Cognitive Physiology

==Summary==
Cognitive Physiology refers to the particular set of characteristics displayed by the main enemies, and allies, of the Megami Tensei franchise. In spite of being dubbed a number of different titles over the series, such as Demons, Shadows & Personas, and even Mirages, all of them ultimately share the same rudimentary and singular foundation of being mere aspects of one's psyche and soul, the basis of all being in Megami Tensei. Being creatures of ethereal nature, they come with a plethora of abilities and skill, which are listed below.
==Demonic Physiology==
Unlike other franchises, Megami Tensei (With a few exceptions) mainly utilizes "Demon" in accordance with the original definition of the word. That is, the ancient greek term "Daimon," which signified any spirit or entity of a supernatural nature, either lesser beings serving as attendants of major deities or the deities themselves, with a few instances even extending this definition to human souls as well. Thus, the term is all-encompassing and includes not only evil spirits of Abrahamic faith, but also all mythological entities.
Nevertheless, the one trait that ties all demons together is the fact that, rather than being strictly physical entities, they are, in fact, anthropomorphized forms of various concepts, stories, and natural phenomena, being residents of a purely informational world that transcends past, present, and future, formed by the thoughts and beliefs of humans, whose desires and emotions they are simply reflections of.
===Low-Tier (9-A to Low 2-C)===
* Superhuman Physical Characteristics: Even the weakest of Demons are able to easily kill fully armored soldiers with ease.
* Immortality: (Types 1, 4, 8): Demons are immortal beingsDevil Summoner 2: Raidou Kuzunoha vs. King Abaddon, that have existed for eons before time, battling for millenniums. Fated to constantly resurrect, they return after being vanquished constantly, continuing to revive as long as the phenomena they represent survive. 
* Enhanced Senses: Demons are able to detect and find invisible enemies without issueShin Megami Tensei: Liberation Dx2.
* Accelerated Development and Limited Power Absorption: Demons are able to devour other beings in order to become stronger fasterShin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga as well as restore and gain new strengthShin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor 2: Record Breaker.
* Conceptual Manipulation (Type 1), Higher-Dimensional Manipulation, Quantum Manipulation, Information Manipulation, Data Manipulation, Space-Time Manipulation, Pocket Reality Manipulation, Invisibility, Dimensional, Time Travel, and BFR Nullification: All Demons can create Decoherence Fields, which are quantum fluctuations in space that create an alternate dimension through which they become invisible. This is also subsequently proven in the events of SMT IV, where Demons can conjure Domains which warp and twist the space of the territory they inhabit to make it far bigger than it should beShin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse. Shadows are no exception to this rule as well, being all able to exert control over space and time to a certain, degree, and manifest independent pockets of space-timePERSONA 3 CLUB BOOK: WORLD GUIDE Q&A, such as the Dark Hour, which are devoid of regular rules of space and time, when in large groups. Demon Lords such as Morax take this a step further, and are able to emit energy barriersShin Megami Tensei DSJ Another Report Chapter 5 capable of isolating entire space-time continuums, making travel inShin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey Redux and out of them impossibleShin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey, and can create and sustainDigital Devil Story: Megami Tensei Book 2 Part 2: Chapter 4 entire universes . These universes, being products of data, are the particles that compose everything within the verse, even down to it's conceptsShin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey - Schwarzwelt Reminiscences.
* Duplication: Demons are capable of cloningShin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor Overclocked themselvesShin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne on multiple occasions.
* Invisibility: Demons are completely invisible to humans and their forms cannot be seen normallyDevil Summoner: Raidou Kuzunoha vs. the Soulless Army.
* Resurrection: Demons possess powers of resurrection, being able to revive from the dead. This can be done by lending energy to other Demons, bringing them back to life instantly. Divine Angels and fragmented aspects of YHVH can be resurrected as many times as he desires.
* Shapeshifting: Demons are masters of disguise and shapeshifting, being able take on numerous formsShin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner: Soul Hackers in orderTokyo Mirage Sessions ♯FE to disguise themselves.
