happyman

True this. Something is up with Stone and the Shin and the Parshmen/Parshendi.

I really like the idea that the Shardblade appeared after his death and cut the Soulcaster. When I first heard that theory, I felt it was going a step too far, but given the points name_here made, it seems like a much more likely scenario. I would add that to some folks, killing someone with a shardblade seems nigh impossible, but this is not true. It is only nigh-impossible if the person you are attacking expects to be in danger and has ten heart-beats of awareness before the danger becomes fatal. At home with family, it's easy to imagine getting a lucky blow in without the person noticing they are in danger, especially if the attack isn't premeditated.

We've discussed this before, and this was the basic consensus. Gold (and silver and copper) would have become currency for much the same reasons they did on Earth. Their Allomancy is weak enough (or non-existent enough) not to threaten TLR, so he would have had no reason to change it. Hence, the status quo would remain such. (And if there's anything TLR loved, it was the status quo, as long as it didn't threaten his power.) Basically, their Allomantic and Feruchemical properties just weren't powerful enough to change their basic utility. Atium is a special case, for lots of reasons. It was used as currency, but only for the super-wealthy. Mostly, this was because it was part of TLR's attempt to keep Ruin from regaining power, which caused all kinds of odd effects, given that he had an effective monopoly on it. In short, it doesn't count.

We know that the Cognitive aspect of a shard is able to affect its interpretation of its intent. From the behavior of the Shards, including Vin and TLR, I would have to say that what is shaped by the shard is the purpose of the actions, not the result. Thus, if your goal is to create a civil war, you will be able to temporarily create plans to build something up. Kind of like Ruin built up Spook; the intent was civil war and so Ruin was able to do it, but the effect was when that all ended, Spook was an honest leader who created peace. That may not have happened without Ruin's interference, but it definitely wasn't his intent. If your goal is to save the world from Ruin, you will be able to damage one person temporarily, knowing you can heal him. It's all about purpose, not actual action or result.

Is there the possibility that, at one point, Honor really did live in the sky? I have to go with the others. Apparently, that tradition wasn't really unusual to Shallan. It's a perfectly bog-standard example of her being witty.

Well, I certainly don't have much more evidence to argue with, so we can just leave it here, then. However, I would be just as disappointed as you if it turns out that Jasnah is completely wrong as you (or I, for that matter) would be if she was completely right. I still prefer the idea that she is somewhat right and was able to see some things more clearly from her background, but that her being right is wrong, at a deeper level. But since I don't have a theory that includes all that, I'll just leave it at that. I do think, though, that the quotes Jasnah was referring to refer to Parshmen/Parshendi. Why there were referring to them, I do not know.

Amen. I would much rather have the Ghostbloods be separate from Taragavinian. Too many secret societies becomes just silly. We haven't reached the level of silliness just yet, though, or anything like it.

If we are wrong about something far more fundamental, like what the Voidbringers are or whose side they fight on or why (my position), then it doesn't matter how early it is in the plot. I actually found the very quotes you consider to be evidence against her theory to be some of her prime evidence in favor of it. I suspect she did, too. After all, the annotations in the book are from her notebook; Shallan sees it in passing at one point, and at the end, it is that notebook that Jasnah uses to prove her case to Shallan. (Incidentally, that she was able to prove it to Shallan should prove that she has more than the meager pieces you left her.) For instance: suck in light: They have black skin The voidbringers are said to be fire and shadow: red and black skin The voidbringers are described as changing their shape: That would be the change from Parshmen to Parshendi The records are quite clear that the fire is real: Why? If it is a translation of a translation, things like that can be easily lost, especially if the translators don't understand what they are translating that they sing: I hope the reference is obvious. Singing while one fights seems kind of distinctive No, I don't think Jasnah is ignoring anything in these particular quotes. She is treating them as reflections of reflections, which is appropriate. The only question is a question of size. That is a dangling thread, but I don't really believe that we have the whole answer. I just think that Jasnah isn't completely wrong, either. Good questions. The number of things that don't make sense is Rosharian pre-history is still quite large, though. Just add these to the list. This one is a stretch. I agree that the Parshendi culture has some oddities to it which make it unlikely they are inherently bad guys, but that's not the same as saying that Jasnah is wrong. Possible, but I personally hope that the connection is more complicated, and that Jasnah is more right than wrong, but still wrong about something important!

