I don't know what gave you that impression, in no time I think I said that.
This entire paragraph, for starters. That and if this text gave me the impression in the first place, my impression was reaffirmed greatly by everything that follows in this post.
| I think that it's more a case of how we are going to explain why we saw that a soul is different from a concept. Simply saying that a concept needs to be 'something above the soul", really isn't a good explanation. With is why I said that we should simply work with a multi-layered existence, with multiple levels of existence (material, spiritual, ideal, etc) and simply use "metaphysical essence" to refer to these things. The power level would be defined by the own franchise in relation to how many of these levels of existence and how they relate to each other, and then things like "souls, minds, concepts" will loose the meaning that we use now and became totally dependent on the names that are in the franchise. |
We can't say any of this until the verse itself does; a franchise can sort of pull whatever it wants out of it's ass when attempting to talk about souls, minds, and concepts, which are all completely up to interpretation by any individual, barring the mind when it's being discussed as a part of the physical body. Like I said earlier philosophy is easier to discuss but even then we have extremely flexible standards regarding stuff like concepts since barely any of the time when a verse makes some obscure reference to Plato or Aristotle does it accurately represent their ideas in the work.
Anyway, if we have two franchises that have the same principle derived from emanationism or other philosophies about levels of beings with souls, spirits and minds existing in higher planes of existence, we simply doesn't have a reason to say that manipulating this is really different than what we consider "conceptual manipulation".
I'd honestly be surprised if there was more than two franchises
total that matched this incredibly specific description.
What
do we consider as conceptual manipulation? Without the verse itself making specific references to concepts of some kind, we have no objective definition of what a concept is; just two-three somewhat popular definitions we try to defer to.
Both are the ability to control some higher essence that exists in a higher plane of reality and the only difference would be that a particular essence would affect only one being while the "concept", the universal essence, would affect multiple things at once.
Just because two things share properties does not make them identical, to begin with. Even if we objectively defined a concept as what you're describing, something we have not and hopefully will not ever do, something being at "a higher level of existence" doesn't automatically mean it's some kind of Ideal Form, especially when so many verses that use language like that have completely different ideas of what they mean by "higher level".
Again though, there is no objective definition of a concept or soul. It's entirely up to the jurisdiction of the verse that uses those terms; us trying to extrapolate a 'default' meaning that ultimately isn't there is dishonest.
And then we encounter the problem that simply because a franchise uses the term "concept" to refer to every essence, even particular ones, we'll use "conceptual manipulation", but if another series uses the term "soul/spirit/essence" to refer to the particular essences, we normally would simply call it "soul manipulation" or something like that, unless someone tries to call it "conceptual manipulation" and turns into a big debate that sometimes are accepted simply by exhaustion (I'm thinking about Kingdom Hearts or even Sailor Moon, although in this case there was the addition of "essence manipulation" to the profiles).
This makes very little sense to me.
What we call a power and what a power's specific functions and mechanics are, are two different things. For example, we'll call a magic-user's flame spell Fire Manipulation, when it functions entirely different than the real-life chemical reaction, which we'd also call a manipulation of fire if a character is using something like a flamethrower.
So we call it concept manipulation if the verse calls it concept manipulation. Platonic theory and Aristotelian theory are two entirely different schools of thought, for example, but we list them both under the same power. Same goes for soul manipulation. Trying to make an objective definition for either is a fool's errand, no offense.
For some, putting "Essence Manipulation" is the same as putting "Conceptual Manipulation" and we just don't put it because "It doesn't really look like a concept". I don't think that if we adjust our Conceptual Manipulation page any more than something like "The power to manipulate a essence that exists in a higher plane of reality/level of being that determinate what some "thing" is in a lower plane of reality".
I mean, if we just change our definition of what concept manip is, we can make it describe anything we want, even something wholly unrelated to what we'd normally describe under that power. For stuff that's so subjective as concepts and souls, it's far less confusing to just use the linguistics that the verse does.
Which does make this particular point purely a matter of linguistics, if I read this right; in which case I don't see the need to haphazardly rename stuff on the site.
Its fits what concept manipulation is, doesn't create any confusion to separate concept and soul/spirit without solid evidence and after that we would simply need to explain the idea, and any more specify rules would be in the profiles themselves.
Hopefully I'm speaking for many other users here who have also commented this, but this entire thread seems to be a confusing mess, and I still have trouble understanding exactly what you're proposing unless it's just using different linguistics for our powers, in which case it would have been really great if it was simply explained in the OP.
I'm still against this proposal.