* Invulnerability: Demons cannot be harmed by conventional weaponry and usually can only be harmed by something with a similar wavelength matching their own, a consistent theme that is followed by Shadows, beings that are constructed from a material that operates on alien laws of physicsPERSONA 3 CLUB BOOK: WORLD GUIDE Q&A, granting immunity to anything that abides by itPersona 3. Mirages serve as no objection to the rule.
* Extrasensory Perception: Demons are able to feel the powers of others and see how strong they are. They can also feel the presences of others that are hiddenDigital Devil Story: Megami Tensei Book 1 Sword of Flame –Chapter 4. Even invisibility serves as no defense, even being capable of sensing internal energiesPersona 2: Eternal Punishment, with said power even being compared to radarPersona 2: Eternal Punishment Tatsuya's Scenario.
* Dream Manipulation: Demons are able to enter and interact with the dreams of others. They can even affect the person's body while doing so.Shin Megami Tensei‎ ‎A-Mode DDS Dictionary
* Transformation: Demons, after gaining more power, are able to change their form into a new one, increasing their overall strength.
* Danmaku: Demons have access to spells that shoot out multiple elemental attacks at once and can wipe whole Hordes with them. Along with more direct examples, such as Black Frost's fire and ice danmaku spheresShin Megami Tensei: Synchronicity Prologue, and shown with Yu Narukami’s awakening in the P4G anime, where he casually creates thousands of projectiles with one spell to annihilate an uncountably large number of Shadows.
* Hacking and Technology Manipulation: Due to their nature as entities of information, rather than matter, Demons are able to hack into computers and other devices, as well as even hack into a person's brain, and manipulate and improve electronic devices through their powers. 
* Acausality: (Type 1 and 4): Demons are completely unbound by any definitions of causalitySecret Theories of the Schwarzwelt Questions with Shogo Isogai and are natural residents of a realm beyond timeShin Megami Tensei IV, leading to multiple of them being responsible for the creation of the universe, yet simultaneously created by human perception, on top of being unaffected by the collapse of the flow of time itself. 
* Incorporeality: Demons are consistently cited as information-drivenDigital Devil Story: Megami Tensei Book 1 Prologue – Chapter 3 existences, in which information exists homogenous to human thoughts and experiences, void of physical form. Stated to emerge from the souls and desires of humanity, and their bodies are themselves composed of Magnetite, the fulcrum of human desires.
* BFR: Demons are capable of BFR'ing their opponents, even as far as to other realms. 
* Power Bestowal: Demons can give new abilities to others such as teaching them spells and summoning other demons.
* Abstract Existence: (Type 2): Existing as anthropomorphized phenomena, Demons are the manifestation of neutral acts of natureThe other face of the Demon Artist, Kaneko Kazuma (Digital Devil Apocalypse), robbed of their original unfiltered state, now taking forms as physical manifestations of their Archetypes originating from the Atziluth, given form due to humanity's collective understanding. 
* Empowerment: Demons can be invigorated by belief and faith in them, as well as strong emotionsPersona 5 Royal.
* Sealing: Due to their immortality, Demons are incapable of definitively eliminating one another, resorting to methods such as sealing.
* Healing and Regeneration Negation: Wounds inflicted by demons cannot be healed without spiritual power and techniques, and they are generally able to kill regenerative entities, such as Nagas or Blobs, the latter of whom can regenerate even after being frozen and shattered.
* Invulnerability Negation: Due to their ability to deal damage on the spiritual, rather than the physical level, Demons are able to harm the Septentriones who are said to be invulnerable to conventional weaponry.
* Sound Manipulation and Empathic Manipulation: Demons have been known to use sound in order to control people and their emotions, even through moves such as Panic Voice.
