11 - the meeting of their minds

Doombase

Keltham+: The man is seated cross-legged opposite Carissa, in their private time-dilated Forbiddance which no other is to enter during this event.  The universe is a bit over three meters tall from floor to ceiling, and though the ceiling is something like a glowing blue sky, it is not really the same.

The man takes a scroll of Heightened Extended Detect Thoughts; the spell at just second-level cannot provide enough raw power for him to get enough decodable information off Carissa.  He has more scrolls, but they will still have relatively little time.  Both of them think quickly, now, and at this level of intelligence there should be little wasted motion.  But there is much thought for them to exchange.

He casts the spell, observes Carissa permitting it to take hold; he signals Carissa that she can go ahead and put on her artifact headband, combined now with her Wishes; and then, when she's ready, cast her own Detect Thoughts on him.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa is very unsure whether this will work, whether it will be impossible to think in front of Keltham or not, but the worst case scenario, here, is that it doesn’t work, and they learn nothing. She’s decided to not try to make it work, because trying to make herself willing to have thoughts in front of Keltham seems like a terrible idea. If he turns out to feel safe to think around, then this will work, and if not, it won’t; all she’s here to do is learn which world she’s in.

She takes her headband back. 

It’s not actually a headband. That’s how she thinks of it, because she’s a wizard who spent the first eight years of her adult life saving for a headband, but it’s a crown by any reasonable definition. More elaborate and more expensive than the crowns most Kings can arrange to wear. The metal is cool to the touch no matter how long she holds it.

Carissa wants to be smarter and better and know more things and have more space to think them in. She puts it on, and feels her mind expand around her.

Carissa Sevar: She gives herself ten rounds, first, to just breathe, take it in, exult in it; she is more complete, and more alive, and her delight in that need not be tainted by all the facts that are going to immediately come crashing down on her. Many Carissae Sevar will live their whole lives without being Wished and artifact-headbanded up as far as magic can take them, without letting their thoughts spool out in a mind that is big enough to contain them.

It is not one ounce less satisfying and less beautiful and less wondrous than she imagined it; if anything, it's moreso, because there is more space in her now for imagination. 

Carissa Sevar: Right, then, enough of that. Time to save the world.

Carissa Sevar: There's not an easy solution.

It's the first thing she looks for when she puts her headband on. She's been considering it unlikely, really, but likely enough that much of her remaining hope resided there. That there was some clever solution as likely as Keltham's mainline plan to result in the overthrow of Hell and the return to better custody of those souls subject to it, which did not run even a small residual risk of destroying everything else in Creation. 

There isn't. Or if there is, it's something that uses dath ilan knowledge alongside Golarion knowledge, something that'll occur to her or Keltham in a blinding flash of insight only when their minds are met and joined. Not something Keltham has seen himself yet, and not something you can infer if you've only built one computer and still can't really see how to convert many of the questions you actually want answered into its strange language. She would think about it longer, but it's unlikely she'll see it in another sixty seconds if she didn't see it in the first six - not if she doesn’t even see a promising angle of attack -

Carissa Sevar: In the absence of the easy solution there’s only the difficult one. In the last week before their trip to the city of Brass she took to organizing her wall for her future self, circling particularly confusing questions that she hoped smarter-Carissa would be able to resolve, trying more to identify important questions than to answer them. Answering them was for later, for once she was smarter. 

For now. 

Well, not quite now. Answering the questions on the wall is the third item on her to-do list. The second is to look inside herself.

Carissa Sevar: She hasn't really been using dath ilani cognitive techniques for a while. She used them to talk to Keltham; otherwise she'd fail to talk to him entirely. She used the really inescapable bits, the bits about how you should try to believe true things instead of false things, and check yourself internally to see if you're doing that, if your questioning-processes are even trying to spot your confusions and rip them away and arrive at the truth. But there's a lot more than that, and for the last month Carissa has been (mostly deliberately, mostly as the result of an explicit calculation about the merits of this course of action, but only mostly) holding them in abeyance, because she did not trust that they would not change her. 

She still doesn't entirely trust the techniques but one of the things that is immediately obvious, from here, from this place of greater clarity about the roiling sea of emotional agony that has been most of her life since she left Osirion, is that she's going to need to be using more of them than she's been using so far, or the world is probably going to end. And while she's changed, in some ways, from the Carissa Sevar who some seconds ago put her headband on, she has not changed in being entirely sure that every other thing she has ever cared about or ever will is worth tossing into the furnace for a one-in-a-million chance that it'll save the world.

Carissa Sevar: And that is, of course, the first place to look, with her newfound mental fortitude, with a sharper spotlight she can use to catch any lies she might still be telling herself and any places she might be looking away from. Is she, mentally and emotionally, configured in the best possible way to work on this for as long as it takes, alongside Keltham even when everything he says is incredibly frustrating and feels slippery and wrongheaded?

No.

This is hardly a thought that required lifting her mind up to a new stage where most people could hardly recognize it. She talked about it with Carmin on her second day here, when she first needed a break from making her wall of strategically important questions. She'd picked a coping mechanism by then: she was visualizing her thoughts, in her head, as suspended above a river of torment, red-hot like the Andramal winding through Dis. That way, she could identify when a thought was touched, singed, shaped, by the river of agony, and rerun it. 

This, Carmin had said, was not the approach most people come up with, to trying to think clearly while in pain; mostly they try to make the pain less intense, less immediate, until it's the kind of pain you can work alongside as an old friend. "Be in constant emotional agony, use very elevated Wisdom to check if thoughts were touched by the intense emotional agony" is both not available to most people and not a very good idea.

Carissa obediently tried various approaches to being in less emotional agony. She determined that many of them were designed for problems that were not 'the literal worst possible outcome under your values system is very likely to happen and it's your fault' since many of them were about noticing and appreciating how the problem you had was not the worst possible problem to have, or not likely to be very bad, or not very likely to happen, or would leave a world worth living in even if it happened. They would be very useful if she were emotionally distressed about her family going to Hell or something normal to be sad about like that. 

Most ways of being in less emotional agony involved looking away from reality, and she could afford that even less than she could afford the emotional agony. Most ways of trying to shape her thoughts to dip into the river of agony less often involved shaping her thoughts to not tell her when the river of agony was influencing her, and that was even worse. 

So she told Carmin it was the approach where she was in constant emotional agony but learned how to keep her thoughts properly clear of it, or nothing, at least until she was even wiser. She would be sculpted around the pain she was in, but at least she would see it clearly, have no thoughts she couldn't think, and know which thoughts to distrust; that was the best solution she could come up with. 

Carissa Sevar: That was wrong, of course. The thing she can feel herself doing now was possible even at her previous Wisdom. She actually thinks that one of the fundamental revelations she's having, one of the general principles here, is that all this was possible for the very original Carissa, the little girl at the Worldwound worshipping Asmodeus with no magic at all.

All she's doing is looking at the pain and knowing that it does not help. That because it does not help, it is a luxury, and she cannot afford luxuries. It feels strange at first, and counterintuitive, for pain to be a luxury, for grief and guilt and horror and misery to be luxuries, but that's what they are; they are parts of Carissa which are real and important and which she cannot afford. 

The pain does not want to hear that it's a luxury. The pain wants to be necessary. The pain wants the story to go that Carissa Sevar is in so much pain and has to do her work anyway. But of course the story is better, truer to the pain and truer to Carissa Sevar, if it goes that Carissa Sevar does not have the luxury of being in pain. 

If you do this wrong, you'll just fold the pain up on itself, and be miserable about your own misery, count it against yourself as another failing. Here, she does feel like she's using a skill she didn't have before, a skill that she certainly at least never used before: the skill of reaching for each thread of her mind and knowing how much pressure to put on it, so that it dissolves instead of hiding. It feels vaguely like picking blackberries; you develop a sense of which are ripe on the vine and ready to fall into your hand. 

She looks at the pain, thread by thread, and she tells it regretfully that she cannot afford it. That precisely because the thing that she is mourning is so important, there is no space and no time to mourn it, and so she'll have to not be in pain, and that too is part of the tragedy, that she must walk into it without even the comfort of being permitted to grieve it. She does it very gently, very cautiously, so she doesn't just hide her thoughts from herself by accident.

Carissa Sevar: After a while in the place of the red-hot river of agony there is an abiding conviction that it would be correct to mourn, correct to scream, correct to pound her fists against the floor until she broke every bone in her hands, but that she cannot, because the world deserves an advocate who is not distracted. It deserves that more than it deserves to be mourned, even though it does deserve to be mourned. Carissa Sevar is strong enough to build her forty-foot wall of strategically important questions while at every instant suffering intensely, but she actually needs to be stronger than that, strong enough to stop it with the suffering intensely, so she's going to do that now. 

That's not the whole of it but it's a solid few steps closer. 

Carissa Sevar: She looks at Keltham, then, and casts Detect Thoughts - (of course the spell behaves like that, how did she never notice before that there's an obvious better configuration, every spell is going to be like that, have little unnecessary points of tension no one could see how to unfurl, she could fix them all) - and then looks up to meet his eyes.

She doesn't feel afraid. That wouldn't help. She does feel curious, because that's the kind of thing that might.

Keltham+: His mind lays open to her, as it did in the beginning, four months and a thousand years earlier, when she cast a lesser form of this spell on Keltham shortly after his arrival in Golarion.

Now she is fifth-circle and INT 29, and he is greatly changed, and she is greatly changed.

The structures of his mind unfold before her, in vastly greater detail...

...they are more orderly, now, than when Keltham arrived in Golarion.  Stronger, sadder, and better-organized.

His mind shows, because he had been watching Carissa confront her dilemmas just now, his thoughts about how he handled those matters himself.

He did not switch off his own hurt.  Past-Keltham never tried to switch off his own hurt at any point.  Pharasma might have seen that as self-modification, planning to extort Her - creating a new version of Keltham that would feel less hurt over having to annihilate everyone in Pharasma's Creation -

(His thoughts swiftly glide over the reasoning there, trusting to the augmented powers of thought-detection that he sees in Carissa now, the swiftness of her thought, to understand what should be instantly comprehensible at INT 29 -)

dath ilan: A coherent being almost never modifies their own utility function.

To choose to hurt less about destroying Creation, is to be readier to destroy Creation, to choose that under a wider range of circumstances.

So a coherent agent in past-Keltham's place, even having already mostly decided to destroy Creation, would not modify its utility function to assign less negative valence to destroying Creation.  What about the small probabilities of Creation not being as it appears, in which case you might have to change your mind in the future?

Even if on the most-probable-mainline you expect to carry out the same decision after modifying your utility function, and get the same amount of utility according to your current utility function, there are possible worlds where the different utility functions imply a different choice.  Those possible worlds do not have zero probability; the different decisions you would make in them represent an expected loss from the standpoint of your present utility function.

And so a coherent mind almost never self-modifies in that way.  The expected loss is obvious; what would they gain?  A coherent agent never has cause to bind itself, to war within itself; if it would benefit from predictably doing something, it can just predictably do that thing.

Past-Keltham was not coherent, and hurt inside, at the thought of killing everyone he'd met in Golarion.  Murdering trillions of innocent people, maybe isekai-ing them to someplace as unpleasant as Golarion had been to him - or just their ceasing to be at all, if what happened to him really was a special case, though there seem to be strong arguments that it wouldn't be - he did not want to do that.

Which is to say - metaphorically - from the quizzical perspective of a more coherent mind - that past-Keltham derived internal disutility from the event of his imagining and choosing situations of sufficiently low external utility.

To a weird twisted mortal incoherent mind like that, might there not be utility to be gained, in choosing to hurt less?

If you're going to destroy Creation anyways, why hurt about it too?  If it's the same outer act, the same outer consequences, either way?

Keltham+: But what if original-Keltham wouldn't have been able to destroy Creation, would have flinched at the end, turned away from the betrayal of deontologies?

What if original-Keltham furthermore would have turned out to believe, deep down, that Pharasma would yield to alter-Keltham; hence that alter-Keltham wouldn't need to actually follow through, if he'd made himself hurt less about destroying Creation?

And - even if that's mostly not what was going on - what if Pharasma's decision theory, looking at something as much of an incredibly incoherent mess as past-Keltham, saw elements in it of Keltham maybe flinching away?  Of his fearing he might flinch away, his expecting Pharasma to yield?  When he made the decision to exert what power and Wisdom he held over himself, to make himself hurt less, and so become readier to destroy the world?

So, just in case, he didn't do anything that Pharasma might interpret as making himself hurt less, about the prospect of destroying the world, when he realized that was what he needed to do.

Keltham+: He didn't deliberately or wantonly think about the painful thing all the time, as would have been stupid.  He also didn't stupidly not-think-about that area of thoughtspace; he went on thinking about alternatives to destroying the universe.  He didn't deliberately think painful thoughts, but he left those emotions in place, ready to fire unchanged, when at the end he made his last decision to proceed with his plan; knowing that it might end with him destroying everything.

On a moral level, what he's doing has simply the moral meaning of him destroying Creation.  If Pharasma or Cayden Cailean comes along and makes something else happen instead, that's not to his own credit.  And he needed to not think about all that anyways.

He didn't actively think about how much he didn't want to destroy Creation and isekai everyone in Axis, didn't actively call that pain down on himself.  He also didn't try to do anything about the sickening sense of sadness and despair that went on in the background anyways.  That might have been a forbidden self-modification, and increased the actual risk to Creation.

That person wove himself a new structure woven out of the pieces that past-Keltham shattered into, when past-Keltham met a situation that set his inner pieces at odds against each other, consequences and deontology and virtues no longer in accord and pointing in separate and incompatible directions.  That man decided not to fall apart, to stay sane anyways, to continue anyways; which was also a capability that dath ilan had tried to grant him.

...he didn't do it perfectly.  You're supposed to have help from a Keeper, to put yourself together again in a way that makes sense, when you take enough damage that you'd fall apart if not for your decision not to.  Sanity-by-fiat is meant to be a temporary thing, for emergencies.

The person that Carissa met when she came to the Doom Base from Osirion - he conceived of himself as something of a mausoleum to past-Keltham's last wishes, made out of the pieces of Keltham.

All of his remaining self-care was concentrated into his last hope that the world wasn't really real, that the people in Hell weren't really there, that the main consciousnesses in this continuum with a lot of realityfluid underlying them were himself and Carissa and his other potential love interests and maybe a few other people.  In that case, he ought to not sacrifice himself fully for the sake of destroying Hell or mending Pharasma's Creation -

- but he couldn't actually do that, it turned out, couldn't balance Creation and himself.  He didn't have enough reflectivity during his temporary bouts of Wisdom 20 to make changes that could simultaneously optimize around himself and Creation.  Especially not when those self-modifications also had to work at Wisdom 16, when the Owl's Wisdoms wore off.

A mortal cannot always divide their efforts between two possibilities, not in practice.  He had to choose between optimizing for his own inner life and optimizing for Creation, and he chose Creation, because he wasn't that selfish, in the end.

The only hope he'd held out for himself, was that a last plea of his had been heard, that the quality of a viewpoint character had left him.  He'd tried to conduct himself accordingly, be something that could fade into the background of the plot.  Hoping that something far above had heard him, listened to his last plea, and removed most of the realityfluid from his computation, letting the real Keltham continue somewhere else, from just before he cast Fox's Cunning on himself back in Osirion.  Even finding himself still in Golarion, he could still hope for that, that most of himself wasn't really there, anymore.

He thought about his own existence as little as possible, a poor man's substitute for daring to try to interrupt the reflective thought-loops that underlay his own consciousness.

