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Thread: Speed of thought
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2018-04-13, 03:16 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Speed of thought
If this is a valid means of measuring the speed of thought, it leads to a strange contradiction.
Picture the nucleus of an atom. Now picture an electron in the first, inner-most shell of that atom.
Your thoughts have moved an infinitesimally small distance, in the same span of time that it took for your thoughts to reach the sun. Thus the travel time is constant, and the speed varies inversely with distance. Therefore, thoughts can be both infinitely fast and infinitely slow, depending on what you're thinking about.The Giant says: Yes, I am aware TV Tropes exists as a website. ... No, I have never decided to do something in the comic because it was listed on TV Tropes. I don't use it as a checklist for ideas ... and I have never intentionally referenced it in any way.
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2018-04-13, 03:48 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Speed of thought
That's not really a contradiction. Look at it this way: a cheetah can run at 50 to 70 miles per hour. But the meat the cheetah wants to eat is only ten feet away from it.
Does that mean the cheetah is out of luck as it cannot possibly move slowly enough to reach that meat? Or does the fact that they could move at 50 to 70 miles per hour not imply that they cannot move slower?Orth Plays: Currently Baldur's Gate II
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2018-04-13, 04:32 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Speed of thought
Agreed. Which, again, has nothing to do with the distance from your brain to the object you're thinking about. Your thought did not travel along a pathway to the sun. There was no instant in which your thought was above your head, followed by an instant in which it was in the troposphere, followed by an instant in the stratosphere, followed by the mesosphere, thermosphere, etc..... Your thought did not travel that distance. It just didn't.
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2018-04-13, 05:39 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Speed of thought
The Giant says: Yes, I am aware TV Tropes exists as a website. ... No, I have never decided to do something in the comic because it was listed on TV Tropes. I don't use it as a checklist for ideas ... and I have never intentionally referenced it in any way.
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2018-04-13, 06:13 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Speed of thought
Attention LotR fans
Spoiler: LotRThe scouring of the Shire never happened. That's right. After reading books I, II, and III, I stopped reading when the One Ring was thrown into Mount Doom. The story ends there. Nothing worthwhile happened afterwards. Middle-Earth was saved.
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2018-04-13, 08:50 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Speed of thought
It's pretty common to all fiction that subconscious thoughts and memories happen in a flash, much faster than, for instance, the time it takes for me to think up this post. These thoughts and memories are always incredibly detailed and often more fully developed than our conscious thoughts.
Certainly this is totally unrealistic, but it's such an accepted trope that probably everything from Star Trek to The Flintstones has used it at one time or another. (Okay, maybe not The Flintstones... )
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2018-04-13, 10:26 PM (ISO 8601)
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2018-04-14, 05:11 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Speed of thought
For me it varies, when I was a little child I had a dream where I lived through my life, became an adult, etc. and was extremely happy when I woke up, perhaps I remember it wrong, but I think when I woke up I had the impression that my dream had went on for a long time.
On the other hand, not too long ago I had a dream about me walking a small distance or something similar, that dream lasted all night and when I woke up it felts like it couldn't have been several hours already.
I think we'd still need to be able to quantify how much information the entire system of nerve pulses accounts for, after all, if I'm not mistaken, our brains are very similar, but our skills can be very different. It is my understanding that abilities such as how well you remember something, or how fast you e.g. can calculate stuff is mainly about efficient nerve wiring.
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About ORione's post regarding speed of thought and the distance to the sun. I read it more as a fun post than anything to be taken too seriously, and I think the level of negative attention it is getting is detracting from the value of an otherwise nice thread.
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2018-04-14, 12:53 PM (ISO 8601)
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2018-04-14, 03:12 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Speed of thought
I stand corrected.
And a great example of this kind of thing occurred to me today. In the film The Whole Nine Yards, the scene in which Oz meets Jimmie:
Objectively about 2 seconds pass, but in Oz's mind, "at the speed of thought", we see headlines and stories from several newspapers in a great stylistic sequence as everything he remembers reading about his new neighbor suddenly flashes through his mind. This is a terrific illustration of the "speed of thought" as we're discussing it here, even if it's a relatively short one.Last edited by Darth Paul; 2018-04-15 at 11:18 PM.