Given that there are several things Jasnah doesn't know, this is what I feel is most likely. Her philosophy towards life opens her minds to a lot of possibilities that Alethi society considers impossible, but it also closes some doors that probably should have remained open, given what we as readers know about the Cosmere. Given evidence, I have no doubt she would admit that the Almighty and Odium objectively exist, even if they are not as described by Vorinism, but I rather suspect that the evidence she would need would be much more than for a person dropped in the situation with no bias either way. She might well overlook hints of that part of the truth in the historical record, dismissing them as simple religious devotion, even while spotting things others miss, such as the Parshmen/Parshendi connection. Thus I doubt she has put together the whole context. Not everything in Roshar can be explained as "the same as yesterday, but longer ago."

Point. Just seeing some type of Spren means he may be a Surgebinder, but not necessarily Soulcaster. On the other hand, despite what people seem to think, Elhokar probably has potential. We didn't see much of him in the book, really, and he wasn't so much bad as clueless. He might have an interesting character arc ahead of him.

I like this. With a mind sitting there between the two intents, he might be able to tip the balance just slightly, or apply corrections as needed. The two shards, interacting together, almost certainly produce something less extreme than either shard alone, and in fact may tend towards self-correction as long as the cognitive aspect is fully engaged.

They're kind of related. After all, if Atium didn't give you mental benefits as well as temporal ones, you wouldn't be able to process the information fast enough to use it. You are limited in how much Atium you can burn, the enhancement to the mind is also limited. Hence "power" and "mental ability" are linked very closely together, and in some respects may be the same thing.

We don't know when the Symbolspren became sapient, but it could have happened slowly to them. Unlike Syl, they don't seem to be particularly gregarious. None of those are reasons for him not to be a soulcaster. They are just reasons why discovering that he is a Soulcaster would suddenly make life complicated for our protagonists. Also, if he is a Soulcaster, he will have other abilities as well, which would make him important in other ways. I don't see any reason for the story not to go that way.

I agree with all this, and was what I meant to say earlier. However, I feel that she believes that what she did was wrong. Despite the law, the term "murder" still carries very strong moral meaning, in contrast to "kill," which is more neutral. None of this means that I would consider what she did "murder," or feel that she had a choice, but it definitely carries meaning for her.

Y'know, I think, despite the look of things, that people are coming to general agreement here. I think the simplest way to say it is that Atium allows you to see all possible futures, limited by how much you can understand and how much power you have. If you are just a mortal and can burn only a little at a time (compared to, say, full Shard power or Duralumin atium) this means you can just see the next few seconds, because after a few seconds there is divergence and the shadows become too faint to see, and so your mind doesn't process things beyond that. I think this is consistent with what we have seen. Vin using Zane's foresight against him agrees with this; she sees him respond to her Atium shadow, which creates a new possible future. Note that Zane saw that possible future, once he had made it much more likely through his own actions! As for compulsion: I doubt it gives you a compulsion so much as it enhances your entire mind. If you are in a fight, you want to survive. It's well below the level of conscious control unless you really, really deliberately sit down hard on it. Atium probably just enhances that instinct, which exists naturally already. But if you decide you want to lose the fight, for strategic or social reasons and you have enough self-control to do it in normal circumstances, I don't think Atium will change that.

Does this mean that you could test somebody's breath for Allomantic metals while they are burning them? That'd make interesting security devices.

