Okay, I want to cut through chasing definitions if I can. Otherwise I can see this stretching out a bit. Let's see:
To be clear, are you saying: "If Hazo looks at / considers Raiton's effects on animal or human bodies (and-or discusses with Noburi what shocking corpses can do), considers his knowledge about conductivity[1], and decides to take that away, the resulting rune would not shut people down immediately?"
[1]: They have ninja wire - and according to the wiki a fundamental use of lightning release is channeling it through ninja tools. One trivial observation any such ninja can make would be "why are we/they using metal tools for Raiton", for instance. Alternatively "why does Raiton make people faster/twitchier?"... Or even: Regardless of what we think, Raiton works on nerves. The whole definition debate is therefore superfluous, because Raiton on nerves would be Hazou's natural inspiration.
Because if you don't think so, then our discussion over definitions don't matter. Through the grace of Hazou and chakra, everything works regardless.
Regardless, thank you for engaging this idea so thoroughly. It is sincerely better than the alternative.
Hmm. I find myself fencesitting on this one. My original assumption was that Hazō wouldn't know that nerves involved any form of conduction, and indeed might only barely know what nerves were. Given that that apparently isn't the case, I wouldn't argue that if Hazō explictly thought "I should make a rune that shuts down current in nerves" it wouldn't work, even if Hazō's actual understanding of what happens in nerves is extremely limited. As you say, there's precedent for that kind of chakra BS. The primary thing I was arguing originally was basically that if we framed it to Hazō as, say, "I should make a rune that stops Raiton jutsu from affecting people", we shouldn't expect him to actually end up making "instant nerve cessation rune".
However, actually, I remain unconvinced that the knowledge that Raiton primarily
affects nerves will lead to the knowledge that nerves
use Raiton (as Hazō would see it). If someone can provide me with a citation that Hazō knows the second thing, I will withdraw this concern, but otherwise it stands.
I'm going to focus most the rest of this post on the emergent property thing. I think that's kind of the crux of this whole debate.
You repeat the "emergent property" objection many times in your post, and use it as the basis of your greater objection, so I must address it thoroughly in one place.
1. Evidently false by previous results: If we can make a rune that can dial up and down time, the "emergent property" defense for not being able to screw with conductivity does not hold water. It's clear that chakra doesn't care.
2. A false assumption in the first place: "Emergent properties" are turtles all the way down, hence stopping at any point and saying "but this is the fundamental property we can change to get knock-down effects above; ignore everything below it." would be invalid. You can't point to one arbitrary point on that turtle tower and say "chakra-manipulabale physics start here. You can't touch anything above or below."
Any "you have to choose which fundamental (sub)atomic interaction property you would need to mess with to get the actual effect you want" objection is therefore pointless. And highly likely to be outside of our (to be specific, my. I can't follow Hazou into Strings-land...) capabilities.
(As an aside, do you think Hazo knows even about relativity?)
If this line of reasoning is false, I will address your points built upon the "emergent property" objection. It could well be! But until then, that would be working under false a false premise, hence misleading.
In general, I see your point. However, I think you've misunderstood what I'm arguing here.
View: https://imgur.com/a/WxDinci
Above is a diagram I made, showing the approximate dependencies of the various involved phenomena. (Sorry about the size; it's probably easier to read if you follow the link to the actual Imgur page.) As you hopefully agree, they're branching; each phenomenon is often dependent on multiple lower-level phenomena, and in turn may be required for multiple higher-level phenomena.
Given the versatility of sealing and runecrafting, it seems likely to me to be entirely feasible to shut down any one of these phenomena. I'm not arguing that in order to shut down electrical conduction in metals, Hazō would need to understand exactly how to change all the lower-level phenomena; chakra's black box can handle that. What I'm arguing is that a rune that, via blackboxed chakra magic, shuts down 'conduction in metals', will not automatically also shut down 'nerve impulse transmission' or 'conduction in ionic liquids'.
If you wanted a rune that shuts down all three of those things, an obvious thing to do would be to target the lower-level things that they're all dependent on. However, if you shut down 'transfer of electrons between atoms' you also shut down 'fire', an undesired consequence. My reference to the precedent set by temporal runes was intended to imply that Hazō is very unlikely to make runes with unintended consequences of that level, and therefore that Hazō is very unlikely to make a rune that shuts down 'transfer of electrons between atoms' while trying to make a rune that shuts down 'conduction in metals'.
