Brandon Sanderson's Mind Body Problem

In February or March of 2016, I went to see Brandon Sanderson on the book tour of Calamity. I shuffled through the line in the grey slushy snow for about four hours. Early night settled on us, and the pale yellow of the street lights flickered on. But I didn’t care that it was slow, cold, and dark. I was waiting to talk to Brandon Sanderson, author of the sprawling, interconnected fantasy universe, the Cosmere. It could have been 30 degrees colder. The line could have been two hours longer. None of that mattered. I was waiting to talk to Brandon Sanderson. In line, I was wearing one of my Cosmere shirts, trying not to freeze, and thinking. Because when you talk to Brandon Sanderson you get the singular opportunity to ask him a question about the Cosmere. You get to take a picture with him too, but who cares? I got to ask Brandon Sanderson a question about the Cosmere. Mistborn: Secret History, the newest installment in the Cosmere, had just come out, so while in line I was thinking through the implications. For weeks, I had been following the 17th Shard’s forum, the fan website that combined and theorized over all of his cryptic answers. In the four short hours I had, I was trying to figure out what question I could ask that would blow the whole Cosmere wide open. What could I ask that would reveal more information about the world? The question I ended up asking did not reveal all the mysteries of the Cosmere, but it did kind of blow it up for me.

I love thinking about fantasy worlds. That’s what I did throughout most of my adolescence. However, what sometimes limits fantasy worlds is the default assumption that the other world is the same as ours, just with magic sprinkled on top. But I don’t think that’s how a universe would actually work. If there was magic, our whole reality would be different. Physics would be different. Biology would be different. Culture, religion, language, everything would change in ways that would give us worlds completely changed from what we assume them to be. And the fantasy universe that consumed me with this line of thinking, and then gutted me, is the Cosmere.

The Cosmere is profoundly important to me. Despite the books being many hundreds of pages the pace moves; it slows down when it needs to, but the default speed is breakneck. His worlds are rich and vibrant, but governed by rules. His magic changes all of society. For example, emeralds are more valuable than diamonds in Stormlight Archives, because emeralds have more useful magical properties. Reading books in the Cosmere reminds me of the feeling I have playing Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The world is one of immense possibilities to explore, and I love the new, satisfying, and unexpected ways Sanderson combines the different elements of the world to overcome challenges and tell stories. And personally, I spent the most time reading Sanderson’s work during a very isolated period of my life. Sanderson’s website has progress bars for all of his ongoing projects in the upper right-hand corner, and the never ending climb of those bars gave me something to hold on to and hope for when I thought I had little else.

So finally, I made it into the bookstore itself. In the building the line moved even slower, because people packed in. And my question finally struck me. I walked up to the table where he was sitting. The person next in line took a picture. I’m standing an awkward distance from him. And now I asked him the question I had spent the last four hours thinking about. And I didn’t ask him about Hoid or anything Cosmere related. I asked Sanderson if he knew about Phineas Gage.

Phineas Gage was a real person, a construction foreman in the mid 1800s. While tamping down dynamite with an iron rod, the dynamite exploded, sending the rod though his lower jaw and out through the top of his head, destroying parts of his brain’s frontal lobe. Somehow, Gage survived this accident, and physically recovered. However, his personality was never the same (the scope of these changes are hard to determine). John Martin Harlow observed Gage and wrote, “... his mind was radically changed, so decidedly that his friends and acquaintances said he was "no longer Gage."”

Sanderson did not know about Phineas Gage, but I explained the history to him. I then asked if someone had an injury similar to Gage’s in the Cosmere, would their personality change. He told me that, yes, their personality would also change, and that biology was essentially the same in the Cosmere as it is in our universe. I was shattered! I was shattered because I knew that couldn’t be true, and that I was thinking about the universe more than Sanderson.

What bugged me about Mistborn: Secret History and why I asked the question about Phineas Gage, is Kelsier’s personality. Secret History takes place after Kelsier is killed and we follow his mind as it travels through the Cognitive Realm. Kelsier’s physical existence is completely destroyed, but his personality and mental faculties are identical to what they were when he had a brain and a body. This answers one of the oldest and most challenging questions of our universes philosophy: the mind body problem. In the Cosmere the mind body problem is trivial and similar to Descartes dualism. The mechanistic body exists in the Physical Realm, driven by the eternally existent mind which resides in the Cognitive Realm. The question of how the mind and body interact is still open in the Cosmere, but there is clearly a separation between the mind and the body. And critically, the mind is not affected by the loss of the body! This isn’t how the mind body problem is answered in our universe. Because of Phineas Gage (and things like antidepressants, and the physical symptoms of stress), we know the mind and the body to be inextricably linked. What are brains for in the Cosmere? So I asked Brandon Sanderson about Phineas Gage, and he told me it would change his personality, which I knew contradicted the universe he had created.

And this is shattering to me because one of the implications of Sanderson’s Third Law of Magic is that the author should think about the consequences of magic more than the reader. Going back to the diamonds example, the author should know that magic will affect the economy of the universe. Likewise, the Cosmere has different metaphysics than our universe and so, I should not be thinking more about the consequences of those metaphysics than Sanderson.

In Mistborn there’s a character called the Lord Ruler. The Lord Ruler ascends to godlike power, and uses this power to try to solve the problems besetting the world. A dense mist is killing people, so he moves the planet closer to the sun to burn off the fog. But now the planet is to hot, so he creates volcanoes, whose ash creates a perpetual winter. But now the inhabitants can’t survive in the ash, so he changes their biology to make them more resilient. Fantasy authors, in many ways take on the task of the Lord Ruler. They’re suddenly gods of a world, and they assume they know how everything works. But a simple change has huge implications for things they may know nothing about. What ended up setting everything right in the world of Mistborn, was a character, Sazed, who possessed all of the collected memories of all previous people, and using this omniscience, he restored the world to its previous location, leveled the volcanoes, and restored the biology.

I know it’s probably unrealistic for me to expect omniscience from fantasy writers, but it has soured me, especially to hard magic worlds. And as I retreat into literary fiction and our universe, I can’t help but miss the infinite possibility that always lies on the next page of fantasy.