Even in the real world, if we have free will, it is emphatically constrained. Reaction time would be a constraint in any case. This would carry to the Cosmere with no modification, as far as I can tell. I'm not going to get into the philosophical debate, although it's a good one with some interesting scientific history behind it. Too likely to get messy. Edit: Also, that analogy is bad. The driver could have forgotten to turn the blinker off. The driver might realize that they are at the wrong intersection. The driver might fall asleep. The car's tire might blow. The question of whether you could still make this prediction if you knew all the variables affecting that is the essence of the problem being discussed, and thus I will stay out of it.

Hoid was named twice in Mistborn, once when he showed up as a beggar talking to Kelsier and once when Vin skipped talking to him in HoA.

I think I should join this faction. I've proposed it four or five times in different places. Maybe we should make it formal.

The idea that the entire universe is alive and has some crude consciousness is an old human one. Educated people generally don't believe it any more, but the idea that it has to be false in the Cosmere seems a bit of a jump to me. Shallan's experience with Shadesmar suggests that goblets might have a crude consciousness (if there has been a deeper debate about this somewhere, I have missed it.) If the cup does, a tree definitely does. Even if the goblet does not, however, that does not prove that a tree doesn't. A tree is an awful lot more proactive than a goblet or piece of stone, as others have mentioned. They can experience stress and jet-lag. The term "think" is pretty vague, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if, in the Cosmere, trees have a cognitive aspect, if nothing else to decide how to grow towards the light.

I was very split on this one, but I finally decided to go with Realmatics. Of course, in the Cosmere, this is about as broad as saying that he was studying "biology" or "physics," but what pushed me over the edge was the fact that, as Windrunner said, in the Cosmere trees might well be able to think a little, and Kwaan finding evidence of this would be well within what little we know about how the Cosmere works. It wouldn't surprise me at all if he had stumbled on to a bit of Realmatic theory (specifically, something about the cognitive realm) and was following up on it. It would be kind of like a real-world historical figure discovering magnetism and trying to work out what was going on without our modern detailed theory...which is exactly what happened historically, and eventually led to our modern theory. The more I think about this theory, the more I like it. It was just an oblique reference to the nature of the world which was meant to sound silly, but really wasn't. It does give us a bit more, though. It tells us about the philosophical developments on Scadrial immediately before TLR. I wonder if post-HoA folks have managed to rediscover any of this stuff.

I agree with Lyrebon that you shouldn't skip any book, at least for the first read-through and probably not for at least some of the later ones---although I found Path of Daggers dead dull the last time I read it, but there are still things in there that you need to read to understand the very important, much more interesting parts that it is building up to.

Hey everybody, Sorry to start off a free-will/determinism debate. That ones a nasty mess of a debate in the real world. However, I would note that even with the existence of free will, there are rock-solid limits everyone agrees on, such as being unable to change the past or physical constraints on strength, and other similar things. Similarly, we have mental constraints such as reaction time, etc. Our free will, if it exists, is in the in-between states, in a sum of decisions made over time, not immediate reactions. My guess is that if the Cosmere were truly deterministic, Atium and the Shards would be able to see much further into the future than they do. The next few seconds probably are pretty close to deterministic, free will or no, but once you get past that point, it begins to get diluted with changes people make. My position is that in the Cosmere, how far you can see into the future depends on how much power you have and how capable you are of understanding the possible futures. Normal humans with just a little shard power (Atium) cannot see very far, with even the slightest of changes making the shadows disappear. Full Shards or even people destined to be slivers, can see and understand much further. Just my $0.02.

Clarification: How she feels about it is obvious. If I, or my friends, will feel the same way when we find out what happened is what I was questioning.

My view on Atium visions and free will is that free will is the limit on atium shadows---the fact that other creatures roughly as intelligent as you will be making their own decisions as best they can is what limits how far you can see into the future. In a fight, decisions occur very quickly and people are processing things slap-dash---the next few seconds is pretty much determined, and seeing that and thinking faster gives you a deadly edge. Even the Shard's have a limit on how far into the future they can see. This is probably caused by humans making an enormous number of almost (but not quite) deterministic decisions. If other shards are involved, it becomes a lot dicier.