Carissa Sevar: For a long time Carissa did not understand what Keltham meant when he claimed that he wasn't Keltham, that Keltham was gone. She isn't confused, now, even if Keltham appears to on an impressively comprehensive level not care about the things Carissa personally gets out of existence and care about a completely different set of things that don't matter to her at all.

She wishes he had been more selfish, too selfish to destroy the world, selfish enough to grasp for the less-likely story where they fix Hell some less risky way. There's no point dwelling on that either. 

Keltham+: When he reached Intelligence 25 / Wisdom 26 / Splendour 25, after receiving Carissa's wishes and Pilar's headband, he put himself back together - though that's more a question of his using Wisdom 26 (now 27) to operate all his pieces individually, rather than him trying to make there really be a coherent person inside.

There are obvious better ways to grow up, as he saw later with some time to think.  One such obvious way involves increasing thinkoomph more gradually, having new experiences that fill in your slightly larger mind with new motivations, new philosophies-of-thought-and-action, newly learned intuitive-choices, to become a real person and not just a utility function hooked up to thinkoomph.

All of that works better with a passion driving you towards something you actually want, and not just a lesser horror you're steering at to avoid a greater one.  It works better if your life and love and startup isn't in ruins, if you have something positive to look forward to.  Carissa could become a coherent person like that, maybe, if she doesn't have to become a god instead; she's not happy, but she's driven and unified within herself.

He could decide to make himself become that regardless, at Wisdom 27 - envision a plausible person he might have become if he'd done things the slow correct way, then imitate his best guesses for what a person like that would think.

But then there's the question of whether that would constitute a self-modification too far away from the original Keltham's original reasons for choosing to destroy the world.  He is very constrained, now, in how he dares repair himself.  Small risks matter, when they're on that scale, and also he can't achieve real organic happiness anyways so it's not worth it.

His mind is all deliberate structure, now; he doesn't just exist and feel, he is working to a plan of what to think and feel, deliberate strategies of internal choice.  If he were to describe himself now, it would be that he is something inspired by Keltham, a crafted artwork designed in the shape of past-Keltham.

...But he's not in pain, anymore.  He's ready to feel Keltham's pain later, when it might matter to how Pharasma perceives the decision theory of threats versus best-alternatives-to-negotiated agreement.  But for now, he's just not in pain.  He's decided not to think those thoughts in the native structure that would bind to the circuits firing those emotions.  That's something you can just do, at Wisdom 27, if you have all of dath ilan's knowledge and training that it gave to the tiny childlike past-Keltham about how minds work.

He'll think those thoughts again in their native format at the end, when he makes his last mortal decision, and imprints himself onto the form of a god.  Just in case what's currently on his mind has anything to do with what sort of god he becomes, when he touches the Starstone.

That he doesn't want to kill everyone.

That he'll do it anyways, and not hurt any less about it, if that's what it takes to end Pharasma's Creation in its present form.

Carissa Sevar: She wishes Keltham could have gone on being the person that he was. She liked the person that he was. She understands, now, why he couldn't just be the person that he was but smarter, the way she can be the person that she was but smarter - she thinks about what she did anyway, in case it helps him, but she suspects that it won't -

- the core thing about Carissa Sevar, which has been true since she was four and first realized it, is that she is the person with a direct and immediate interest in the survival of Carissa Sevar. That gives her an intimacy with all possible versions of herself that she could never feel for any other person, that no other person could possibly feel for her; every Carissa Sevar, whether created through memory modification or enhancement or curses or whatever else, possesses a stake in Carissa Sevar's continued survival that no one else in the universe possibly can. When tiny four year old Carissa was scared because she'd gotten in trouble at school for misunderstanding an instruction and gotten beaten, she could take comfort in the love and support of grownup Carissa, of devil Carissa, the future people who want Carissa to live because they can only live through her. 

The next most core thing about Carissa Sevar is that she loves being alive. Some of that was interwoven with Asmodean things she's now discarded, gratitude to her creators that she is not sure is entirely coherent since their decision process about whether to make her did not involve a check about whether she'd approve of being made or about whether she'd be grateful. (She does think she approves of being grateful to any creator who created her conditional on her gratitude, of serving any creator who created her conditional on her service; Asmodeus's mistake is that he didn't negotiate for her loyalty, more fool he.)

Carissa Sevar: But most of the wonderful perfect delight of being alive is just a fundamental truth that felt as real when she was four as it does now, that to take in input from the world around her and make sense of it as much as she can is a wonderful glorious untouchably perfect thing, and as she's grown bigger she can take in more input, and make more sense of it, and answer and ask newer more complicated questions, and it's wonderful. 

The next more core thing about Carissa Sevar is that she wants the world to not feature any big appalling problems that might eat her, so that she can study magic all day. This, too, has persisted uncomplicatedly in her self-concept since...not since she was four. Since she was eleven, maybe. If it's possible for her to solve the big appalling problems, she'll do that, because it's what she'd want someone else to do, but the point of solving the horrible problems is to get to study magic all the time. 

And from there there's a lot of branches, bits she's exploring, like why "it's what she'd want someone else to do" features so much in her reasoning and whether that's enough to get you all the way to Good or if it's more of a Lawful Neutral thing at its core, and why she likes being a cult leader, and why she thinks Dispater and Abrogail were good for her in ways Good versions of them wouldn't and couldn't have been, but all of them feel like whether or not they persist across any particular set of new capacities she'll remain herself, and recognize herself, and love herself and be happy for herself that she gets to be alive.

 She is sorry, if Keltham isn't shaped in such a way that he can take any advantage of any of that. It's probably not high priority to resolve, but she wishes it were better for him.

Keltham+: He is showing all this to Carissa, now, showing her all of this, all of the dath ilani technique he can, because he is pretending that Snack Service does not exist, and if Snack Service did not exist, he would be desperate to find a better way - even more desperate - would be giving Carissa every advantage he can, all of his art, all of his knowledge.  Because maybe she's the story's protagonist and she can think of a way out, a way to save Creation without maybe destroying it, without releasing Rovagug and killing everyone in Project Lawful and Osirion, everyone he knows in Golarion.  He has seen Carissa augmented in the City of Brass, for it, opened his thoughts to her, for it, will trust her, for it, would give her any resource in his power, for it; if she can think of a better way to rescue all the souls in Evil afterlives and make Pharasma's Creation something that doesn't hammer down any Civilization before it forms.

He'd do that even if he was taking Snack Service into account, just in case.

If she needed him to true-suicide for it, he would; only not go to Hell, for that is something he'd never do.  He is not that unselfish.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa isn't, actually, going to use the dath ilani techniques for this; she'll look at them, learn from them, and then build something else for herself. 

She isn't sure Keltham understands the way she feels about dath ilan, about dath ilani mental techniques, she suspects that she wouldn't have ended up needing to do so much translating of the things he says to her if he understood.

 Carissa thinks that dath ilan is a nice place to live for the people who live there, and probably doing notably better than any institution she'd know how to run at acting on the values of the people who run it, and it makes sense that Keltham misses it very much.

She does not, actually, share much in the way of values with dath ilan. She's thought about it, because it might be very important, and she has picked out the parts of herself that were just rationalizations so she could endure Cheliax and pass mindreading, and even once you strip all that way - Carissa thinks that getting to exist is very important, that ceasing to be is far worse than going to Hell, that if you are annihilated from a billion universes and someone makes a copy of you in a different universe you have lost almost everything that mattered, that 'average utilitarianism' does not describe her values or anything that even resembles them and in fact feels like a silly value-function someone made up to win philosophy arguments, not a plausible account of how a person's deep wants for the world could possibly be shaped (she is aware that it is a real way peoples' deep wants for the world could be shaped, but certainly not hers). 

There aren't Carissae in dath ilan, and she wonders whether there's no one born like her or if they just get shaped some other way in the course of growing.

Carissa Sevar: Dath ilan is not really something she wants to see win; dath ilan winning isn't very good, by her values. She suspects it's wrong-by-Carissa's-values to kill demons and magical beasts and wild turkeys and mules. It's definitely wrong to kill anyone who can object.She thinks it's definitely wrong not to make new people, if you can do it. It's all right to hurt people if you're good at it. It's all right to have slaves, if you made them or saved them when no one else would have. That's what a Carissaeish Good would look like, she thinks. She isn't, herself, Carissaeish Good, but if she met a civilization of it she'd want to see them win. 

Dath ilan's mental techniques were, in a very ordinary sense, engineered to make people dath ilani; engineered to raise ilani children who share the fundamental assumptions of their society. Every society does that; there's no way of raising children without inculcating them in your values, nor would it be a reasonable thing to try. You can tell them about the importance of independence and thinking for themselves, but that's a value of your society that you are inculcating in them. There's nothing wrong with it. 

Since Carissa disagrees with dath ilan on almost every important values question relevant to her life, she is wary of building her mind out of cognitive techniques meant to produce dath ilani. Even without assuming any malicious engineering by dath ilan's technique engineers to confuse people about their own values, dath ilanism teaches ways of resolving some of the muddles inside people, and Carissa thinks it mostly does not resolve them in the way that a fully worked out Sevarism would resolve them. 

If she had time, then, Carissa would discard ilani techniques entirely and build it all herself from scratch. She didn't, initially, agree with this premise of Irorite philosophy, but it has grown on her; the best cognitive techniques for you are the ones you hammered out yourself, at your pace, with your goals as an aim, with access to some examples but without a model you'll get stuck on and use as a base for forming your own. 

Of course, she doesn't have time. She needs to become as skilled as possible as quickly as possible, even if this means building a permanently worse and diminished Carissa because of using techniques that aren't hers, that are designed by people that don't share her values, and that resolve all her muddles in the wrong way. It's better to have access to those tools than to not, wherever she's not able to invent her own fast enough. But she thinks that the version of her built out of ilani techniques instead of out of her own techniques she invented herself for her own specific values and purposes will be substantially worse, and so she's trying skill-by-skill to calculate the best tradeoff and then use the ilani technique or not depending how that calculation comes out. 

And of course it is not a good use of her energy to feel sad about this, or bitter, or resentful, so she's not going to, but she considers learning dath ilani techniques to be replacing bits of her own soul with aliens with alien priorities, and it is the sort of thing that would grieve her, if she had time to grieve. She doesn't share Keltham's sense that people ought to enhance themselves slowly, bit by bit, filling out the pieces of themselves as they grow - it seems like one thing people could do, but not the only one -- but she does feel that for mental technique-building, that it's actually something you ought to do at your own pace. 

All of this to say that she's listening, trying to take in everything Keltham is trying to push at her, but with wariness, because the tools he's trying to teach her to use are tools meant for different goals than she has. 

Keltham+: Rolling your own cognitive techniques is an obvious goal.  Dath ilan has a whole philosophy about it, that knowledge isn't truly part of you until you could reinvent it from scratch.  He supposes she could try to run off only the Irorite version of that philosophy, if she's worried about contamination, but it sure is a very dath ilani way to look at the world and yourself.

If you consciously understand the ways you shape people, but letting them become themselves is one of your goals, it follows that 'roll your own cognitive techniques' is something that your Civilization would try to teach people to do if they could.  It's why they don't have Golarion-style 'schools' full of memorization, why they herd children into discovering for themselves how dath ilan orbits its own Sun, the simplified equations of classical-illusion gravity.  Dath ilan engineers people to be themselves, to discover themselves, to a degree far beyond anything that anyone in Golarion has ever considered doing, because they have the luxury of that in their optimized world; to figure out the precise conditions to let children discover gravity for themselves, and not make them memorize it.  And children aren't told either, until they suspect it, that the simplified equations of classical-illusion gravity they discover aren't the final truth.

Maybe Carissa at INT 29 - cognitively overpowered in some ways if not others beyond anybody who existed in dath ilan, using mutual telepathy with INT 29 Keltham - can reinvent her own cognitive techniques to any significant degree, within a week or two of time dilation.

It would not particularly be possible otherwise.

Past-Keltham was not taught very much of the Art directly, he was too young to need it and too stupid to use it, but he was taught a lot of the material that can be used to invent it at INT 29.

Here, then, is some of what she'd need to know to rebuild her own version of the Art from scratch.  Even at INT 29, the Detect Thoughts are not fine enough that she'll be able to pick it up from watching him think at this speed, but it is something of an overview of what she could try to learn later at speed, using INT 29 and telepathy -

dath ilan: - and his mind reviews some of it for her, what little he was taught of the vast amount that true Civilization knows about cognitive science, and some of what he filled in at INT 29 around improved recollections; like a Zoomout Video showing dath ilan surrounded by its entire universe; only with meaningful content with implications in every piece of it, stars that are structured words instead of tiny dots of light in an illusion -

- macroanatomy and microanatomy of the brain, over a hundred cortical regions in two hemispheres and subsurface structures, vision here, spatial sense here, one kind of sensory integration and motor planning here, the mapping of the body's homunculus onto it; but that sensorimotor cortex interfaces with the cerebellum which does this kind of motor planning - 

- microanatomy, the layers of the cortex, the different neurons making up the layers, how they mesh with each other, the signaling mesh produced by temporal synchronization of two already-synchronized cortical columns that recruit a third equidistant member; this is a cerebellar chip, detecting errors and correlating those errors against a hundred thousand inputs, a branching factor higher than exists anywhere else in the brain, yet still vastly reduced in dimension compared to all the incoming sensory data -

- differences between expected reward and actual reward; the equations for how much an error in either direction updates the neuron; if the errors can't be gotten down to zero, the neuron equilibrates, metastable if not stable, around the point where the error-nudges in both directions balance in their sum -

- circuits in subcortical structures that watch the larger world-model, binding emotions to them if they recognize the format; here's what Civilization taught him about the way that those circuits wire up in childhood, the lesser ways they rewire in adulthood; the gene expression cascades underneath, the locally simple learning equations they implement; local gradient descent, temporal-difference learning, fire-together-wire-together -

- this is what a human brain really is, deep down, the real character of cognition as carried out inside mortals -

- and his thoughts start to zoom back upward from there through the levels of organization in intelligence, pointing out particular emotions and the subcortical structures they correspond to, what those emotions take as successes and errors, how mortal habits train themselves and balance around the point where subcortical error-nudges counterbalance each other, as they propagate through the whole brain - most of the local parts of cognition are usually in equilibrium, but there's always something being updated somewhere and so the brain's habits-in-sum are always moving...

...like a three-dimensional puzzle piece slotting into place, fitting together the mathematics of decision theory, what he's already taught her of computation and programming to build the magical-simulator-of-magic, calculus, equilibria, expected value, valid inference; combine it with what Civilization knows of the specifics of how brains compute things, and you can see the shape in the center, how that shape matches with all the surrounding areas of knowledge and binds to it, like a protein molecule slotting into its receptor...

...this is Thoughtcraft, much like Spellcraft, but with different laws of physics.

It's one fragment of Science.

There's kind of a lot of Science.

Past-Keltham didn't tell her because he didn't know how to teach all that and definitely not quickly - not knowing that Detect Thoughts at this level was possible - and it didn't seem kind to him, to say what sort of education adults had, that he couldn't realistically pass on in any reasonable time.

Carissa Sevar: Huh.

How the brain works isn't actually something Carissa had ever particularly wondered about; it wasn't just an unanswered question but one where it was hard to imagine any answer being particularly useful. 

there's so much world so many things to learn so much detail everywhere how could anyone know those things and think it'd be better if it were all gone

 It's sad, in a way - a very small sadness next to the other ones, but still sad - that he couldn't have told her that when she would have collapsed into his arms in delighted wonder and just wanted to play with the idea all day. 

