to transport, and space efficient Investitures in the Cosmere; you can easily obtain it as long as you have a willing Nalthian, it's Identity re-keys itself to you so there's no Identity contamination to worry about, and, unlike with Stormlight it's Intent/Connection doesn't prevent Worldhopping. Plus, no Perfect Gemstones are needed to carry at least tens of thousands of BEUs with only the storage space on one person. 

Only hard part is, it's an innate part of Nalthians, and removing it noticeably reduces their quality of life. No matter how you spin it, traditional methods of gathering Breath have a real cost, one usually paid by those too destitute or otherwise pressured to have any other viable options. 

So, to combat this bleak scenario, what if you didn't need to harvest Breath from people to obtain it?

In the Cosmere, it seems likely that true AI will always require a Spiritweb to exist, just like any other sentient thing.

My thinking is, what if you were to create an Awakened or perhaps just highly advanced machine that could fabricate a Spiritweb by mimicking the natural process humans and other biological organisms use. They don't require an external injection of Investiture, they seem to draw it from the SR itself, so this machine likewise wouldn't need any extra Investiture beyond any needed to make it in the first place (if any). You just need to make sure the Spiritweb formed is properly Connected to Endowment during its creation. 

If done correctly, the process would yield a Spiritweb that drew a Breath from Endowment, adding more to the system. You then embed a Command in the artificial Spiritweb during its creation to have it give its Breath to either a human operator or another cognizant machine. Finally, you break down the Spiritweb's leftover bits and recycle its Investiture to begin the process anew.

And. . . As I'm writing this I'm beginning to see another set of moral implications that I don't particularly like. 

So, ideally, maybe you don't even need a true Spiritweb, but just a fragment (kind of like lab grown meat,  but with souls) that could trick Endowment's Shard into giving a Breath, even a smaller or weaker one, without killing any sentient/sapient being. 

If such a thing is even doable, I suppose era 5 Mistborn would be the earliest it would be developed; it's just too game breaking otherwise. 

That's a very complicated way of obtaining Breaths. I have a different proposition - Stormlight is the most easily obtainable investiture in Cosmere as far as we know. Navani's experiments have proven you can convert Stormlight into something else via rhythms, in her case it was anti-light. Brandon has said numerous times that it's possible to convert one type of investiture into another, but also it's possible to just Awaken without using Breaths (the Father Machine from Yumi). Therefore the easiest way to gather more Breaths is to convert Stormlight into Breaths, which requires expanding on Navani's discoveries, or just Awaken with Stormlight, if you just want to Awaken something. 

This isn't immoral, a sentient AI is thinking and feeling, it's just like a person is, so forcing it to give away their Breaths and later killing it to "recycle" their investiture is as bad as creating Drabs and then killing them because they're of no use to you anymore. A true AI can think and feel just like a human can. Instead all you need to do is to advance science and get free Breaths made out of raw investiture - both Scadrial and Roshar are just a few steps away from that. Scadrial with their advancements of creating power spikes out of raw investiture, Roshar with their discovery of anti-tones. 

But that's just my tangent about sentient AI from the WoB you've posted. What you are proposing is making an artificial spiritweb, which we know is possible. The problem is to trick Endowment into giving Breaths into that fake spiritweb, which isn't an easy task. You don't just need to be born on Nalthis, you need to live there for several generations to be considered a Nalthian. Nalthians that leave the planet will have a weakening of their Breaths in future generations until it fades completely from their bloodline. And because you're making a fake spiritweb, it's not being born naturally, I think Endowment would not give it her Breath. You might be able to create a spiritweb with a Breath already in it (by infusing it with more raw investiture and converting it to Breaths), but this is just converting investiture with extra steps. Just take raw Stormlight and turn it into Breaths, no artificial spiritwebs required. Not to mention how would you even extract Breaths from those spiritwebs? Breaths have to be given willingly, Commands have to be said, if it's just a spiritweb, with no mind or body attached to it, how could it give you its Breaths? You would have to steal it with Hemalurgy, which is even more unnecessarily complex. Find a way to convert investiture and you will have all you want.

Spoiler

Questioner

A Spiritweb is composed of a bunch of chunks that are added based on certain circumstances. Could you manufacture Spiritweb patterns out of raw Investiture in such a way that, instead of cutting something from someone and grafting it to someone else, actually manufacture the chunk desired from Investiture and put it on the person?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes. They don't know how, but you could. Synthetic meat, synthetic souls, possible.