* Non-Physical Interaction and Durability Negation via Mind, Soul, Information Manipulation, and Conceptual Manipulation: As seen above, Demons have the ability to launch "spiritual attacks," which damage opponents on both the physical and the underlying spiritual/mental/informational level, and are perfectly capable of directly harming each other, who exist as entities of quantum information devoid of the restraints of matter.
* Corruption (Type 2): Demons can utilize an intangible projectile to corrupt humans into changing their physiology and mentality, redefining their ideology into one similar to the demons responsible for the corruption.
* Self-Sustenance (Types 1, 2, and 3): As data beings, they do not need oxygen, food, or rest.
* Teleportation: Shown the capacity of teleporting to different locations.
* Telepathy: Demons are able to communicate with othersSMT2 Visionary ItemsShin Megami Tensei KAHN through theirDigital Devil Story 2: Megami Tensei Part 7: Chapter 6 minds.
* Forcefield Creation: Demons are capable of creating barriers, barriers powerful enough to keep the effects of the Collective Unconscious out.
===Mid-Tier (Low 1-C)===
All previous abilities on a much higher scale, plus:
* Immortality (Type 2): Demons of this level are entities of pure power whose core essences exist independently of their physical forms, being able to act offensively even after their own deaths.
* Telekinesis: Demons are able to affect the environment and everything in it with their powersDigital Devil Story 1: Megami Tensei Transfer –Chapter 2.
* Enhanced Invisibility: Demons on this level can surprise even other Demons, who can pick up invisible targets.
* Necromancy: Various demons like Nemissa, Nebiros and Dagda are able to resurrect fallen allies and enemies as undead entities and puppets to control. In Nemissa's case, the undead she brings back are immune to most attacks by other demons, with the exception of Expel and Healing.
* Enhanced Memory Manipulation: Demons are capable of manipulating one's memoriesShin Megami Tensei GBA Visionary Items Part I.
* Enhanced BFR: Demons are capable of sending others to different realms such as KetherDigital Devil Story: Megami Tensei (Telenet), and the Digital World.
* Fusionism and Absorption: Powerful demons, such as Seth, are known to be able to fuse whole universes togetherDigital Devil Story 2: Megami Tensei Part 4: Chapter 5 through their mere presence in the physical world.
* Enhanced Forcefield Creation: Demons as powerful as the Four Devas are able to create barriers powerful enough to separate the Human World and the Expanse. 
* Power Absorption: Demons are able to steal the powers of others to make themselves stronger.
* Power Nullification: By spreading their influence, The White were able to induce a grip on the Expanse that prevented Lucifer and Gabriel from retrieving Flynn and his party from it.
* Size Manipulation: Demons can use magic in order to shrink the size of an objectShin Megami Tensei GBA Visionary Items Part II. 
* Biological Manipulation and Body Puppetry: Stronger Demons are able to warp and change the human body through their powers and assume control of them.
* Transmutation: Demons can transform humans into other demons to give powers. They can also transform others to things such as flies, and animals.
* Subjective Reality, Illusion Creation, Memory Manipulation and Perception Manipulation: Demons are able to create different types of illusions in order to mess with their victims, affecting what they can see or experienceDigital Devil Story 1: Megami Tensei Sword of Flame –Chapter 5 or recreate specific memories of the victim.
==Archetype Physiology==
Archetypes are the fundamental units of the collective unconsciousness itself, being primordial, formless images and patterns that allow for the proper development of a human ego, as well as their capacity to comprehend and analyze their surroundings, which itself gives rise to the function of Understanding, that in turn shapes the Archetypes into the forms of Demons.
* Abstract Existence (Type 1): Archetypes are pure ideas and patterns that exist as elements of the Collective Unconsciousness itself, being described as formless and abstract even in comparison to their Demon counterparts.
* Acausality (Type 4) and Immortality (Type 5): Archetypes are residents of the unconscious world of Atziluth, which is described as free of all time and causality, as well as the concepts of life and deathQuantum Devil Saga: Avatar Tuner, Vol. 5.