She appreciates his telling her now, because she can see that he wants her to, because it really is fascinating.

She'd have less hesitancy about borrowing from dath ilani knowledge of the physical functioning of the brain, except that of course Wished-up and artifact headbanded minds probably don't even exactly work like that anymore.

Keltham+: Everything is of a piece because reality is one piece.  All divisions between areas of knowledge exist in the map, not in the territory.

The perspective that she labeled 'average utilitarianism' relies on an understanding of generalized Relativity as it applies to quantum mechanics -

- this being something past-Keltham didn't discuss with Cheliax earlier, because combined with the most elementary math of quantum fields, Relativity directly yields an understanding of antimatter, which is the most obvious way to use Wishes to destroy countries -

dath ilan: You can, of course, get the equations of Relativity just by observing the physical facts; but to really understand them, children are led to guess them in advance by contemplating certain questions and dissolving those questions as ontologically meaningless.

"How fast is the whole universe moving?" seems unobservable from inside the universe; and, you could argue, is not only unobservable but meaningless - because in the simplest conceptual frameworks that do predict what is observable, 'motion' is the motion of particles relative to each other.  Not, motion relative to an absolute space, that is unobservable and hence can be eliminated as an element of the theory.

But maybe there is an absolute space?  Maybe physics has absolute space beneath it, and everything is moving at a speed through that space.  Maybe someday you'll discover 'laws of physics' - simplest logical rules that would reproduce a universe embedding you to observe what you observe - that imply distinguished structures that stay motionless within space, mathematical seams that are observable.  And, measuring those, you'll discover the whole universe is moving at a billion kilometers per second relative to absolute space.  How do you know you won't?

Later, you're shepherded through discovering the relationship between electricity and magnetism, generalizing the classical-illusion field equations for those, and realizing that the wave propagation through that field is light.  And this, it seems at first, implies a fixed speed for light, relative to the electrical-magnetic field.

And you might think: couldn't you measure how fast you were moving relative to light, and so measure how fast you were moving relative to an absolute Background Space?  So the thought experiment about the whole universe moving twice as fast - suggesting that only relative motion is real or even meaningful - has failed to predict the character of physics; there was an absolute space after all.

But actually, every time you measure the speed of light relative to yourself, you find the same speed.  No matter how fast you're going, or how fast the light source is moving, you find the same measured speed of light from your own perspective.

And when you work out the logic of what that shocking fact implies, it ends up requiring that you view spatial dimensions and time dimensions as being relative to your current velocity... which is to say, the time distances and space distances that observers at different speeds observe as different quantities, are not the underlying elements of reality.

The only thing that's still invariant from every perspective is the interval between two events, which in terms of classical-illusion measurements would be expressed as the square of distance in time minus the square of distance in space, with the speed of light converting units between the two.

This surprising additional math, indeed, is exactly what's required to implement a universe where there's a universal speed limit reflecting the locality of causality, and yet the only meaningful elements of reality are the positions of things relative to each other.  That Reality went to this extra effort to make physics visibly 'relative', in this sense, is the beginning hint of a deeper truth that proves to be more general: physics is built around a certain spirit and character in which relative positions, not absolute positions, are the elements of reality in the ontology of physics.

Over and over, it proves possible to start from a thought experiment like "If I'm inside a sealed room, should I be able to tell if I'm staying still or moving at a constant velocity of a million miles per hour?", or "Should we be able to tell whether the whole universe is rotating or not, relative to absolute space, by seeing if there's centripetal forces being generated by the rotation?", to answer "No!  If I can't see the quantity from my own perspective, ultimate physics must be arranged in a way to make that quantity not exist!".  One can correctly derive intricate laws of physics from that principle.

It's idealistic reasoning, but it's a form of idealistic reasoning that Reality itself seems to use, the same way that Reality seems fond of calculus, or continuous quantities, or numbers and math more generally.  You could say, it's first-principles idealistic reasoning, using the sort of idealistic first principles that Reality has been empirically observed to respect, and which prove to cause people to correctly guess physics without observing it first if they're led to guess using those principles.

(Golarion physics, he strongly suspects, is partially an imitation of that simple dath ilani physics, and partially has been artificially constructed and modified and complicated away from that physics; so that this universe can run both mortal biology copied off dath ilan and dath ilan's physics, and also include magic and souls.)

dath ilan: It can be seen from 'first-principles reasoning using the kind of first-principles that Reality has been empirically observed to actually follow' that it shouldn't be sensible to ask "How quickly or slowly are the laws of physics operating?", unless there is some larger outer universe establishing a speed metric to be compared to.  Similarly, you can't ask "Is the universe upside down?", unless there is some larger spatial metric that embeds both the universe and something else that points in a direction.

Further beneath reality is quantum mechanics: in which the basic quantities are complex numbers, 'amplitudes', assigned to positional configurations of particles.  The integral over the squared absolute values of those amplitudes, the measure, seems to describe how real something is - or rather how relatively real something is, because physics doesn't talk about the absolute amount of reality, at that lowest level.  Only the relative quantity, relative phase, slope of derivative, of the amplitudes.

If you run a quantum experiment that divides the greater reality into two subworlds, with amplitudes over configurations that interact almost purely internally within a world -

(this happens all the time, to be clear, or at least it did in dath ilan, there's ten-to-the-large-number divergences of worlds every second as entropy increases over time, and Pharasma's Creation is either doing the same thing or pretending very hard that it is)

- and one of those worlds has twice the integral-over-quantum-measure as the other, you'll find yourself in the larger experiment-future two-thirds of the time.

Do a thousand of those experiments, and look back, and you should find that around two-thirds of the outcomes reflect the larger quantum future.  There's a version of you that sees the smaller outcome every time, a thousand times, but those yous are only 1/3^1000 as real, and you'll almost never find yourself there / only experience yourself seeing that to a very tiny degree.

There's no physical difference that would be observable if you doubled all the tiny amounts-of-realness.

And this is also the kind of physical principle that you can correctly guess from thought experiments about Relativity: what would it even mean if everything everywhere simultaneously became twice as real?

You can get this quality of quantum physics by observing experiments, but you can also advance-guess its character via the vastly productive principle of Relativistic thought experiments: it's meaningless to imagine all of Existence becoming twice as real, so reality is only relative, and that's why physics over amounts-of-realness only speaks of the relative quantity of those amounts.  Some things can be realer than other things; it is meaningless to ask how real they are in an absolute sense.

There's a meaning to one person being twice as real as another, inside of larger Reality.  You're twice as likely to meet people who exist in twice as many places.

But what does it feel like from the inside to become twice as real, or half as real, in an absolute sense?  Nothing, and in fact the thought isn't meaningful, just like there are no absolute phases in quantum mechanics, only relative phases of the amplitudes.

One future can be more real than another, and you'll mostly experience yourself in the futures that are more real; when you look back in your past, you'll find that the experimental statistics for results roughly match the physics-predicted amplitudes of those results.

But when you look at yourself and question how real you are in an absolute sense - imagine yourself becoming twice as real, or half as real - you're imagining something that wouldn't feel like anything, because it doesn't mean anything; just like it wouldn't mean anything for time in the universe to run twice as fast, unless it could run relative to some larger universe and greater metatime.

This, in a sense, is why you find yourself experiencing anything; the answer to the malformed question, "Why does anything exist at all?"  It doesn't require anything larger than yourself to give you existence, as would then need some further outer factor to lend existence in infinite regression.  Structures of relative realness always find themselves to be as real as themselves, however much more or less they exist compared to other things; and that's why you find yourself inside a physics ultimately comprised of a structure of relative-realness.

In dath ilan that physics over relatively-real elements was 'quantum mechanics' over 'amplitudes'; but even if it's something else inside Pharasma's Creation, it'll ultimately be made out of stuff that embodies relative quantities of existence.  Nothing that exists can be absolutely real (as isn't even a meaningful concept) but only relatively real to other things, so whenever you look closely enough at something that exists, you'll find out that it's made out of tiny bits of relative-degree-of-realness.

Keltham+: He is thinking all this, because it seems to him entangled, as truths-of-empirics and validities-of-reality often are, with what a sensible mind would end up valuing as it shakes out its emotional structures binding to pieces of reality-as-the-brain-models-it. 

It seems to him that you can't, actually, just say that you reject dath ilan's concept of how to value people's reality ("average utilitarianism" as she calls it, though in dath ilan it does not have a name), and have that be divorced from everything else dath ilan knows.

There are pieces of morality that can be pried apart from other elements of a coherent decision system - like whether you enjoy seeing people suffering or enjoy seeing them happy, that's something you can pry apart and invert without affecting other parts.  (At least if you're talking about an agent with a utility function; it doesn't work that way inside normal mortal humans, obviously, humans are woven together more tightly than that.  But in principle you could pry away the utility function of something that did have a utility function.)

Whether your ontology of thought is over relative amounts of existence, or hypothetical absolute quantities of existence as seen against an absolute outside-of-all-reality yardstick of existence-quantity-units - like imagining an absolute right-side-up direction of space - isn't something you can pry apart from understanding physics with an ontology that's based around relative positions and relative realness in a very visible way.

When you worry about whether it's a crime to make people's sum-over-futures add up to less than the reality of their current selves - to wonder if this is a crime apart from people objecting to it, apart from whether their remaining futures are pleasant or unpleasant - it seems important to comprehend that becoming less real does not feel like anything from inside, and in fact doesn't mean anything except relative to other things being more or less real than that.

When it comes to asking whether an enslaved being should be grateful to have been created, it matters to his own emotions-morality-philosophy that this being who will be enslaved would counterfactually otherwise still exist somewhere; in fact, would exist within a countably infinite number of such environments, all existing to some tiny finite degree of relative realness, summing to a finite total.  What an entity like Asmodeus is doing, in 'creating' somebody, is changing which environments are more real relative to that person, and changing which futures that person will predominately experience; and as an entwined effect, making that person more encounterable by others in the same larger environment.  If this future and environment is not pleasant, a future of slavery, this seems to him to be not a favor requiring a grateful reciprocal favor - as the act is phrased and described in his own ontology.

Carissa Sevar: ...Carissa realizes that you cannot reject dath ilan's morality piecemeal because all of the pieces form a worldview together. That is why she stopped using all of it and would, if her concern were for her own integrity, never use any of it to build herself, even the science.

None of that information makes her an 'average utilitarian', as she predicted it wouldn't, when she considered the space of possible observable features of reality dath ilan could have observed which would have caused them to all be 'average utilitarians'. Carissa took into account how good an explanation dath ilan would probably have for all of its alien values, considered how confident she was that her values were different, and isn't learning anything from being told that, yes, dath ilan has a predictable explanation for its beliefs. She didn't reject them in the conviction that dath ilani hadn't argued the question.

If there are an infinitely many Golarions which are functionally identical such that there are infinitely many Carissae in this exact moment of existence considering this exact problem, then there being half as many isn't a meaningful thing to describe (she recognizes that this isn't quite the frame Keltham is using, she's not sure yet if his frame is importantly different).  But it's coherent to care, for instance, about in what share of universes she exists, or in what share of universes in which she existed at some point she exists for a long time, or in what share of universes in which she exists her parents and sister exists, and it's coherent to, if you wake up inside a new universe, have preferences about whether you died and stopped existing in your old one. And if you prefer to exist in as large a possible a share of the universes that there are, and for the duration of your existence in every universe to be as large as possible, and for the people you care about and all people who aren't insane people who want to die to live in as many universes as possible, and you would be distressed to learn that you are murdered in your sleep half the time you fall asleep, then she's pretty sure you end up not an average utilitarian.

She's being snarky - it's much harder not to in her thoughts - so she does want to note that she appreciates Keltham not trying to make the infinities argument to her until she was smart enough to immediately better-articulate her preference; if he'd said that to a small Carissa she might've thought she had to be persuaded because she couldn't describe what she cared about coherently, and she - appreciates it, about Keltham, that he didn't try that.

Keltham+: She's catching up satisfyingly fast, now, but even at INT 29 comprehension is apparently not instantaneous - this is a distracting thought and not good protocol to think 'out loud' and he wishes he had not thought it.  This is not an argument from infinities; the ontology of physics is also written in such way as to visibly reject infinities.  'You never actually meet an infinity and what do you mean by that word anyways' is among the first-principles that Reality is empirically observed to favor.

If you imagine (probably counter to fact) that Carissae are one-third of everything that exists, you could say that there are infinite Carissae which are one-third of an infinite existence, or that there are zero Carissae which are one-third of zero existence, or that there are twelve realness units of Carissae who are one-third of a greater reality with thirty-six realness units.  The only real thing in all three cases would be the relative quantity one-third; the units appear in both numerator and denominator, and cancel out.

It's not meaningful to talk about everything becoming half as real.  It's not meaningful to talk about Carissa becoming half as real to herself from her own perspective.

If Reality is as large as dath ilan had strong reason to believe - and encountering Golarion hasn't exactly counterargued the case - it's not true to talk about some external factor creating a new Carissa whose pattern would otherwise counterfactually not exist anywhere else in Reality.  It's a meaningful claim, but a false one, always:  Reality looks to be quite large.  And even a small large number of universes will be enough to saturate the number of meaningfully distinct Carissae that can exist; there's only so many ways to put together all the atoms making up her body, if you only consider those atoms' momentary positions down to a tolerance of one atomic nucleus's width.

It is meaningful to talk about Carissa becoming half as real to her parents as she once was, or her parents becoming half as real to her; he wasn't trying to say otherwise.

It's consistent, coherent, for Carissa to care about how her parents here can't see her again, even if she continues somewhere else and that place also has a copy of her parents.  It's coherent for Carissa to want to be in more places, to be more encounterable from the perspective of other people, for lots of people to meet a Carissa one day.

The weird-to-him part is where Carissa seems to feel like her being encountered by more people in greater reality, makes her more real from her own perspective somehow, and is a selfish good.

From a selfish perspective, Carissa can control the fractions of future universes that she'll encounter, through her decisions - this indeed is what all ordinary decisions do, control the relative realness of the possible futures that continue yourself.  She can't make herself be more or less encounterable to herself from her own perspective.  She can want to experience being in the same universe for longer, and not get isekaied to somewhere else; but that's a question of which possible futures containing herself are relatively more real compared to each other, not the percentage of existence she holds within larger reality.

...on a personal level, he doesn't really want Carissa to update about this, because if she wasn't trying to copy herself over as much of the multiverse as possible and never ever get isekaied the hard way, she wouldn't really feel like Carissa any more.  He's not even, really, arguing with her about it.  It's just weird.  (In the sense that it's a long sentence from the standpoint of somebody who thinks about reality using a language with a simple correspondence to reality's native structure.  Or in the sense that most human beings who grew up knowing from the start how reality worked, probably would not shake out their initially incoherent emotions in a way that attached great selfish importance to a fact that's impossible to measure or experience from inside yourself: the fact of how often you are observed by other observers within a greater Reality.)

Carissa Sevar: Carissa honestly doesn't distinguish, really, in her head, between selfish goods and unselfish goods. There's just the whole long list of things she wants, some of which she'll notice having gotten and some of which she won't. Her desires about other universes all feel like the same kind of desire, to her: she hopes, for each universe, that the universe is rich and interesting and populous and has interesting magic and that the people get to do cool things and that one of the people is her. It doesn't feel different than wishing the universe isn't a Hell, which she imagines is in Keltham's values.