Dragonsteel Mini-Con 2021 (Nov. 22, 2021)

 

Spoiler

Ilkhan2016

Breath and Stormlight are both forms of Investiture. AFAIK you can power any of the magic systems from any form of Investiture. Zahel is on Roshar, I believe, primarily due to how easy Investiture (Stormlight) is to come across.

AFAIK the form of Investiture doesn't change anything about the abilities. For example, Szeth was sucked out of Stormlight when he drew Nightblood; and Azure used Stormlight to Awaken in Shadesmar.

/u/mistborn is that right?

Brandon Sanderson

A lot of this depends on the Investiture and the magic in question. Azure was legit using Breaths, for example--ones she'd brought with her. But Szeth was able to feed Stormlight to Nightblood, much as Vasher uses Stormlight to keep himself alive.

To Awaken with Stormlight, the easiest thing to do would be to first change Stormlight into Breaths--something that Azure doesn't know how to do. (Admittedly, Hoid doesn't either, so it's not like it's a simple thing to achieve.) You could also theoretically use some magical (or mechanical) means to power your Awakening with a different form of Investiture.

Extesian

This is very interesting. Is it possible then in the Cosmere for the 'intent' (spin or however described) of Investiture to be changed? And I mean within reasonable limits (not the powers of six shards or any of that). Can a Shard effectively grow in power in a place (e.g. toward an avatar) through another Shard's Investiture being changed (not just corrupted)? Or is it just making one type ('intent' - you should canonize a word for this :D) of Investiture mimic the properties of another?

Brandon Sanderson

Most of the ways of accomplishing what you're talking about would involve either 1) fooling/overwriting your spiritual makeup somehow. (This is what Hemalurgy does, for example.) 2) Refining the power somehow into a more pure form.

But there are a lot of variables. The way magic from Nalthis works, for example, the system is just looking for any available Investiture to power itself--and so basically anything will do, regardless of the source. This includes consuming your own soul, in some cases...

You'll see terminology coming along eventually that facilitates talking about all of this. I'm not yet decided on some of it.

Celestial_Blu3

How many Breaths does [Azure] have by her final appearance in OB?

Brandon Sanderson

That's a RAFO, I'm afraid.

General Reddit 2019 (April 25, 2019)

 

Spoiler

Argent

Staying with Yumi, since we're asking the big questions here. I want to talk about the big machine, the father machine.

Brandon Sanderson

Yes.

Argent

There are some really interesting what feel like intentional parallels between it and Nightblood.

Brandon Sanderson

Yes.

Argent

There's smoke involved, there's eating of souls, there's a whole bunch of things. So what I do want to ask is: one, was the father machine Awakened using Breaths, using Nalthian Awakening? Or are you using Awakening as Lightweaving or Bondsmithing which is an overarching system in the Cosmere?

Brandon Sanderson

It's the second. This wouldn't exist in the pre-space-age as much; by space age there's a certain terminology that is going between... basically it's starting with the arcanists and moving to the general population. What certain themes in the Cosmere magics mean. And so when Hoid says "this is an Awakened machine" his audience understands what that means. It does not necessarily mean Breaths Awaken, but Breaths are one of the main ways that people see things be Awakened. You should be noticing those parallels, but that's a term that in the Cosmere is becoming genericized to mean un-living object being given some measure of sentience and even sapience by application of Investiture, Commands, and these sorts of things. By this point they've all interacted with various Awakened machines of sorts in the future Cosmere. They know what this means. They've talked to an Awakened computer.

Argent

Interesting! Very interesting! That's what I was hoping you would answer. Because Awakening is such a cool term for Awakening an object, right!

One notable difference between the father machine and Nightblood other than them using different magic systems to be Awakened is that the Machine was able to somehow draw people's souls at a distance, which seems EXTREMELY broken to me.

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah. I had to let... This is going to be a pretty special circumstance for this book. But yes. It is pretty broken. You wouldn't want this to be... this could be very dangerous in the wrong hands. Don't expect this to be very commonly used in the Cosmere.

Argent

Was that a side effect of the magic system that was used to Awaken the machine, or was there something else going on?

Brandon Sanderson

This is a side effect of what Virtuosity did and the bit of Virtuosity in all the people allowing the Machine to have enough of a plausible Connection to them to draw upon them.

Argent

Ok. Interesting. I will think about this while I pass the ball back to Matt.

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah. This is me pushing just a little bit hard on the boundaries of what is possible. It is possible, but it it is pushing further than I normally would on the bounds of what that can do.

Shardcast Interview (July 30, 2023)