- This was my primary response to your point about biological electron transport. Since Hazō knows absolutely nothing about that phenomenon, he can't intend to target it. My argument there, and here, is that Hazō is very unlikely to autonomously decide to target the lower-level thing that would shut off biological electron transport while attempting to research a rune not intended to do that, because it would have other major unintended consequences and the example of temporal runes suggests that Hazō's research process doesn't produce those.
This is I think the core of the dispute. I am happy to agree that Hazō could shut off any one of the individual phenomena in the boxes, provided he knows at least enough to try targeting it. However, the point I'm trying to argue is that Hazō wouldn't shut off other phenomena at the same level that he
doesn't know about by targeting a single one that he
does know about, because that would require him to step down a level in what he targets, and that would have unintended consequences major enough that Hazō's research process would keep it from happening.
Two asides:
1. DanZapman already addressed the Raiton energy knowledge being present in-story, so I won't belabor that point further except to say that I am sure you can imagine that Hazo is somewhat aware of what one of the five human elements does to the human body - both academically and through in-person observation, since ninja throw that at each other.
2. Creating the new requirement that "Hazo should know why Raiton has the effects it does" feels, at best, like splitting hairs. And is unnecessary anyway, since he will observe the effect he expects.
As above, it's not about why it has the effect, it's about the difference between 'X is affected by Raiton' and 'X is dependent on Raiton'. That Raiton affects nerves would be sufficient knowledge if Hazō wanted to make a rune that, say, uses electricity to make all someone's muscles tense up; for Hazō to make a rune that tries to shut off the natural Raiton in people's nerves (again, as he would see it) he has to know that there is natural Raiton in people's nerves.
---
I will address your two other points that are not based on "but an emergent property", shortly:
1. The myelin sheath doesn't fit: You are right. The myelin sheath example was an auxiliary idea I had before our discussion, which I specifically noted was used for secondary reasoning. (e.g. I do not know what is going on here, but changing this variable seems to cause this, so...). Therefore it does not fit with the rest, and may make it seem like I arbitrarily go between those two definitions of "conductivity". The second and third are specifically for electrical conductivity.
Understood.
2. Side effects:
While it is a repeat, this bears repeating:
If you make the same post about the time rune, you will find that it (at least) causes molecular breakdowns on its threshold and possibly causes sub-atomic breakdowns on its threshold. Have we seen perfect slices out of the landscape (and-or MeatPuppet192108), or more exotic consequences like hellfire consuming the area? No.
In fact, as a happy coincidence, some of your points must exactly be the same, as both electron and ion transfer "will" break down at the barrier, hence the time rune must also result in the major side effects you mention, "whether to the action of chemistry (e.g. fires), to the integrity of nearby matter, or to the propagation of light"
Do any of these things happen?
No. (Barring the fire, which I doubt Hazo checked)
So this is a double-standard. If the time rune does not have those problems, neither will the conductivity rune.
Actually, I
did make the same post about the time rune. You can read it
here, if you're interested.
Regardless, thank you for engaging this idea so thoroughly. It is sincerely better than the alternative.
Thank
you for holding this viewpoint. One of the things I really love about MfD is how willing people (including the QMs!) are to have discussions like this, and not just do things like "oh, it's a story, it works however the authors say it does". Internal consistency is one of my key values in judging what makes a work of fiction good, and to achieve that, things like this do need considering.
I'll reiterate
@DanZapman 's point to clarify my stance.
My efforts were not to dictate the specific mechanism or effect (wrt conductivity) Hazo
should use to achieve instant-nervous-system-kill. That's clearly not how this works, e.g. the time rune. Instead, my efforts were to show that there already exists Hazo-(accessible)-knowledge and subsequent physical effects (related to conductivity) that Hazo can manipulate for AoE instant-nerve-kill.
Agreed. As above, if someone can provide me with a citation that Hazō knows that nerves naturally use Raiton to function, I will agree that Hazō knows enough to attempt a 'turn off the nervous system' rune by this pathway, regardless of his lack of more detailed information.
.