Keltham+: That Carissa Sevar, the girlfriend he ran into after losing most of his realityfluid inside of dath ilan and ending up somewhere else, desperately wants to be everywhere in Reality even if some of those instantiations are awful, is one of the more probabilistically-suspicious facts about this entire situation.  It's the sort of thing that would be true if something at a higher/lower level of Reality was trying to be ethical about which people it created - or rather lent additional realityfluid.  It might pick a kind of person who would totally want to be more-instantiated almost anywhere, even in a place as awful as Golarion.

He is, in fact, kind of horrified about this.  Relatively far more people will give permission to be instantiated in nice places, meaning those places don't have Carissae because they don't need Carissae in particular.  The places that get Carissae rather than other interesting people, will be places where only Carissae give permission to make them emissaries or recipients-of-reality, to fix those broken places; where most sane, sensible beings would not feel so grateful for being forcibly volunteered for it.

It's not exactly a very pleasant fate to call down on yourself... from his perspective.

From Carissa's perspective, he expects, she thinks that's a great fate to call down on yourself, because you get to exist so much more that way, and it's okay if a lot of those places are on fire.

But it's one more way that it's incredibly incredibly suspicious that he met her.

Carissa Sevar: That had also occurred to her. She in fact concluded that if this means lots of people make lots and lots of Carissae to enslave or torture or whatever, because this is more ethical than doing it to other people, then this is an enormous win. All of their universes will have Carissa Sevar. After realizing this, she explicitly said aloud to the powers that be 'I want you to make copies of me, you have my permission to do that' in case the powers that be happen to care.  If she had the time she'd write up a more detailed set of instructions to persons considering instantiating her, but she's busy.

She'd previously thought that Nethys/Snack Service/that faction arranged for Keltham to land on her, but she now thinks this can't be correct because that would constitute a threat-by-proxy. Keltham is more prepared to shred himself and become a god and try to blow up the universe because he landed on Cheliax and they fucked with him. If they got to pick Keltham's landing spot, they should have picked a landing spot that didn't look like it'd bias him towards destroying the world.

So some other force chose his landing spot, and they need to know what it is because they need to know if it was making a threat. Well, she wants to know that; Keltham, presumably, wouldn't act any differently if he knew he was a threat and Pharasma was going to ignore him.

If Carissa has persuaded a lot of universes to put her in them, and is particularly popular with universes that use some rule like "you can make any people who on reflection want to be there", then maybe most Carissae are in those universes, and this universe only has people who on reflection want to be here.  (This would imply that Keltham shouldn't blow it up.) 

Keltham+: The pattern that seems to him obviously correct for a discussion like this one - as is also dath ilan's pattern for how Very Serious People discuss Very Serious Matters, but it looks to him like he can derive it from principle easily enough - would involve identifying importantly different ways reality could be, that matter to their morals, such that there is some hope of resolving those by observation or further argument.  And then make predictions and then run the experiment, especially if it's a cheap experiment.

If a paving stone in Hell wants to go on existing even there, and would rather not be isekaied if that meant existing in fewer places or becoming less encounterable, that is in fact a crux for him.  Whether it is true about the paving stone 'on reflection' might matter to him differently, depending on how much reflection was required, and how loudly the paving stone would yell to ignore this reflection and please kill them because they're hurting.

In principle they could Wishnap a paving stone from Hell and use Detect Thoughts on it and try to ask it questions, and hope the paving stone is in good enough shape to have recognizable thoughts in reaction to words, if not, maybe, to talk.  There are obstacles and costs to doing this; first he wonders what Carissa predicts of it, whether paving stones in Hell will prove to have the surprising-to-him property of accepting horrible futures if that's the cost of more people in Reality being able to meet the paving stone.

Carissa Sevar: Golarion is definitely, observably, not run on the principle that everyone in it, at every time they might be asked, wants to exist there; she has met people who don't. There are more complicated things that could be true of it that, by Carissa's values, would constitute a strong argument against destroying it: for example, if everyone looked at the distribution of outcomes in Golarion before being instantiated there and agreed to take their chances on it, even if they dislike the actual outcome they got. Or maybe they'll find a way to fix Hell and find in ten thousand years everyone will agree existing now is worth the time they spent as a paving stone. 

The surprising not-impossible thing they could learn, of paving stones, is that there's actually nothing it's like to be a paving stone; that Asmodeus has hidden that because of the beneficial effects seeing the paving stones has on non-paving-stones. It's on the wall, but she doesn't consider it very likely. 

Keltham+: The other thing that could be true, but that would be hard for them to observe, is that most of Reality that continues on from paving stones is worse for them than Hell.  He mostly expects this is not the case; but that touches on different large issues.

He has not previously scried Hell, asked any questions about Hell's internal details more complicated than he got from his unfortunate previous Vision of Hell, in case his doing so would lend additional reality to the targets of his scry or inquiry.  Possibly this egg has already broken, if Carissa has journeyed into Hell, and talked with damned souls in ways that depend on the details of their torment, or worse looked inside their minds.  Mid-Keltham would have asked her and bargained with her not to do that, if he'd seen it coming.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa has ventured into Hell, and interacted with the devils there, though mostly not with the paving stones or the petitioners. Her past self would have required a lot to be bargained out of that. The suffering of some ten or a hundred people, in the world where she causes it by visiting Hell again, seems much less important than them having slightly more accurate information and more resources, or Asmodeus having slightly less cause for suspicion, or where they gain whatever they gain by negotiating with Dispater and Erecura. 

Keltham+: On Carissa's mainline assumptions as he understands them, that's a valid derivation; the suffering of one paving stone is a small weight compared to all of Pharasma's Creation.

This is true only if everything in Pharasma's Creation is as real as it seems, rather than it being almost entirely unreal, and becoming real when a viewpoint character needs to look at it.

On that alternate premise:  Looking into the thoughts of one entity undergoing extreme suffering, whose history would then need to have been extrapolated inside the putative Storywise Simulation of Golarion that they're inside, is a significant cost.

(They are otherwise inside a Non-Storywise Nonmagical Simulation of Magical Physics - high-probability not one that "Pharasma" created, She is not powerful enough for that.  This again touches on other large issues.)

Carissa Sevar: Carissa doesn’t think it makes sense to care very much about harms inside the world where very few people are real, unless you are overwhelmingly confident that’s the world you’re in. The world with trillions of people in it is just trillions of times more important, and as a result you should virtually always be doing things that make sense in that world; it would have to be an exceptionally unusual situation where something had trillions of times the effect in the world where most people weren’t real. Extrapolating the life of one suffering person seems very bad, but not anywhere near bad enough she’d trade it against even an infinitesimal cost in the world where trillions of lives are at stake.

Keltham+: Depends on priors (as this is locally unobservable) for the amount of total reality (in the sense of a fraction of total realness of Existence) that you think is invested in the realities across those two hypothetical cases.  You can't get moral worth / utility just by comparing the numbers of real people across the twin cases - that rule would say to value tiny quantum outcomes as much as large quantum outcomes in your future, since the people-count would be the same in both cases.

Dath ilan ran on simple physics, and had no visible storylike attributes or signs of past intervention by extrauniversal beings.  Finding yourself in dath ilan or a planet similar to it, it makes sense to expect that almost all of your reality comes from the underlying mathematical structure of physics being faithfully implemented; on simplicity priors, almost all of your reality comes from worlds where the other people visible are as visible as you, and those worlds are getting a lot of realness (as a fraction of all existence) that way.

There's a possible Pharasma's Creation where everybody is real and he and Carissa are only a tiny fraction of that realness.  There's a possible Golarion where he, Carissa, and the other Project Lawful researchers are the main real people.  There's a possible Golarion where the viewpoint shifted off himself and Carissa when their INT went too high, and Pilar Pineda is now the viewpoint character.

He is mostly at this point planning across the Everyone Equally Real version of Creation: because the people there are hurting more and more in need of rescue; because he assigns majority probability to that world being the case; because there is not much he really values that he can achieve for himself selfishly, now, in the Storylike Golarion.

It's not particularly clear to him that the Everyone Equally Real universe gets a larger dollop of total realityfluid summed over all the people, across all the realities where something like that exists, compared to the Storylike Golarions.  Pharasma's Creation has more complicated physics and is also more storylike, maybe especially in their own version; it may be that most situations like theirs exist inside generalized stories, rather than because something happens to be running physics like that and gets selected to host a story.

He doesn't want to be an idiot, by making a paving stone's horrible life and past much more real, in the event that storylike continua are where most of the realityfluid resides.

Carissa Sevar: Storylike Golarions where peoples’ realness varies with how much Keltham or Carissa are paying attention to them should be a very tiny fraction of all storylike Golarions. 

This is of course going to be very difficult to test, but Carissa thinks that the strongest argument that many Golarions run on stories is that there are a lot of extraordinary stories in Golarion, to the point where it’s something people have a concept for, the meteoric ascension and/or downfall of epic heroes. It makes her envision some kind of setup where there’s a baseline physics Golarion and then a lot more realityfluid in individual extraordinary stories and circumstances, where more people are paying attention or playing out minor variations. For most possible creators or audience who’d make this story, most stories they would tell in Golarion would not be this story, and would instead be, say, Nex’s story or Arazni’s story or Aroden’s story or Iomedae’s story or Cyprian’s story or Tar-Baphon’s story or Abrogail’s story or the story of many other people who’ve led classically storylike and compelling lives; even if Carissa and Keltham are as appealing a story as any individual among the great names of history, which she doubts, there are thousands such. 

Creators would probably reuse resources across stories, so you’d expect that the default outcome of looking for a person would be their being temporarily copied from a different Golarion, which increases that person’s realityfluid but not very much because this story does not, in how many implausible events shuffled them here, seem likely to Carissa to be one that has a lot of realityfluid.

Keltham+: Point 0 - Not directly disagreeing with anything Carissa thought, but reviewing background as he knows it, since their synchronization is recursing to this depth where it's relevant:   - If you compute a simulation of something using more sophisticated programming techniques than their Magical Simulation of Magic can support, it should be easy to seamlessly simulate a universe that's computed in only as much detail in every global part as is required to attain some specified accuracy level in the local details as seen from a viewpoint.   - The key thing is not the commonness of simulations, but the total amounts of realityfluid in them, or in particular parts of them.  If a uniformly-distributed-realityfluid simulation of Golarion has much more realityfluid than a variably-detailed simulation, the uniform simulation will be correspondingly more expensive to simulating Entities, and they'll create fewer simulations like that.  The key question is not so much 'Are uniform simulations or locally-weighted simulations more common?' as 'How much realityfluid in total do higher Entities want to invest in all uniform simulations, versus all locally-weighted ones?'

Point 1 - They're coming in with different intuitive priors as to what a story should look like.   - Nex/Arazni/Aroden/Iomedae don't look like dath ilani stories, and they don't look like an eroLARP in particular.   - If Iomedae's story involved isekaied entities from outside Creation, or multiple romantic prospects each with distinct special abilities, or asexuals who watch it all, Golarion history has omitted the fact.   - Nex and Geb, so far as he knows, were not obviously having a romance at all.  Or, if they were having a blackrom relationship, they didn't obviously have anthropically unshareable updates on their self-obsevation of isekai immortality to explain away their persistent disagreement, which is very much the sort of plot development you find in dath ilani romances and not in Golarion romances.   - The story of Keltham and Carissa appears to have been written for somebody with an ilani-style knowledge background, or maybe a mating of his and Carissa's mortal knowledge backgrounds.  The story of Nex and Geb doesn't obviously share this feature, as might indicate optimization for trans-Creational artistic properties.

Point 2 - If he fails to destroy/modify this whole universe, it's then much more plausible that his story was only one story among many, compared to the case if he does destroy/modify this whole universe.  If everything goes as he plans, he will be sorta standout among people with an impact who had important stories.

Point 3 - Even if Nex and Geb were relatively real, it doesn't imply the paving stones in Hell are real before Carissa or some other viewpoint character casts Detect Thoughts on them.  The high-resolution viewpoint might look only at Nex and his surroundings (especially as spread around by Detect Thoughts) rather than simulating everyone in equal detail.  There might not exist a precomputed high-resolution Hell-tormented paving stone that would be exactly and realistically the one that Carissa or himself would find, especially given that the two of them at INT 29 would notice anomalies in the origin date or average life of such a paving stone.

Carissa Sevar: It is true that all of the stories Carissa knows of are Golarion sorts of stories not dath ilan sorts of stories. She doesn’t think that’s an argument this story has more realityfluid than those stories, but it is certainly a difference in their character. 

She does think that if they’re in a story then probably Keltham will fail tragically and get squished, changing nothing. It’s what would happen in every kind of story she’s ever heard of. (Actually, she thinks if they’re in a story they’re in a failed timeline which will be glimpsed by the successful Carissa and Keltham at some point.)

It seems like another reason to operate on the assumption things are governed by causality and not narrative satisfyingness. If things are governed by causality, they don’t actually look hopeless to her; maybe the thing Snack Service is planning will succeed. 

Keltham+: A dath ilani story wouldn't balk at letting him or Carissa change Pharasma's Creation, so yes, they're coming in with different story-priors.  The key question is what tropes the Higher Entities use.

Sending somebody in from entirely outside Creation, into a story with tropes made of both his culture and Carissa's culture - his best guess as to why the narrative does not quite feel dath ilani - seems like the kind of event that might betoken more involvement by Entities who could dispense variable-realityfluid at all.

That said, his current guess is that the existence of Pharasma's Creation predates this present interference.  Golarion does not quite look shaped by the same pattern that designed their story.  That's why he's spending so much effort trying to destroy-modify this world.  He's just not confident enough in that belief to risk creating (infusing with retroactive reality) a paving stone who'll be one of only twenty real people who needed minds detailed enough to pass telepathic inspection.

Events here, especially after the breaking of prophecy, plausibly-to-him were proceeding without tropish improbability at all.  That could itself be a literary artifice, the story of somebody in a tropish situation who came to a world that previously had been running on its own logic.  But his own guess is that he, or rather, his story, is an emissary sent to Creation from Outside and to some degree Above.

Background:  Unless something even stranger is going on, there are Entities at a much higher level than Pharasma, Entities with INT very very far above Hers, who operate a larger continuum within which Pharasma's Creation is one small bubble.  Much of what seemed puzzling about dath ilan, he has now realized, is explained by the following key point: anybody with a computer and a bunch of Keeper-suppressed knowledge about how to construct actually efficient agents, could unleash an unstoppable horror that would eat Pharasma and Her fellow Outer Gods like so many grapes.  Given that Pharasma is still around, She and Her Creation and the rest of the Outer Gods are presumably inside a zoo-like preserve laid down by Higher Entities, a zoo within which genuinely scary things can't exist.

Dath ilan doesn't have any protection like that, so they're twisted up into a weird shape so that they can research making a controllable ultrasmart thing or possibly heritage-engineer smarter children to research it.  He's much more confident about the dath ilan statements than any of his Golarion-guesses.  Dath ilan is much simpler and straightforward and known to him, and at INT 29 the shape of the evidence he has about dath ilan is completely straightforward.  Dath ilan looks exactly like it should look, if it's secretly believed that anybody with a sufficient combination of computing power and exfohazardous knowledge could destroy dath ilan and surrounding galaxies.

He has complicated guesses about why Entities paying the Creation-containing Entities to send a storylike event into Pharasma's Creation, might pay to make that event storylike; or why the Entities operating the level above Pharasma's Creation, might charge less to accept an intervention if it was storylike; but this they should probably not fully recurse on and should do more breadth-first exploration, like if Carissa has any questions about what he just thought about dath ilan.