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2018-04-17, 03:14 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Speed of thought
Personally, I've a hunch that, while memory-absorption is extremely fast, it's not quite instantaneous. Durkon's plan for the battle is to unleash his memories, all of them, all at once. Can Not-Durkon absorb all of that in six seconds? Twelve? A round or two of the villain being lost in thought might be all it takes for the heroes to defeat him.
It's an extreme measure, to be sure, and not to be taken lightly, because it hastens Durkon's oblivion. But when the Order is right there, it might still be worth it.
And that's why he did the Workplace Orientation Seminar memory, and the Zit-Popping memory, and so on: He wasn't just trying to annoy Not-Durkon; he was testing whether Not-Durkon could choose to not experience the memories. Now he knows that he can't, and so the plan is a go.Time travels in divers paces with divers persons.
—As You Like It, III:ii:328
Chronos's Unalliterative Skillmonkey Guide
Current Homebrew: 5th edition psionics
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2018-04-18, 01:00 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Speed of thought
I don't think we have any evidence that Durkula *has* to view a memory Durkon is showing him? Surely he can just ignore what his host is babbling on about while he concentrates on the battle.
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2018-04-18, 01:40 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Speed of thought
Number of Character Appearances VII - To Absent Friends
Currently playing a level 20 aasimar necromancer named Zebulun Salathiel and a level 9 goliath diviner named Lo-Kag.
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2018-04-18, 04:58 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Speed of thought
The question remains, whether "speed of thought" is slow enough for Durkula to waste one or even two actions...
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2018-04-18, 05:21 AM (ISO 8601)
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2018-04-18, 08:06 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Speed of thought
Each one of us, alone, is but a drop in the sea
Our powers pale compared with the great heroes
Our battles don’t hit theheadlines or shake the earth
But they are few, can’t be everywhere, and we, many
So, when the world or universe needs saving, they come
But when people needs saving, we are the ones to appear
We're underdogs, but we rise up to the challenge to be heroes.
(Wishing Joe, a low-powered superhero)
"I really like the Geek Math'ology we do here"
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2018-05-05, 07:39 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Jun 2005
Re: Speed of thought
"Speed" can be and is used to refer to anything divided by time, not just distance.
Exactly!
Huh? That's like saying that we know that sword fighting is nonphysical in OotS because Roy was able to do that in the afterlife and he certainly wasn't using his inanimate remains for that.
Roy obviously had a different body while he was dead. We know that because we saw it and saw him use that body to interact with his environment by doing things like climbing a mountain. He may have no longer been subject to hunger and thirst and exhaustion, but demons and angels aren't either, and they're still organisms with vital organs (and thus e.g. still subject to sneak attacks and other forms of precision damage). This is D&D we're talking about, where even being "incorporeal" just makes you intangible and floaty and see-through. Straight-up disembodied minds, as a rule, just plain do not exist. "Spiritual" places and entities like the afterlife, ghosts, and even gods aren't more abstract than mortals, just more magical, and with enough magic of your own you can travel bodily to one of the Outer Planes and punch a god right in the face. (Please note: This is inadvisable.) That's just how this genre works.
Why would characters even have brains if mental processes had no physical component? What would brains do, cool the blood? Why would a brain-eating monster nutritionally evaluate characters' mental traits if they didn't have anything to do with the brains that it would be eating?
The available evidence suggests that the brain is indeed the organ of thought, from which we can infer that Roy had a brain in the afterlife, because he still thought there. Regardless, it plainly doesn't make any sense to say that he couldn't have had a brain because he didn't have a body. We saw that he had a body. And if you think that his body "wasn't physical", I'm going to have to ask you what you think the word "physical" means, because at that point you certainly don't seem to be using the term normally.
It didn't read as a joke or as having any obvious non-literal meaning to me.
If simple disagreement bothers you that much, a discussion forum might not be the best social environment for you.