* Omnipresence and Nigh-Omniscience: Existences native to the world of archetypes are said to exist within all worlds, and across all times, unbarred by any location, able to see, and feel all across the fabric of existence as omnipresent existences.
* Nonduality: The archetypal world is a realm to which the domain of the Ego does not extend, where distinctions between the individual self and the world become meaningless and cease to exist entirely, with Schrödinger describing it as "one giant ⟨I⟩" devoid of any separation, and Zula identifying it as "the all-in-one and one-in-all, who is limitless both in self and being."
* Nonexistent Physiology (Type 2): The world of the unconsciousness is a realm of nothingness, where existence as a whole is absent, and nothing but unstructured, raw information resides.
* Beyond-Dimensional Existence (Type 2): Atziluth is a realm that exceeds the very concept of dimensions, lacking directions such as up or down, and being something fundamentally beyond simple higher dimensionality, with information itself being further alluded to as something not necessarily bound to the concept of "coordinates."
==Low-Tier Resistances==
* Mind Manipulation, Empathic Manipulation, Soul Manipulation, Information Manipulation, Conceptual Manipulation (Type 1), Fusionism, Absorption, Existence Erasure, and Void Manipulation: Demons naturally exist in the Expanse, a higher-dimensional realm that transcends past, present, and futureShin Megami Tensei IV, which formed of Magnetite, in which even a jar of it can erode one's mind. The Expanse also swallows and consumes all that comes in contact with it, including the universe itself. They are also capable of maintaining their own existence in the Collective Unconscious, where the concept of the ego does not exist and all self-identity dissolves into oneness.
* Transmutation, Data Manipulation, and Petrification: All Demons are unaffected by the Cuvier Syndrome, which is caused by the sun releasing corrupt Data that instantly transforms anyone exposed to it into stone, and are capable of quickly breaking out of being turned into flies or other animalsShin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga 2.
* BFR: Demons are able to protect themselves and others from being sent to other realms. 
* Disease Manipulation: Demons can look into Girimehkala's eyes and remain unfazed by its effectsShin Megami Tensei V.
* Magic (Elemental Manipulation, Absolute Zero, Healing, Purification, Status Effect Inducement, Energy Absorption, Statistics Amplification, Statistics Reduction, Statistics Negation, Damage Boost, Damage Reduction, Light Manipulation, Holy Manipulation, Darkness Manipulation, Curse Manipulation, Death Manipulation, Summoning, Resurrection, Resistance Negation, Existence Erasure, Forcefield Creation, Attack Reflection): Demons have an assortment of ways of dealing with their own attacks, such as Null, Repel, Resistance and Anti-Skills, etc.
* Physics Manipulation and Matter Manipulation: Demons are composed of Magnetite, an energy substance derived from human thoughts, which is also unbound by the laws of physics, followed by Shadows, who are constructed from a material that voids physics, granting immunity to anything that abides by it. Mirages serve as no objection to the rule.
* Death Manipulation: Demons are able to survive within the Vortex World, which instantly kills anyone inside it.
* Space-Time Manipulation and Time Stop: Shadows are naturally unaffected by their own space-time distortions, as well as those of other Shadows.
* Extreme Cold and Cosmic Radiation: Demons are completely unharmed while being in outer space.
==Mid-Tier Resistances==
Same as before, on a vastly higher level.
==Archetype Resistances==
Same as before, on an unfathomably high level, plus:
* Enhanced Resistance to Mind Manipulation: Stronger Demons can withstand Kagutsuchi's light, which can affect weaker Demons.
* Enhanced Resistance to Existence Erasure: Demons of significant stature, such as Demi-Fiend, can no-sell Kagutsuchi's light, which can erase people from existence.
* Observation: As proven by Mem Aleph, Observation cannot reach the deep depths of the Atziluth, with this characteristic being directly responsible for Mem Aleph's lack of an anthropomorphized form.
==References==
Category:Verse-specific Powers and Abilities
Category:Megami Tensei
Category:Megami Tensei
Category:Persona