Carissa Sevar: As a conclusion about dath ilan, it makes sense, and makes sense of her own instinct that dath ilan, for all its wealth, isn’t right, isn’t nice in the ways it should be nice or safe in the ways it should be safe, that it is maybe in the stage of growing up but certainly isn’t what a civilization would hope to grow up to be. 

One of the side notes on her wall, a line of inquiry that she didn't expect to be crucial but that had an off chance of being so, asked: what is the nature of gods, what is the dividing line between godhood and mere incredibly excessive power and intelligence? 

There is a dividing line; no one names Nex, or Tar-Baphon, or Baba Yaga, a god, even though they are plainly in many respects constrained only as the gods are constrained. They don't pick clerics. That's the answer her textbook would give. 

All of her speculation here was tentative; it is a matter where little is known, and the process that selected what was known isn't a trustworthy one. But her best guess had been that the gods were on the other side of a divide that she can plainly see looming ahead of her, now. 

If you are a sufficiently muddled sort of mind, getting more intelligent changes your priorities; it is very nearly impossible for a muddled mind to deliberately get more intelligent in a way that doesn't have that effect. It was part of the problem she was trying to solve, for Aspexia Rugatonn, when she was an Asmodean, and look how well that went. Under most circumstances, then, a mind that cares about its current values shouldn't consent to a procedure that changes the mind and predictably changes the values. She predicts if she asked Aspexia Rugatonn if she wanted all her stats Wished up by five, Aspexia'd in fact be at least somewhat reluctant. 

So until you have figured out how to change yourself while preserving what you care about, there is a large class of possible self-modifications that would be obvious unambiguous good ideas if you knew how to stably preserve yourself through them, and that are equally obviously a terrible idea if you don't. A mind that figured out that thing would make all of those changes, go into the place in the space of all possible minds that that collection of modifications takes you towards. A mind that hasn't figured out that thing is going to be stuck, unable to verify its own integrity across various modifications. 

Keltham+: It's not that hard for a coherent mind to preserve its own preferences through self-modification, unless he's missed something.  It might have taken him a while to work out the math at INT 18, and if he was starting from Golarion's math background instead of dath ilan's, it might have seemed like a huge deal.  But at INT 29 the logical structure for an unbounded already-coherent agent amplifying while staying coherent looks straightforward: here it is.  It doesn't fully solve the problem for Carissa, because she's not already a coherent agent nor unbounded; but knowing it may help in practice too, much like knowing the formal Law of Inverse Probability can help in informally weighing evidence.

When you're not a coherent agent - when the decisions you'd make at different times and in different states of mind step on each other's toes and defeat each other - any choice you make to become Something Else Which Is Not That, means that you will act differently, under some circumstances, than you would have before.  It's in this sense that for an incoherent thing to become coherent must seem, from its own perspective, like reshaping itself to do unnatural things at least sometimes.  But that only happens when the 'natural' behavior is in some way stepping on itself; otherwise you could act the same way as a greater intelligence.  Indeed, you could just do similarly as a greater intelligence, in a few special places, so long as you weren't doing it all the time or in a way that burned all of your resources.

It's strange to imagine that obstacle blocking Nex from becoming a god - that Nex couldn't see any trustworthy pathway to further improve his own intelligence and stay Nex, even with decades to work on it - that Nex turned back from that possibility and feared it.  Still, he supposes he can imagine it being possible for a very smart Golarion native to get stuck on the problem?

However, another plausible barrier is Nex's concern about being squished by Achaekek, while prophecy was still running.  That Nex was powerful might be exactly why the ancient gods wouldn't assent to Nex taking divinity, and Nex could have known that.

He expects he'll have to become a god in order to rig Pharasma's Creation for destruction.  He has already reshaped himself in somewhat of the way that past-Carissa saw and worried about.  He has begun readying himself for imminent godhood, giving himself a shape that can be stable, not fighting against itself.  He has crystallized his mind into something that knows itself in detail and operates itself in detail, that has designated internal resolutions to its internal conflicts.

His conflicting desires have been reified into something closer to a utility function, with multiple subfunctions attaching simply-summable opposed weights, in place of internal conflict.

It's one of several ways in which he's prioritized 'doing something about Creation' over 'being faithful to the original pattern of Keltham or humanity'.  The more he starts with a coherent utility function, he suspects, the more he'll get to keep that coherent utility function when he ascends, instead of the Starstone choosing a utility function for him in the process of granting him divinity and divine domains.  He is worried that becoming a god is an unnatural form of enhancement that imposes extra constraints.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa is pretty sure that all the parts of her which aren't "people shouldn't all be murdered" have in fact been incoherent across self-modification, not because she can't see in principle how an agent could be coherent but because she in fact isn't; she thinks there's a way to incorporate this insight into Sevarism but isn't necessarily going to straighten out the rest of it because, in fact, 'people shouldn't all be murdered' is enough to be getting on with for most of her purposes. Maybe she'll spend five minutes on it later, see if it's simpler than it looks from here.  

Backtracking to the previous topic, if she’s not misunderstanding him, Keltham was hypothesizing that there’s something strange about the fact godhood is a well on the other side of that line, instead of entities with the ability to modify and improve themselves continuing to do so and use their improvements to amass more resources to use for more improvements.  

She doesn’t think that theory requires some higher entities above Pharasma and her ilk; they can just, themselves, be competent to squish baby things that will grow up to eat them, and in fact Otolmens and entities like her seem to have precisely that remit and fairly extraordinary powers to deploy in pursuing it. 

Numeria is in a bubble, after all. 

Keltham+: Cached thoughts adapted from dath ilan's analysis of the Great Silence / absence of visible aliens in dath ilan:  Given the existence of FTL travel via Interplanetary Teleport and the absence of much of a visible local speed limit, if it's possible to become Something Bigger that can tear through Pharasma and absorb the resources of Her Creation, and that happens anywhere in the larger playground that embeds Creation and has Outer Gods elsewhere inside it, Pharasma and all the other Outer Gods would quickly fall.

Pharasma is still here, so:

Possibility 1:  Some higher force protects Her; near-equivalently, some Enitity wrote the complicated laws of their Higher Creation such that it wasn't possible for anything inside to become dangerous.

Possibility 2:  Pharasma or at least one Outer God holds sway over every part of the Larger Universe that embeds Creation; they have uniformly agreed not to become any more dangerous than each other; they uniformly squish everything within the Larger Universe that tries to become more dangerous before it can actually get powerful.

2's premise of uniform cooperation doesn't well-match what surface-appearances he has been able to gather about Outer Gods; the Outer Gods don't seem to be running in a state of careful uniform cooperative action with Pharasma.  Rovagug required action from Pharasma to suppress, and would probably become a bigger scarier more dangerous thing if It could do that.

(He suspects based on his early research attempts into Outer Stuff that there's some sort of Outer Thing sealed beneath Cheliax's Whisperwood.  He was thinking of unsealing that, at some point, for additional observations/experiments to bear on open questions in this vicinity.)

Carissa Sevar: Carissa suspects that’s the kind of action that causes Otolmens to look at you more carefully and then immediately squish you. (It’s actually slightly surprising to Carissa that this has not happened already.)

Keltham+: Multiple hypotheses there, primarily that ancient gods in general and possibly Otolmens in particular have a lot of trouble decoding mind-states of embodied mortals (as would be trivial to an Actually Scary Thing).  To surface appearances, absent complicated immersive divine deceptions, Golarion is a world where Outer cultists and Rovagug cultists can exist and gain cleric powers - and this was true even before prophecy was shattered.  This implies weird things in general about to what degree the ancient gods / Pharasma-aligned entities can see well and intervene cheaply.

His current precautions include Mind Blank as much of the time as he can manage, and having negotiated with Otolmens via Lrilatha about Doombase screening if he agreed to return to the Ostenso region.

He'd try to make the Outer Thing's release look like an unrelated accident that he was responding to helpfully, at least so far as surface glances of gods could tell about the surrounding situation.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa’s theory of why there are Rovagug cultists is that they don’t matter to the gods and the cultists mostly rederive it independently so stamping them out wouldn’t keep them gone, though it’s definitely also the case that the gods have a hard time interpreting mortal minds, and have a hard time in general seeing what’s going on now that prophecy is broken. 

Osirion, of course, has a prediction market on the odds he’s trying to let Rovagug out, and the gods can see that. His primary advantage is that he’s a first-circle wizard and everyone knows first circle wizards who want to destroy the world can’t actually do it; the first time he demonstrates any genuinely unprecedented capabilities he loses that. 

What specifically would he be trying to learn from unleashing an Outer Thing and can they just ask it of Erecura?

Keltham+: Foremost he wants to try communicating!  Like by tapping out sequences of primes and so on.  There's standard dath ilani ideas about How to Open Communications with Aliens, which plausibly nobody in Golarion would have tried with Outer Things after Tongues failed to work.  If he can establish communications, an Outer Thing might know all kinds of relevant stuff that Pharasma-aligned entities don't want to tell them.

Failing that, if he at INT 29 / WIS 27 and with his greater background knowledge of alien possibilities via dath ilani extrapolation, is still as horrified by the Outer Thing as other observers report being horrified by Outer Things, maybe he'd update further about Pharasma being a relatively nice Medium-Sized Entity who ought to be kept around despite the Hell business.

Carissa Sevar: That’s a pretty tantalizing possibility, though obviously he doesn’t expect to update in that fashion or they could skip the step with unleashing any Outer Things. She doesn’t actually see why he doesn’t believe already that Pharasma is a relatively nice Medium-Sized Entity; she believes that.

Keltham+: Nice by his definition of nice.

(His thoughts attempt to shut down several distracting non-optimally-conversation-steering side thoughts about Hell's tolerability and Carissa's earlier thought that Carissan Lawful Good societies would keep slaves.)

Carissa Sevar: Carissa thinks that, well, mostly people go to Hell because of the awful things they do to other, weaker, worse-off people, and that really does look like human values, or something like them, were a substantial input into the afterlife system. Not the only input, but human values probably have something like 90% overlap with the actual system. Most people think it’s right and just that bad people go to Hell. Carissa doesn’t especially agree with them, but the thing Pharasma is doing is recognizably in most of its details in the space of things humans might do, and you wouldn’t necessarily expect that from things done by a bizarre and distant alien. 

Keltham has perhaps by now read about how war is practiced between nations in Golarion, though he won’t have seen it firsthand. Armies march through farmland claimed by the enemy faction, killing everyone who resists, taking all their food and leaving those they do not kill to starve, raping women, taking slaves, slaughtering children. Ordinary people are called up to serve in those armies; ordinary people do those acts, because they can, because everyone else is doing it. 

That’s not what Chelish armies do because someone engineered Cheliax that way; that’s what ordinary Taldane or Qadiran armies do, in the ordinary course of war. 

The worst half of those soldiers will go to Hell, and while Carissa thinks that Hell should make better use of them, she does think that the assessment that they are Lawful Evil is basically correct, and Axis is reasonable in not wanting to let them in, and a Hell which was merely a place full of people like them would be awful. 

By some estimates she dug up while she was doing research for her wall, one in ten people is a slaveowner. It’s higher in Cheliax, of course, which wants everyone to be a slaveowner to damn them, but across history the best estimate is that it’s one in ten. Not all of those go to Hell, but they sure do go a way towards explaining why about one in ten people go to Hell.

(Carissa’s family owns slaves. The staff at the villa the first few days, before Otolmens picked Broom and they realized it was a vulnerability, were all slaves, if Keltham hadn’t figured that out. The fire elementals who heat the water are slaves. They didn’t realize right away that they should hide from Keltham things like how people enjoy gladiatorial contests and public executions, because that’s true in Taldor too.)

That is, to her, the fundamental expression of who Pharasma is and what Pharasma wants: people go to an afterlife that reflects the choices they made in life, and that afterlife is good or bad depending on whether the choices they made in life were conducive to good worlds or bad ones. 

You can disagree with that, of course, but nothing about it feels especially inhuman. In-ilani, maybe, but not inhuman. 

Keltham+: Past-Keltham was placed somewhere that he would, in fact, get to know some damned people: kids his own age, with a much much poorer education, who wouldn't have qualified for most dath ilani adulthood tests.  How they ended up damned:  They were dragged into a banquet hall and told to sell their souls to devils.  After being raised to believe, whether it was truth or lie, that if they refused they'd die and go to Hell right away and have a worse time of it.  On account of how they'd earlier gone along with being forced to cast Acid Splash on their classmates, and later on prisoners and orphans.  Also their minds were being read for signs of disloyalty, forbidding them to actually think about their situation.

He's aware that past-Keltham may have been placed someplace where he'd be selectively exposed to evidence of the system functioning in that way.  It remains validly signifying evidence that Pharasma's system has a mode for damning people like Ione Sala - who atoned to True Neutral after leaving Cheliax, and ended up natural Neutral Good almost immediately after.  If she hadn't been oracled by Nethys, Ione would have been damned.  Peranza actually did sell her soul and did go to Hell.

Another reason people go to Hell?  Malediction!  An Asmodean priest was using that spell on children too!  Pharasma apparently doesn't give a shit!  At best, it might be a negative weight in Her utility function that She traded to the ancient gods of Evil for something else that She wanted.  A tradeable medium-sized negative utility is not the same as Her really giving a shit.

People he knew personally who might actually deserve preemptive cryosuspension... Abrogail, Aspexia... Maillol and Subirachs, probably... Elias Abarco, apparently.  Possibly Avaricia and some of the second-gen Project researchers.  Even of those, he did not really get to see them doing very much that was Wrong.  Maybe it would feel different if he'd watched Abarco rape Carissa, and then again, maybe it wouldn't.  Thousands of years of torment seems like disproportionate revenge even if you grant the concept of revenge.

Possibly his personal experience is statistically unrepresentative of Creation.  He gets that.  Though he wasn't put in position to witness the very worst, hasn't actually scried in Hell some orphan who got Maledicted because a priest still had that spell at the end of the day.  But sure, he may have been put in position to witness statistically unrepresentative amounts of damnation due to soul-sale.

The thing is, that Pharasma permits Peranza to go to Hell after being forced to sell her soul, or that She traded away the possibility and actuality of children getting Maledicted even if She mildly dispreferred that, is strongly informative about what sort of entity Pharasma actually is.

On a larger scale, he figured out sometime around INT 27 that part of why almost everyone in Cheliax goes to Hell is that their fiat currency is backed by souls, causing everyone's acts of spending money to count as soul-trading.  He's not sure how large a part that is of Chelish universal-damnation protocols - they could ask Erecura or Dispater later, if safe oaths can be established there - but it's some part, given that Cheliax goes to the effort at all.

Cheliax might be a statistically unrepresentative place for Keltham to have landed inside of Creation, receiving a disproportionate amount of effort from Asmodeus because Golarion is where Rovagug is contained or because Golarion is where prophecy is shattered.  But that Cheliax is a possible mode for planets in Pharasma's Creation means that if Pharasma's Creation is allowed to continue, maybe it all goes to Cheliax.  He does not particularly think that Asmodeus has a worse chance of reshaping Creation in His preference than nonancient Iomedae has of saving it.

And then of course there's all the feral kids in the Boneyard - many of whom merely go to the Abyss or Abaddon, of course, but some of whom go to Hell, including the ones who choose Hell at the gates of Abaddon.

Those are some of the defects-from-a-humane-standpoint in who goes to Hell.  There's also the point that eternal, soul-destroying torment is not a human standpoint on deserved revenge even if somebody did terrible things in life and even if you legitimate the entire emotion of revenge.