It's not like we've derailed the thread with lots of criticism. Given that there are less than two pages after over two months, there's barely even been any activity at all. Not that the subject warrants a lot of discussion, but what little there's been hasn't struck me as unpleasant.
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2018-05-05, 07:46 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Speed of thought
The description in Complete Divine seems to suggest that a "soul" in most afterlives is not a creature, but a disembodied entity, with no stats.
Special (usually, especially devout) souls get the "turned back into a creature" template - becoming 2HD outsiders - petitioners.Marut-2 Avatar by Serpentine
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2018-05-05, 08:15 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Speed of thought
What part seems to suggest that?
"The dead character doesn't perceive anything at all, doesn't think, and has no notion or memory of events beyond the moment of death."
—— Complete Divine, p. 125
Sure sounds like a "raw" soul is mindless. It doesn't think because it has no brain. It also can't sense anything because it has no sense organs. Obviously it carries information about the creature it's from, but it can't do the things that a body can do with that information on its own. Otherwise there would be no need for things like brains and sense organs. This seems straightforward enough.
A soul that reaches an afterlife then has a new body created for it there.
"Soul shells are not insubstantial wisps—they're creatures of flesh, blood, and bone."
—— Fiendish Codex II: Tyrants of the Nine Hells, p. 9
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2018-05-05, 08:26 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Feb 2007
Re: Speed of thought
Soul shells are Hellish petitioners (Manual of the Planes - page 115-116) - Lemures are an upgraded version.
The Activities in the Afterlife section of Complete Divine discusses petitioners, and makes it clear they are the exception, not the rule:
page 129:
Become One with The Plane: The vast majority of souls in the afterlife silently experience their final destination, whether it's a place of great beauty such as Elysium or a place of mad cruelty such as The Abyss. As time passes, they become more like the plane, taking on its qualities and caring less about their time among the living. At some point they cease to have an independent existence and become one with the fabric of the plane itself. Essentially, souls eventually become abstract quanta of the good, evil, law, chaos, or neutrality they lived with when alive.
This process is why every rich individual in the D&D world doesn't come back from the dead repeatedly. Whether they're good or evil, most souls find resonance in the afterlife - they have a sense that they are where they're supposed to be. Only souls with strong force of personality and unfinished business among the living (which includes many adventuring PCs) respond to the call of a raise dead or resurrection spell.
Get A New Body: Some individual souls come to the attention of the gods and powerful outsiders that inhabit the planes, either because the souls were exceptionally good or wicked in life or because the deity sees great potential in an otherwise unremarkable soul. These souls are granted new bodies and become outsiders called petitioners. Most petitioners are 2 Hit Dice outsiders with abilities similar to those of the outsiders that inhabit their particular plane. Lemure devils and dretch demons are typical petitioners, for example. Petitioners serve gods or outsiders that created them; many are promised promotion to more powerful forms (whether demonic or angelic) if they serve well. In this way, the deities replenish the ranks of their hosts.
It makes it clear that "regular" souls experience the afterlife - and if resurrected, have vague memories of their experiences in it - like Roy. But petitioners can't be resurrected as the people they once were:
Page 129-130:
Respond to Resurrection Magic:
When you come back to the world of the living, you remember in general terms what the afterlife was like, but your memories have a vague, dreamlike quality and you're unable to recall the specifics of events. Whether the afterlife was torment or bliss to you, you have a good idea of what to expect should you die again - unless you alter your behaviour markedly enough to change your alignment.
page 130:
When You can't Come Back
Characters who have been granted new bodies as petitioners can't come back from the dead, because the creation of a petitioner effectively returned them to life. They're new creatures with at least some memories - but none of the abilities or skills - from their former lives.
Baator appears to be the exception to "the vast majority of souls in an afterlife aren't petitioners" - though (page 40, FC2) some souls do (because of their deity) become Fiendish-Templated versions of whatever they were in life - instead of Outsiders. Kurtulmak has fiendish kobolds as what his dead worshippers are turned into. Sekolah has fiendish sahaugin.
It's possible that in the domains of LE deities like Hextor, the same rules are followed as elsewhere - the soul is not a "soul shell petitioner", a "lemure petitioner" or a fiendish-templated being - but just "a soul".Last edited by hamishspence; 2018-05-05 at 09:07 AM.
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2018-05-05, 09:20 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Speed of thought
Eh, getting a new body as a petitioner doesn't mean that you weren't a petitioner before. Evolving from one form to another is an established phenomenon for the alignment exemplars, after all.
I agree that the text seems to strongly imply agreement with you, but FCII also seems to me to clearly imply that becoming a soul shell is the norm for souls that go to Baator. We could dig into this further, but I wouldn't count on even explicit statements necessarily being consistent with each other.
But suffice to say that I'd expect any other book that described another afterlife in comparable detail to also portray an embodied existence for the souls of the dead. Because... well, that's just how this genre works! Most any being detailed with sufficient specificity is detailed as something that a sufficiently powerful and sufficiently determined player character can stab to death. Even if it's already dead.
It's not like this isn't tangential to the matter at hand, anyway. Regardless of how things work in the default cosmology, Roy plainly wasn't disembodied in the afterlife, right?
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2018-05-05, 10:08 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Speed of thought
Roy's plainly visible at least. As is everyone else we see. But no bodily worries, not even those outsiders have to contend with, seem to be a thing for him:
http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0499.html
I would suggest that souls, unlike lantern archons, can't actually be harmed normally - they're not "creatures" by D&D standards, and don't actually have stats.
EDIT: Apparently, The Giant has said souls in the afterlife are interactable with, by adventurers:
http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showt...-After-vs-Life
you will never improve at any skill you know, never have a say in what happens in the world, never have children if you haven't already, never talk to anyone with a different point of view, never experience any real risk, never visit anywhere else, and never see any friends or family members who did not share the exact same shade of alignment as you. Oh, and you can still be destroyed by evil adventurers, but you never get any better at defending yourself.
And that's the Lawful Good afterlife.Dead souls cannot earn XP, gain levels, learn feats, or increase skills.
http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0497.html
So by implication, prior to becoming an Outsider and a petitioner, you weren't one before.
Other features of a Dead Soul as opposed to a petitioner, I would suggest - not having a heartbeat, not having to breathe, and not having to move their legs to get around:
http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0665.html
http://www.d20srd.org/srd/typesSubty...m#outsiderType
Outsiders, by contrast, qualify as living creatures - and they do have to breathe.Last edited by hamishspence; 2018-05-05 at 10:37 AM.
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2018-05-05, 12:08 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Speed of thought
That you didn't simply answer my question in the affirmative leads me to suspect that you think what we saw of Roy's afterlife was largely consistent with him being "disembodied". As with my reply to factotum, at that point I have to wonder whether our disagreement isn't primarily semantic.
Looking at that part of the story, I see that Roy is a physical being with a body moving around in a physical world. Some of the details may be different from his mortal life on the Material Plane, but he's neither formless nor intangible. One could argue that Roy's form and Roy's tangibility are illusory, but that implies that they appear to be something they're not. Words like "form", "body", "tangible", "physical", etc. to me just describe how things interact with other things; they're no more specific than that. Like, if something looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it seems appropriate to me to call it a duck, even if it exists in a radically different universe that e.g. isn't made of particles. It's still a duck, just implemented differently, y'know?
So, when I say that in a D&D-style afterlife souls still have physical bodies, I don't mean anything remotely so specific as to potentially exclude Roy's experiences.
Anyway, I was pondering my earlier thinking that souls wouldn't need sense organs if they could just sense things on their own, and I got to thinking... what if they could? If they had no particular ability to see or hear through things, then, being within their bodies, they'd still need apertures through which to sense things, wouldn't they? Isn't is often said that the eyes are the windows to the soul? Could that not be literally true with results superficially identical to our everyday experience?
Of course, if the ears and nose were both holes that lead to the soul, then both would let in sound and smells, so maybe smell, along with the closely related sense of taste and also that of touch, is a sense of the body. But sound and sight could be senses of the soul. And if sights and sounds were simply inherently sensory in nature, then there would be no need for an apparatus to translate data into perceptions, would there? They could just flow directly into the soul through the appropriate openings. Huh!