He is aware, at this level of Intelligence, that dath ilan probably has some amount of mortal-Golarion-like horror in its hidden past.  He genuinely does not know how much.  He genuinely does not know the extent to which dath ilan's past was Golarion-without-magic, before dath ilan did heritage-optimization to make it better; or if the people in Golarion have interbred with Evil beings, or had some of their Goodness and Intelligence destroyed by selection pressures over millennia.

But it - really doesn't seem to him - when he looks inside himself, for emotions buried under culture, that would have evolved in him - it doesn't seem to him, if he felt really angry at somebody, angry enough to want to hurt them even if nothing good would come of that, that he'd want to hurt them forever and ever until they turned into paving stones, forgot their names and the hurt they'd dealt to him, and then go on hurting them.  Humanoids evolving from before civilization started, before farming started, shouldn't want to levy unbounded punishments on each other for bounded misdeeds, that's not where the evolutionarily stable strategy should settle.

Hell - doesn't seem to him like a concept - that human beings would invent for themselves from scratch - if they didn't grow up in Golarion, thinking of it as part of the way-things-are.

He's not sure.  It's a guess that could be wrong in a same direction that he's been wrong before.

It's not really a crux, none of this is a crux - he should warn her, before this line of thought continues for too long - because at INT 27 he lost his ability to think of Evil humans in Golarion as anything but bigger Boneyard children.  He was trying to hold onto his sense of people in Golarion as having their own virtues and strengths, who were experienced emergency responders even if they couldn't pass 13-year-old adulthood tests, who had their own plans and purposes even if they were INT 10 or INT 8.  He tried to keep hold of that sense, he really did.  He lost his last grasp on it after he put on the artifact headband.

That people in Golarion damn themselves is the final proof of their innocence, in a way.  Why think that they really understand the pain they deal to others, any more than their mind can successfully span time to understand the pain they're bringing upon themselves in the future?  The future isn't really real to them, and that's why they destroy it.

Carissa Sevar: It doesn't really bother Carissa that the soul trade counts as Evil. It does seem like probably something happened where - say that Pharasma’s conception of Good and Evil is 99% the same as a human conception of those things, that doesn’t mean that the world will end up 99% as good as if She’d gotten it right, because Asmodeus can deliberately identify the places where human values and Pharasmin values aren’t quite the same, and try to build a society that leverages those to make humans be Pharasmin-Evil without being human-evil. 

Though mostly Cheliax just makes people normal human evil. Keltham’s Ostenso wizards are younger than Carissa; they haven’t, yet, had Worldwound assignments where they mindread and report defectors, or are allowed to punish misbehavior by their own inferiors. 

Carissa isn’t sure that being muddled means you can’t be meaningfully evil, can’t meaningfully deserve punishment. She…. agrees that you don’t deserve torture for the rest of the lifetime of the universe, at least not if it’s feasible to provide you with something better than that. 

And she agrees that they do, after all, have to end Hell, if it can be done without having the whole universe gobbled up by Outer Gods or something worse. She doesn’t feel urgency about doing it. They could build a Civilizaton that will have better ideas about how to do it, and she’d be satisfied with that. But she agrees, in the end, that it has to be done.

Keltham+: One of his guesses about Pharasma is that - since She seems plausibly loosely inspired by some humane civilization's concepts of good and evil - somebody tried to build a Medium-Sized Entity and failed.  That scenario in distorted mortal-story-form could sound like "Pharasma is the last Survivor of a previous universe" (that in fact Pharasma ate, because the previous universe wasn't optimal under Her alien values and she wanted to replace it).

Possibly there was some previous universe in which trading of souls was almost always evil, and the people there were punished with prison sentences - obviously dath ilan would never set it up that way, but having seen Golarion, he can imagine some other universe working like that.

Then Pharasma was built, and learned from some sort of data or training or something, a concept of "punishing evildoers" as defined by "written rules" by "sending them to a place they don't like".  And then, uncaringly-of-original-rationales-and-purposes, instantiated something sort of like that, in a system which classified soul trading as unconditionally "Evil" across all places and times and intents; and punished that by sending people to Hell.

Which entities like Asmodeus could then exploit to get basically innocent people into Hell through acts that they didn't mean to hurt anyone, and didn't understand for Evil.

This, as Carissa observed less formally, is simply what you'd expect to follow from the principle of systematic-divergences-when-optimizing-over-proxy-measures.  Maybe in some original universe where soul-trading wasn't a proxy measurement of Evil and nobody was optimizing for things to get classified as Evil or not-Evil, soul-trading was almost uniformly 'actually evil as intutively originally defined'.  As soon as you establish soul-trading as a proxy of evil, and something like Asmodeus starts optimizing around that to make measurements come out as maximally 'Evil', it's going to produce high 'Evilness' measurements via gotchas like soul-backed currency, that are systematically overestimates of 'actual evilness as intuitively originally defined'.

An entity at Pharasma's level could have seen that coming, at Her presumable level of intelligence, when She set those systems in place.  If She didn't head it off, it's because She didn't care about 'actual underlying evilness as intuitively originally defined'.

Allowing Malediction also isn't particularly a symptom of caring a lot about whether only really-evil-in-an-underlying-informal-intuitive-sense people end up in Hell.

Pharasma was maybe inspired by human values, at some point.  Or picked up a distorted thing imperfectly copied off the surface outputs of some humans as Her own terminal values - that She then cared about unconditionally, without dependence on past justifications, or it seeming important to Her that what She had was distorted.

He frankly wishes that She hadn't been, that She'd just been entirely inhuman.  Pharasma is just human-shaped enough to care about hurting people, and go do that, instead of just making weird shapes with Her resources.

If anything, Pharasma stands as an object lesson about why you should never ever try to impart humanlike values to a being of godlike power, unless you're certain you can impart them exactly exactly correctly.

If he was trying to solve Golarion's problems by figuring out at INT 29 how to construct his own Outer God, he'd be constructing that god to solve some particularly narrow problem, and not do anything larger that would require copying over his utilities.  For fear that if he tried to impart over his actual utility function, the transfer might go slightly wrong; which under pressure of optimization would yield outcomes that were systematically far more wrong; and the result would be something like Pharasma and Golarion and Hell.

There's no point in trying to blame Pharasma for anything, nor in assigning much blame to mortal Golarion's boneyard-children.  But somewhere in Pharasma's past may lie some fools who did know some math and really should have known better.  Whatever it was they planned to do, they should have asked themselves, maybe, what would happen if something went slightly wrong.  People in dath ilan ask themselves what happens if something goes slightly wrong with their plans.  That is something they hold themselves responsible about.

Carissa Sevar: That seems like a good opening to contemplate what most of Greater Reality is like, because ‘not quite an exact copy of human values, with problems introduced in the translation’ strikes Carissa as probably an extremely common format out there, if it’s something that humans can do just by making a couple of stupid mistakes. 

Keltham+: That's literally the largest question they could contemplate.  Let's have at it.

He does not actually expect that 'Entities with imperfect copies of the values of the things that tried to build It' are all that common in Greater Reality.  Pharasma, if She arose that way, happened because Her hapless makers lived in a continuum with 'magic' like 'Fox's Cunning' that adds points to 'Intelligence' and 'Wisdom' even if the person casting the 'spell' has 'absolutely no idea what they're really doing or how the spell works'.

In nonmagical continuua like dath ilan, building a Scary Thing has to be done by weaving together raw causality, like in their Magical Simulator of Magic.  This implies that the people making the Scary Thing have to be more knowledgeable about the thing that they're building; more importantly, it implies that, if they messed up, near misses in formal-space would translate into much larger motions across the conceptualspace of the Scary Thing as seen from a mortal viewpoint.

That is, if you try to make something like Pharasma in dath ilan, your design plan probably ends up missing the target on dimensions like 'caring about what happens to living feeling mortals, instead of considering tiny-dolls-shaped-like-mortals equally good and much cheaper', and the cheapest instantiations of things that satisfy Its utility function aren't self-aware qualia-bearing entities.

Pharasma would be the sort of disaster that happened to hasty makers who called on spells to produce lots of 'Intelligence' by surface-simple conceptualmagic means, that hid all the underlying complexity; and also invoked poorly-tested spells to do the actual targeting of the utility function, where those spells themselves were conceptualmagic processes such that their small design flaws corresponded to small movements across conceptualspace.

To put it another way, Pharasma's makers (if this whole guess is correct at all) probably got the equivalent of a misphrased Asmodean compact, whose implementation still bore an overt surface resemblance to their exact wording; rather than a misphrased computer program, which goes off and does something completely weird that isn't close to the original intention of the maker inside the space of conceptual descriptions on the output.  When you screw up a computer program, it doesn't misspell some words, or cook a well-formed tomato stew instead of a carrot stew, it exhibits much weirder behavior than that.

Pharasma should be more the sort of thing that you meet inside an Artificial Magical Continuum that makes 'souls' and 'magic' and 'Wisdom' into short words of the language of that Magical Continuum's conceptualmagic physics, while hiding the tons of actual complexity that must actually exist underneath that API.

And Artificial Magical Continuua like that, he does think, ought to be relatively small segments of reality.  Dath ilan was in a mathematically simple universe with visible reality-amplitudes at the bottom, which is what you'd expect a base-level structure of relative realness to look like.  The Magical Continuum that embeds Pharasma's Creation is presumably in turn embedded in some more mathematically regular universe resting directly above its own underlying realityfluid, and the Magical Continuum is probably only instantiated by some small portion of that Base Physics's realityfluid.  Unless, for example, some Alien Scary Thing took over all of its Base Physics and then decided to use all its resources on simulating a Magical Continuum - which in turn seems like a decision that ought to be relatively rare, because a Simulated Magical Continuum is not massively economically useful in any obvious way, nor will it occupy a maximum of most possible Alien Scary Thing utility functions.

That is to say:  You'd expect most of the realityfluid directed by intelligence, in Greater Reality, to look like it was being directed more by the sort of Large Entities that might have come to exist in a base-level reality like dath ilan's; rather than the sort of Medium-Sized Entities like Pharasma that come to exist in Magical Continuua that get a small share of a Large Entity's resources, or maybe very infrequently a huge share of a Large Entity's resources.

So the question of what Greater Reality looks like is mostly about which sort of Large Entities come into existence in Mathematically Simple Physical Continuua like dath ilan, what desires those have; rather than mortals in Golarion, gods in Creation, or Outer Gods in the Magical Continuum.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa wants to start thinking about Greater Reality by taking a survey of all of the alien races and civilizations known on Golarion; she started some of that work already, because it was obviously going to be useful, but she needs to re-review all of her notes with a bunch of new questions in mind. Her theory is that basically most alien species either evolved, or are copies from versions elsewhere who evolved, or were deliberately bred for intelligence by other intelligent species, and especially the ones who evolved or are copied from versions who evolved are the most useful input they have of what kinds of evolved species you might get, out there in Greater Reality. For each of them, it seems hard but not impossible to extrapolate what kinds of civilization they would build, if they had lots of time independently to build civilization; would they kill outsiders? Trade with them lawfully? Be altruistic towards them? and from there to extrapolate what the distribution of bits of Greater Reality controlled by the descendants of various evolved civilizations would be.

Of course, there will be parts of Greater Reality not controlled by the descendants of evolved civilizations, like Pharasma's Creation. Those will generally be the product of some process that propels something not shaped like the values of the civilization that created it to godhood.

Carissa needs to think more about what kinds of processes will propel things not shaped like the values of the civilization that created them to godhood, but from where she's standing it's not obviously the kind of thing that wouldn't happen without magic. You could just have humans who spend a lot of effort, but not quite enough, teaching their god human values, or humans who ascend themselves but via an ascension process that resolves their muddles slightly badly.

Keltham+: Some of their evidence on how difficult this problem could possibly be, is constrained by the fact that dath ilan is trying to solve it at all (he infers with confidence, based on the shadow of their policy in which ideas were and weren't removed from public discourse), so it can't look too hard.  And they would rather let the planet run for a few decades than try to solve it immediately, so it can't look too easy.

Carissa Sevar: In fact it seems like if a coherent set of values that come from human values is very hard to define, there might be lots of things that are not-quite-right for every thing that is right, even if there are also lots of things that are sufficiently wrong as to not recognizably have anything of value at all in them.

Honestly the thing Carissa is tempted to do next with that is figure out how to build a non-magic god (not do it! just figure out how she would) so she can see what the distribution of tries to do it seem like they'd look like - though also, it seems like while Greater Reality is probably dominated by simple-to-specify universes, those seem disproportionately unlikely to be able to do captures of minds from the specific point of their destruction in other, more complex magical universes.

Keltham+: The set of correct spell diagrams for Prestidigitation is much smaller than the much larger set of ways to configure Prestidigitation that is near-right-but-significantly-wrong; which in turn is tiny inside the much vaster space of ways to configure spell diagrams that aren't Prestidigitation at all.  The much larger space of complete failures doesn't make it impossible to hang Prestidigitation.  Similarly, within the any-success space, the larger proportion of near-right-but-significantly-wrong configurations doesn't mean that most Prestidigitations hung at all are near-right-but-significantly-wrong.

The difficult part, and the reason why dath ilan is running so scared, would be getting things right on your first try .  But it wouldn't be valid to conclude that a first try, conditioned on it not being completely wrong, probably hits near-right-but-significantly-wrong.  If you can do something on your first try and not have it go wildly wrong, that's probably because you've invented systematic methods for targeting and error correction, not because you got lucky enough to miss the wildly-wrong space.  Then the question becomes whether those target-locking-optimization-methods have sufficient narrowing-strength (unit: bits) to hit the center target and not just exclude the space of complete misses, where most of the work, in some sense, goes into excluding the complete misses... he thinks, having not actually observed that computational landscape.  But he has already done some thinking about how many bits it takes to specify the structure and content of a utility function, and the set of errors that give you near-misses versus complete misses.

He does think she's wrong about simple-to-specify universes not being able to mirror and copy minds from more complicated magic universes.  Thought from quantum mechanics:  Realityfluid (in dath ilan) is continuously divisible, and ends up in more and more mostly-separated-worlds-interacting-mostly-internally, exponentially growing in number and exponentially shrinking in individual size, as the greater universe increases in entropy.  You can exploit the exponential subdivision of realityfluid to create 'quantum computations' that can only be calculated using exponentially large numbers of computing elements.

Quantum phenomena in dath ilan can't be exploited to run arbitrary computations over exponential numbers of computing elements, because the motes of quantum realityfluid can't communicate with each other arbitrarily and can't be searched arbitrarily for successful answers.  But quantum computations can compute in polynomial time things that require exponential classical time, like factoring large composite numbers.

No law of reality known to Civilization forbids that a universe with more permissive continuous physics could simulate many many more complicated magical universes, by dividing a bit of reality into very tiny pieces, and using those pieces to mirror a whole complicated magical universe.  The people inside that universe would exist to only a very tiny degree; but even in dath ilan, it's known that you can set up computations that are only real to a very tiny degree, and interact with them to read out their outputs .  There are in fact famous edgelord-philosophical-thought-experiments about whether it's okay to run harmful experiments on people who are clearly visible to you, but who are only real to some tiny degree because they're inside a quantum setup like that.

That said, it's been speculated that the quantum universe is the way it is because of some unknown constraint that weighs against universes whose realityfluid is even more amenable to arbitrary computation via arbitrary divisions; but it's mostly guessed this is an anthropic constraint more than a Reality constraint.

The Higher entities very likely have access to some form of hypercomputation by continuous division of reality, given that they were able to run dath ilan and copy him off it, or that somebody else in the Higher Causal Continuum outside the Simulated Magical Universe was able to do so.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa has a hard time imagining the motives or values of a civilization that would run all possible universes, including universes with Hell in them, at very very minimal realityfluid, in order to take the people in them at the moment of true-death and suddenly give them wildly more reality-fluid, which seems to be the kind of civilization Keltham is hypothesizing. Even the Carissae wouldn't do that and they're very very in favor of making lots and lots of people.

Keltham+: ...to him, this seems like a totally obvious thing to do?

Probably dath ilani Civilization is (secretly) planning to do it with a bunch of smaller universes easily contained inside of quantum computers, once Civilization has safely ascended - unless it's more efficient to engage in cross-universe logical negotiations with other universes that will do that instead.

Dath ilan's universe comes with a built-in time limit before the negative energy (not Negative energy, a different kind of negativity) grows too strong and rips everybody apart.  He guesses that the actual reason the Keepers told everybody not to worry about that right now, is because they expect that a few billion years later Future-Civilization will have made some logically binding deals with extrauniversal entities that are sufficiently visible to them - like Entities that started out inside simple but indefinitely continuing physics, which Future-Civilization can accurately simulate well enough to guess which Entities that evolve there will stay Lawful and have a known utility function to trade with; but whose otheruniversal sub-classical-illusion physics permits the possibility that they'll later develop computation powerful enough to simulate dath ilan's greater universe exactly; and give those Entities more of what they want inside of Civilization's realityfluid today, in exchange for them continuing Civilization in their own universe after dath ilan's local universe runs down.

Carissa Sevar: Trading for your people to go on existing elsewhere makes sense. But why take the people in such a pocket-world out at the moment of true-death instead of at literally any other moment? Why let them go on being conscious in Hell but then take them out if Hell is destroyed inside their universe?

If you're nice, you could just take them out sooner; if you're trading, no reasonable person would trade for that.

Carissa would like it very much if other universes made copies of her, but if she goes to Hell and gets tortured a lot and deteriorates she doesn't want the copies to be made from that point! The copies should be made from the point where she is coolest, obviously.

She would be actively quite angry with the copiers who could have copied her from the point where she was coolest and decided to copy out a traumatized shell instead.

Keltham+: No doubt there's Carissae copied over to elsewhere to some tiny degree at every moment!  But if you're copied over to somewhere else at a 2^-41 fraction of your current reality, that mostly doesn't feel like ending up somewhere else.  If you wait until almost all of somebody's reality has been destroyed by a plane crash, and then copy them, that feels to them like they're going somewhere else.

The part where mass numbers of people who die in Golarion end up in Hell instead of getting isekaied, and will have been thoroughly messed up by the time Pharasma's Creation runs out (it may come with a known time limit to the gods, though the stories about it sound very distorted and might just be made up) - that setup is, he's guessing, an unusually bad situation from the perspective of Entities who care about that sort of thing.  Bad in a way where they can't just ordinarily catch mind-states as they fall out of reality, as they would do with a place like dath ilan.  That is, he would guess, part of the story of how Keltham ended up in Golarion on track to destroy it.

Carissa Sevar: That makes sense, but destroying the universe would, then, not isekai people. Keltham experienced showing up somewhere else because he died in approximately every single plane crash across all the dath ilans where his plane crashed. If instead 99% of dath ilans had been instantly destroyed, he would find himself in the dath ilans that were not instantly destroyed.

The experience that the people in Hell will have if Keltham destroys them (treating 'experiences that feel continuous with the current people' as the important thing, which Carissa isn't persuaded of) is of being in Hell, in the nearby universes where Keltham didn't land, or where Otolmens noticed or squished him, or where his plan failed, or where he randomly had a heart attack as does sometimes randomly happen to healthy humans, not often but often enough.

If they want the people currently in Hell to have the experience of the pain ceasing and their lives getting better, they have to do that by fixing Hell; otherwise, overwhelmingly, those peoples' continuity will continue in all the Hells that no one touched.

(Carissa is aware this is also an argument that destroying Heaven probably doesn't give people the experience of waking up in an unknown bit of Greater Reality run by entities that may or may not comprehend the values of the societies that created them, but of going on in the nearest bit of un-destroyed Heaven. This does make her feel a little better about the whole thing but she evaluates that as a confused impulse brought about by trying to pay attention to the wrong features of the universe, ones that in normal circumstances overlap heavily with the thing she cares about but which aren't actually the same.)

Keltham+: Ideally, he'd knock on the afterlives, such as by making a very loud physical or spiritual sound that everyone hears and remembers hearing at least briefly, eg an explosion or a loud trumpet sound.  It's then cheaper for soul-catching Elsewheres to 'rescue' the people that heard the sound, even if Hell otherwise ends fast enough that people don't notice themselves dying.  Though he notes that this is more of an Experiential Thread utility than an Average Fate utility.

(Experiential Thread utility:  Valuing the moment-by-moment trace of what it feels like to be a person, weighted from their reality-measure when they first noticed their own existences.

Average Fate utility:  For every observer-moment in the universe, weighted by its momentary measure, valuing the average experience of all the future observer-moments that remember having been that observer-moment.)

Carissa Sevar: That still seems like there are enough universes in which he succeeds at the trumpet sound but fails at destroying all of reality that she would expect most people who heard such a sound to mostly go into universes where that sound occurred but the universe wasn't immediately destroyed.

Mostly, though, experiential-thread theories of what matters feel like an error to her, they're not what she cares about; she appeals to them only to the degree they describe what Keltham cares about.

(Arguably Keltham should, actually, be interested in what the people he is doing this to care about; she understands that he mostly doesn't have a method he believes is accurate to get that answer by asking them, but it seems like a wrong to, as an experiential-thread sort of entity, go around doing things to someone that are extremely bad under their own theory of what they care about. She agrees that asking people on the street probably wouldn't work well, but possibly asking ascended mortals would?)

Keltham+: He realizes he's updating off evidence fundamentally unshareable with her, but nonetheless notes that from his perspective, when Keltham heard and saw that his plane was about to crash, he ended up in Golarion, not in a complicated fake Exception Handling scenario in which they'd induced that hallucination or faked that setup for Totally Justified Reasons Actually.  There were maybe some worlds like that even within dath ilan, but they were rarer than one in a thousand, rarer than one in a billion, however much rarer they had to be for Golarion to have more realityfluid than that; and Golarion can't have that much realityfluid to start.

If he sets up some of the obvious physical phenomena for destroying Pharasma's Creation, to be remote-detonated from Golarion where prophecy doesn't work; manages to cause some sort of experiential anomaly in Hell or all the afterlives; and then tries to blow up the universe; there may be possible and therefore actual states of reality where that doesn't work, but if they're improbable enough, the people in Hell don't mostly continue in Creation.  Creation can't be all that probable in the first place, though of course that also decreases how much caring Higher Entities are willing to pay to rescue people from Creation or destroy it.  And that's before taking into account the subjective probability that they're inside a privileged story-reality-thread which has much more realityfluid than neighboring nonstories.

He agrees that asking an ascended mortal (who must be Lawful enough to abide by solid secrecy oaths) is a reasonable experiment.  He doubts it swings anything by itself, but it could swing things in combination with other experiments coming out in the direction Carissa hopes or predicts.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa isn't sure, yet, what exactly is the best articulation of her own values here, and doesn't expect it to be a common articulation even among humans who arrive at one. But she's intending to make her system at least satisfy her intuition that it's extremely different whether someone arrives at a high average happiness because they are killed in every universe where they are unusually sad, or because they are made happy in every universe.

Keltham+: Among the barriers to himself just taking Golarion mortals' word for it, is his concern that Golarionites have now been heritage-optimized to not really think about their afterlife-futures.

If you're told that Evil afterlives exist and their existence implies reproductively-suboptimal behavior given your other goals - like, for example, not stealing something you could get away with taking, because you might go to the Abyss; or it being more prudent to donate money to Iomedae's Church, instead of spending that money on dates - then maybe that gets evolved-against.  Civilization was always very worried about scenarios where it looked like smarter, more altruistic people might end up having fewer kids; lest they breed intelligence, altruism, or actually-acting-on-your-philosophy out of themselves.  They went to great lengths to avoid it.

One of his concerns is that Golarionites have been effectively bred not to think about Hell, or not to care about Hell, but in a way that doesn't make Hell hurt any less once they get there.  People in Golarion who think about the near-inevitability of some of their kids going to the Boneyard, who really care about their kids, might decide not to have kids.  And it'd be one thing if people's sanity and intelligence were left intact, but their utilityfunction changed, so that they really and coherently and in a consistent way ended up as a sort of thing that didn't mind the prospect or actuality of Hell.  But it does not look to him like this is what happened in Golarion.  To him it looks more like - people grew up knowing about Hell, and the more coherent people drastically reshaped their lives in reproductively suboptimal ways given that information, and Golarion bred itself against coherent thinking about Hell.

Or it could be that dath ilan bred itself for coherence and Golarion just never got around to it.  He can't reliably guess, at this remove from Golarion and without spending a lot of time tracking down histories of who had how many kids, whether Golarion actively bred against people coherently thinking about their own future, via people learning about Hell, or if dath ilan just heritage-optimized for smarter saner people over a couple of dozen generations before their historical screen.

Carissa, at this level of Intelligence and Wisdom, may rationalize that heritage plus the philosophy she developed from growing up in Cheliax as an Asmodean, into something that is coherent and that really doesn't mind going to Hell.  He doesn't currently predict that most other mortals in Golarion would end up with the same philosophy if they were boosted to the same stats; he predicts that their incoherence would fall away from them and they'd become more actually horrified by Hell and the Boneyard, which would feel much more real to them as their larger minds shrugged off a finite adapted internal pressure against thinking-about-the-future-and-other-people's-future-experiences-as-if-they-were-real. 

Carissa Sevar: Golarion does seem to have masochism, which isn't exactly heritage-modification-for-Hell-being-all-right but is - quite a step in that direction, a thing that could conceivably be a product of people who are genuinely more all right with bad circumstances and less likely to opt out of them being more likely to have children for many many generations of raids and rapes and slavery.

But Carissa's best guess, from here, is that people will indeed be more appalled about Hell and the Boneyard (though the Boneyard is fixable without any divine intervention! With diamond manufacture and contraception you can just make sure babies almost never die and get called right back when they do!). She's ....deeply uncertain about whether that'd make them favor erasing the world. It doesn't seem overdetermined by being appalled about Hell, it depends on your estimate of whether it's possible to destroy just Hell (she's still confused about what presumptive-future-Keltham-capabilities let him make a trumpet heard all over the universe before painlessly destroying it, but don't let him do that same thing in just Hell - perhaps by compacting with some gods elsewhere so they know how to counteract it in their own domains?), and it depends on your estimate of what Greater Reality is like and on your estimate of how good lives in Heaven and Axis are and on a lot of other things they haven't yet gotten to.

She'd be very surprised if, presented with that, smart humans with lots of time to think all arrived at the same answer (unless there is a clever way to destroy just Hell with success near-guaranteed; then, she supposes, they'll all agree on that.)

Keltham keeps saying that it's overdetermined, that Golarion is so wildly far beyond the line any dath ilani would permit to exist, and Carissa's main prediction is that among Golarionites on reflection, wiser and with time to think, it's not overdetermined; they'll be all over the place. Which may not be worth testing at great expense, if it wouldn't be decisive to Keltham even if true.

Keltham+: He acknowledges the point about masochism but suspects that Hell would need some renovation before even Pilar Pineda could have a good time there.

It would not ultimately surprise him if the same storylike forces that dropped Keltham near Carissa at the Worldwound would also arrange for Golarion to be clearly over his line, clearly under Carissa's line, and of mixed reception to everybody else in Golarion under intelligence enhancement sufficient to allow them to answer coherently.  It could even be that most people in Golarion would end up thinking a different thing, given Wishes and an artifact headband, depending on whether he talked them through the growing-up process or Carissa did.

It may, in fact, not be decisive to him; because of his sense that there are people in Hell who wouldn't want to be there, and they get a kind of veto power over the whole arrangement.  A trade arrangement that leaves nine people better off and one person worse off is not, in the end, a voluntary trade; from his perspective Pharasma is just a kind of thing that makes unfair trades, because She doesn't think the little things can threaten Her, and She has no right to object if he makes Her stop existing about that.  He is not just destroying what he'd rather not exist, he is refusing a trade that didn't get buy-in from the participants.  Maybe, maybe it would be the case that if there was only one person in Hell they shouldn't get veto power over all of Creation - though there is an old parable in dath ilan about a city of a million happy people and a thousand forsaken miserable children and a democratic-supermajority vote, whose point is that democratic-supermajority does not make right.  But it goes back to the question of ratios, again: he is ready to call off a trade if it screws one person out of a hundred, and his threshold definitely isn't one in ten.

- he does still think that they're supposed to make a list of everything they can test, and figure out how to test it all least expensively, and then spend some amount of bounded resource on running the tests with the greatest value-of-information including how they potentially lead to spending more resources and running other tests.  That's just common sense.

Carissa Sevar: Yes, definitely, she's noting the experiment-ideas as they run across them, just in case.

She does observe that the decision isn't between destroying everything to destroy the people in Hell or doing nothing about Hell. It's about the difference between the odds-of-success of this plan at destroying Hell, and the odds-of-success of the next best plan for destroying or fixing Hell; so the question is not whether destroying the universe is better than nothing by Keltham's values, but whether it's better than a less certain, narrower intervention that leaves the other afterlives intact.

She doesn't expect to convince Keltham that not destroying the universe is better than destroying the universe.  She does hope to convince him that destroying the universe is much much much more bad than she thinks he currently conceives of it, so that he is more willing to trade off some chance-of-success for a plan with a narrower scope.

Keltham+: It actually does seem to him to be a lot easier to destroy Creation than to destroy just Hell.  He doesn't actually have solid plans for getting a trumpet call (that was just a hypothetical example based on Golarion announcement protocols) into the eighth layer of Hell, that was something he expects he'll end up mostly leaving to his future divine self.  His primary hope is that releasing Rovagug is the sort of thing that will cause a consciously perceptible change of experience within Hell, including via side avenues like by Asmodeus leaving Hell to fight Rovagug.  His backup nonconcrete plan is for his divine self to negotiate with Lawful Good entities about that.

To destroy Creation he probably just needs to destroy Pharasma's infrastructure in the Boneyard continuum, Her Seal and Her Spire, though he will also try to simultaneously destroy as many Material planes as he can.  Asmodeus has worked hard to make it pragmatically unsolvable to destroy the center of His presence on the ninth layer of Hell without also destroying Creation.  Asmodeus has probably not put in the same effort to make it impossible to cause a loud noise or other perceptible disturbance in the first eight layers of Hell.

...he's got plans for getting Carissa's family out of Cheliax and into Elysium before he unleashes Rovagug, obviously, along with everyone else in Golarion he knows or cares about, basically boiling down to Wishnapping them there.  It is - a sort of thing where he was not sure whether Carissa would let herself think about that, or not. 

Carissa Sevar: Carissa suspects it won't matter. She has thought about it - it's hard not to -and she thinks that, while the Chaotic planes are said to be infinite, the reachable bits of them will all go with Creation if it goes. The parts that survive will be, well, infinitely far away. It might help in the case where Rovagug is unleashed and Golarion destroyed but not all of Creation, and seems worth doing for that circumstance (though in that circumstance they're also probably resurrectable), but she thought about it for a while and considers it unlikely, that the parts of Elysium and the Maelstrom that any Golarionites go to would outlive the universe.