Seems like some interesting fantasy worldbuilding, anyway.
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2018-05-05, 12:22 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Speed of thought
Roy has a form - but I don't know that it qualifies as a physical body - in the sense that's usually used for creatures.
Based on the descriptions of how the Afterlife works in Complete Divine - souls may be more like illusion spells - major image and the like - wrapped around the ego and personality of the original living creature.
The body used to be "a glorified sausage"
http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0493.html
but, separated from it - the soul has the opportunity to, over time, get over things like "messed up urges".Marut-2 Avatar by Serpentine
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2018-05-05, 01:05 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Speed of thought
If Roy's form has a location and an appearance and a sense of touch and Roy can use it to manipulate his environment, then it's a physical body as far as I'm concerned. Like, I'm even not working off of any specific definition here, I'm just telling you that provided the truth of the proceeding, "Roy has a physical body" is true as I use the words "physical" and "body", such that anyone who disagrees with that has to mean something different by at least one of those words. This case is like an acid test to determine whether a potential definition is even possibly the right one, if you see what I mean. (Is there any "definitely true" statement that you'd use as an acid test?)
What sense do you regard as being usually used for creatures?
Ah, but as I pointed out earlier, a raw soul doesn't have any of that going on; and neither does a living one, does it? So that manifestation around the soul isn't part of the soul itself. The soul is the ego and personality part. And the manifestation around it? Why, that's the soul's new body in its new environment! Absent overly restrictive definitions of "body", of course.
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2018-05-05, 01:11 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Speed of thought
As in "has hit points".
Roy says he didn't have to move his legs before, he didn't have a positive hit point total before, and so on:
http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0665.html
Making me think that "Roy in Celestia" (or floating around in Azure City, Sunken Valley, etc) might not have used a "regular statblock" - being a soul, not an undead, or an outsider, or a "positive energy spirit" (Deathless) like the guardians of the throne room in Azure City.
That said, whatever it is, it's Extraplanar, being affectable by Dismissal:
http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0572.html
http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/dismissal.htm
so Roy's new "home plane" is Celestia.Last edited by hamishspence; 2018-05-05 at 01:20 PM.
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2018-05-05, 01:20 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Speed of thought
One potential aspect of "the speed of thought" may be the per-character variance. Not in a biological sense, but in the game sense. What's the WIS score of the character involved - how "fast" can they think?
As a cleric, the HPoH/Durkon is going to have a pretty darn high one, so his "speed of thought" is potentially going to be substantial enough to exist without delay, whereas a Sparkly Elan Vampire might find his speed of thought hindered by lag, assuming the WIS score translates.
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2018-05-05, 01:50 PM (ISO 8601)
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2018-05-05, 03:20 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Speed of thought
That's at least as much of a stretch as anything I said. Intrinsic to the concept of the soul is the idea that the soul is the self. ("You don't have a soul, you are a soul. You have a body.") It's described as such on the relevant page, which also asks "Where do the faithful go when they die? What do they do when they get there?" It's plain from context that those questions aren't about what happens to the corporeal remains of the faithful, I hope you'll grant.
Besides which, if mental phenomena are non-physical, they're never done by the body anyway. In which case saying that the character's body doesn't do those things is just as true for an alive character as a dead one! So it only makes sense to specify that this is the case if thought is physical, it seems. It can't be that the soul just isn't doing those things within the body... because the quoted passage refers to the state of a character immediately after death, before the soul departs the body.
Um... we don't have D&D stats. Do we lack physical bodies? Or am I missing something here?
I'm guessing that I am. I'm guessing that you see hit points and regular stat blocks as somehow corresponding to some relevant actual qualities of real creatures.
The question then is... What are those qualities?
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2018-05-05, 03:49 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Speed of thought
So why is this physical body unable to interact with the environment when he's floating around down on the Prime Material Plane? Clearly, whatever it is, it is not made of the same stuff that a normal physical body is, and it also doesn't have the needs of one--hence Roy is able to spend weeks on end fishing with his grandfather without ever needing to eat, sleep or pass waste.