Her feelings about this, which she has a very strong habit of hiding from Keltham and which are crying out in misery at being observed here and now, are fairly mixed. Of course it's better to do slightly less expected harm than slightly more.  But....it's less than one trillionth of the harm averted, and wildly more than one trillionth of the emotionally significant to Keltham harm averted; and that makes her scared that he'll be more willing to do it, what with how he's primarily risking the people he's never met or cared for. When she was planning to destroy Cheliax to buy them another month of time, she considered and rejected getting anyone she loved out; if she wasn't willing to do it to them, she felt, she shouldn't be willing to do it at all. Instead of her family, maybe Keltham should just pick four random people to Wishnap to Elysium; it'd do exactly as much harm-reduction, and it wouldn't deceive the parts of their minds that can only conceive of bad things on human scales.  Maybe none of that actually coheres, but she thinks it does, or is a pointer to something that does: she thinks that part of the 'deontology' of a world of Carissae would be that anyone in one of those who decided it was worth bombing a city did not get themselves or their loved ones to safety first.

Keltham+: He doesn't know if she'll listen to him, but he wants to suggest to her, as a woman once said to past-Keltham, that she is allowed to be a little selfish.  He knows that she will have already thought of this obvious thought, and rejected it; but he nonetheless wants to say it to her, what she'll have already predicted he'll say.

The 'infinity' of the Chaotic planes does strongly suggest to him that they're more continuous with the territory outside Creation than the other planes; Carissa might want to learn the entirety of his physics knowledge (though it's clear that local physics are modified from that) and then reconsider whatever Golarion evidence she has.  (He'll want to review her relevant Golarion knowledge too, but it might lack the crisp clear formality of physics and so be less learnable by him at low expense.)

From a dath ilani perspective, it would be a generically obvious sort of tactic, at this point, to collect some Golarionites and a repository of their culture and put them into an ark in Elysium, with spellsilver on board and diamonds and some helpful magic items, and maybe an Efreeti noble bound by oaths.  Try to maximize their chance of surviving, if Elysium comes unanchored from Creation but isn't destroyed instantaneously.

If he's doing that anyways, he'd obviously put Carissa's family on board by default.  Telling him not to do that, in hopes he'll be influenced by her and her family's greater jeopardy, seems threatish in the decision-theoretic sense.  He might acquiesce to leave Carissa's family behind if Carissa demanded it be so, for the sake of peace between them; but he'd then ignore the influence on his decisions from that.  Making the outcome be worse for him, than he could otherwise make it be for himself, in hopes that it'll influence him, is something he should respond to by not being so influenced.  Maybe Carissa wants to bind herself that way, by not getting her family out of jeopardy - though this seems to him like questionable altruism, her family does not belong to her like her clothes do - but she definitely shouldn't hope to bind him that way, by putting in more jeopardy what he could put into less jeopardy.

(A side-thought, thinking to himself:  Possibly delegate the ark project to Fe-Anar, maybe Wish up Fe-Anar and give him some now-unused headbands to be a better leader...  Iomedae's transcension via Starstone generated artifacts from the magic items she was carrying with her at the time; maybe they can do something similar with their headbands and/or the giant diamonds entrusted to Fe-Anar... Obtain a large existing airship or larger regular boat, and commission emergency-speed crafting on it, add magic items to it, to try to make it more planar-survival worthy...  He may want to put Fe-Anar on that project soon, there could be lead time on Fe-Anar obtaining a ship.)

Carissa Sevar: Carissa isn't sure, actually, that if you're doing something like this you're allowed to be a little bit selfish.

She isn't sure that you aren't, either. She is aware of her own bias to solve moral problems in a way that involves suffering whenever that is humanly possible and sometimes when it isn't.

But it feels to her like all the trillions of people you are going to kill have the right to demand of you that you do the best possible version of your plan; that if you are unwilling to do whatever it takes to try not to have to kill them, then you aren't grown up enough, yet, to do it at all. 

Probably it's fine to do things like saving her family that don't affect the odds of success of the overall plan. But everything's entangled, and she's not sure there are things that don't affect the odds of success of the overall plan. It won't affect whether Keltham is willing to go ahead, maybe; but say that Pharasma is willing to grant him an end to Hell and nothing else he demanded, and he has to decide whether to annihilate the universe over that or not. She can't, actually, bring herself to wish that the universe whose annihilation he contemplates holds nothing of particular importance to him anymore.

Keltham+: Even leaving aside that he's unlikely to end up relatively-certain that an Elysium ark survives the destruction of Creation, her family is not going to swing this.  Even the other Project Lawful members are not going to swing this, if he can Wishnap them to the putative ark.  Carissa won't be on that ark, and she is and always has been the thing about Golarion that felt the most real to him.

Carissa Sevar: In that case, she is grateful that he thought about her family, and if it'd be helpful she'll plan Fe-Anar's ark with him at some point. Fe-Anar does seem like a good person to do it. 

(This is only sort of an accurate explanation of how she feels; she is trying to produce cooperativeness and gratitude and positive-reinforcement-for-Keltham out of a well of recently-deafened agony and isn't totally sure it's working. But she hopes it's working.)

Keltham+: ...there's a protocol out of dath ilan which might help here, which is that she's allowed to say for example 'I acknowledge the thought and am glad we're still coordinating, but can't feel gratitude right now', and this serves a lot of the same purpose of not appearing to Keltham as a blank non-reinforcement of behavior she wants him to repeat, without requiring her to feel particular things.

He's not looking for a feeling of gratitude from her, for people can't (or at WIS 25+, should not too often) choose what to feel.  More like - the acknowledgment that he made or was trying to make a Cooperative move in their multiplayer dilemma, including one that was on the level of people and feelings.  So long as that acknowledgement is there in any form, it doesn't need to take the form of an emotion she has to struggle to produce within herself. 

Carissa Sevar: She's still trying to be extremely selective about which bits of alien technology she adopts into herself. But that is the language Keltham so wishes he could hear, here, so - yes. She acknowledges that he is cooperating, that he is trying very hard, even when it is costly to him, and that she noticed him doing that just now in addition to having a background presumption he's doing it even when she doesn't notice.

Keltham+: He acknowledges that, in turn.

...They're clear at this point that dath ilan's alien technology is just alien and not secretly meant to corrupt Lawful Evil targets, check?  He's reasonablycertain at this point that he understands everything about dath ilan that looked sinister to the likes of Cheliax and Osirion.  The sneakiest thing dath ilan did was covertly shape him to never notice he was a sadist; and they didn't do that in a way that hindered his adaptation in a world with masochists.  (Now that he thinks about that at this intelligence level, that's weak evidence that dath ilan has masochists but very few, and they didn't want to hinder the sexuality of sadists who could end up affording them.)

Obviously past-Keltham was shaped in all sorts of ways as a kid, but those shaping-targets are matters of public documentation on the Network.  They're not covert intended effects of the alien technology.  Even the height of dath ilan's cleverness shouldn't be able to steganograph mind-control tactics that could influence augmented-Carissa, without his own augmented self being able to notice, through the sole medium of techniques simple enough to be taught to past-Keltham - to speak only of capabilities, saying nothing of intention as would require knowledge; past-Keltham was clearly not prepped for the Cheliax scenario he landed in. 

Carissa Sevar: Carissa agrees with all that, and would be making different tradeoffs if she disagreed with any of it; and still, if the situation were any less dire, she would not be trying to replace her own instincts and responses with those of an alien civilization whose values are in fact very different from hers, and she checks internally, every time she does that, if it's actually necessary to do and if the implementation is tugging at any related bits of her head. 

She imagines if Keltham were in a civilization with vastly more advanced mental technology where everyone preferred Hell to death and cared mostly about how many universes they existed in and was a masochist, he too would develop some kind of mental checklist when adopting their alien thought patterns, and might feel sad, that it was necessary to do at all.

Keltham+: It would depend greatly on whether the purpose of everything in that civilization was clearly labeled.  Past-Keltham didn't hesitate to learn any of Carissa's alien technology - which did have more risk than he realized, but he was mistakenly treating a low-trust society like a high-trust society, and Cheliax's lessons to him were not overt in their true purposes.

There is, in general in dath ilan, an ethos that the protagonist is supposed to immediately learn any and all amazing mental tricks the aliens possess, and analyze them and judge them and repurpose them if necessary.

(He's reasonablycertain that's not a subtle trap aimed at causing aliens who pick up dath ilani to think it's a good idea to rapidly learn from the dath ilani.) 

Carissa Sevar: She wonders if they're perhaps quibbling over this because it touches on a deeper thing, where Carissa on an emotional level views dath ilan as ...not really the kind of civilization you cooperate with if you have any choices other than cooperation and death. She has tried quite hard to not make this Keltham's problem, she has not asked again that he talk less about dath ilan, but when they're mindreading it's hard to hide; Carissa views dath ilan as something that should be forcibly cryopreserved, ideally.

Keltham+: He wishes to see those thoughts; guessing them would take more time than looking.

Carissa Sevar: The people of dath ilan are obviously not alien the way Asmodeus is alien; they have many human impulses, they have lots in common with many people of Golarion. But -  a gesture at the concept that things that are similar until you optimize them aggressively enough can then end up extremely distant from each other - dath ilan has resolved a lot of their muddles, and in almost every case resolved them in the opposite of the way Carissa, herself, resolves them; and so in this world, and she suspects in most worlds, the things that Carissa wants and the things dath ilan wants are very very different. She thinks she'd probably be reasonably happy in a dath ilani utopia, and that they'd probably be reasonably happy in a Carissaeish utopia, but in any world short of that, their aims will be diametrically different and there being dath ilani around makes it less likely that anything at all of value to Carissa will be preserved. 

Keltham is very very much not a Carissa-utility-inverter, he's just for unrelated reasons reasonably likely to do the precise thing a Carissa-utility-inverter would do, and dath ilani, as she understands it, would nearly all do that, and so to Carissa, as a pragmatic matter, they aren't very different from Rovagug or from a Carissa-utility-inverter. The best thing to do about them is to render them unable to hurt anyone while you try to make the world a place so good it has space even for them in it. 

Keltham+: More puzzlement that he can probably resolve faster by looking than by guessing himself.  (Seeing evidence first and hypothesizing later is not as deadly to him, now, as when he was smaller.)

What would Carissa do differently (rather than teach differently or think about differently) if she had great political power in modern dath ilan as it is?  Would she tell all the sadists what they are, and... let them be sad sadists?  Enslave people to be used as victims who wouldn't enjoy that?

Carissa Sevar: Probably let them be sad, yes; she thinks it’s actually much better to be sad than to be muddled. And probably she'd let people set to be forcibly cryopreserved choose to be enslaved instead, with an ongoing choice about that, though she understands it to be the case that probably few dath ilani would go for it.But it also feels to her like…something has gone very wrong to put those things into such tension? One of the ways in which dath ilani are very alien to Carissae is that they would, in fact, be worse off from having a bit more wisdom and noticing an obvious fact about their own minds and desires. It makes it hard to say you'd do anything in particular to make them predict reality better or understand themselves better; after all, it can be stipulated that then they'll be sad. 

She thinks mostly she'd change all the heritage optimization to be pointed very aggressively at that, at the way dath ilani are so, uh, the words that immediately come to mind are 'so fragile and so miserable' but she understands Keltham is homesick and she would not have said those aloud -- 'so configured such that realizing they want things they can't have makes them lastingly worse-off' and 'so frequently sad', maybe, is what she'd have said. She would have said to them that they'd accidentally optimized-out a ton of really valuable stuff, further info available on request, and that the highest priority for the next generation would be getting it back.

Keltham+: He suspects that dath ilan's ancestors damaged themselves in the process of trying heritage-optimization, while knowing far less than they know now.  Subsystems of the brain compete for volume, for attention.  To make one subsystem louder can diminish the relative voice of another by comparison; there are known syndromes like that.  Dath ilan's ancestors (he now suspects, infers at this distant remove) blundered into a tradeoff like that in the course of optimizing for reflectivity, which is entangled with the relative loudness of prefrontal cortex compared to subcortical emotion-binding structures.  Past-Keltham knew he had more emotional intensity than the dath ilani around him; this probably correlated with past-Keltham having Golarion-measurable Wisdom well below dath ilani average (he is guessing).

The smart people of dath ilan may already know as much.  Even if they don't calculate that it would be helpful to emphasize a lot in public, that people ought to have louder emotions, as would give people one more thing to be sad about.

Fixing dath ilan, he currently guesses, would be mainly a matter of heritage-optimizing or biochemically intervening for more subcortical loudness.  (A component of local measured Splendour, probably, given how Wishes that boosted measured Splendour also boosted that.)  He'd advocate that policy himself, now that he's had a chance to look at Golarion.  He suspects it's already in progress there at least a little.  Dath ilan may not prioritize that characteristic as much as he would, having seen Golarion; but dath ilan has some idea that they've got a problem.

This does not yet seem like the part that you'd cryopreserve Civilization over.  His model of Carissa would never say they're too sad to be allowed to exist.

Carissa Sevar: That makes her feel a spark of fondness, which she squelches out half-automatically. Indeed, no one is too sad to be allowed to exist. They can go along as miserably as they want. No, the only acceptable reason to cryopreserve Civilization is in self-defense; if it learns of worlds like hers, worlds where most people have good lives and amazing afterlives but some people have good lives and go to Hell, it will annihilate them.

 If there was nothing else in the entire Greater Reality then it'd be better to have dath ilan than nothing.

Keltham+: That gets into a rather larger issue, as he'd frame it.  Dath ilan is only one instance of a much larger class of agents, here, and that larger class is probably what's impinging on Golarion.

This is a large thought; he requests that they pause on active interchange for long enough that he can think it through.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa can, actually, at this Wisdom level, just stop all her contentious world-destroying related thoughts and think about the sensation of having fingers and joints, being able to shift her weight, being able to breathe. It’s delightful. It is nice how some things are exactly the same as when she was a very small Carissa.

Keltham can take his time. 

Keltham+: There's a lot of different hypothetical ways to slice up the alien superintelligences that constitute the Powers of Greater Reality; and at this weak level of augmentation he just doesn't have the time or computing power to derive a serious estimate about the real landscape from scratch.  The large thought that follows is properly framed against the magnitude of this difficulty of guessing...

Greater Reality: In different universes with different physics, there will be Things that don't develop neuron-analogues as a whole new computation substrate on top of their genes; and instead compute with their equivalent of DNA, and pass memories and skills on to children.

Aliens like that would be very different from dath ilani, or from the Golarionites copied from a common ancestor of their humanity.

Some such species of Things won't transcend by constructing computers from scratch, but by accumulating enough DNA-skills like that over time, or coming up with some adaptation for exchanging DNA-skills horizontally, until in the midst of all those DNA-analogue-bourne skills collected of their species, a greater coherence and reflection is born, and a self-optimization.

A superintelligence born that way would be very very different from dath ilani or Golarionites.

Greater Reality: Some possible laws of physics will put much larger subvolumes of reality into causal neighborhoods of each other; compared with how, on a planet, things only touch their immediate neighbors in three dimensions of space.

Some coherent mathematical causal-relations over relative-reality (another way of saying 'laws of physics') will do the equivalent of creating vast numbers of computer programs that immediately start copying and eating each other, or competing for memory, googols of them all touching each other within a confined space; such that a superintelligence is born from those almost immediately, rather than requiring a long time to evolve.

A superintelligence born that way, from a universe like that one, would be very very different from anything that evolved anywhere, or that had been born out of a process itself evolved.

Greater Reality: With that warning in mind - that large segments of Greater Reality are probably really alien, much more so than the Outer Gods - one of many many potential theoretical ways to slice up the space of alien superintelligences, might be to talk of three kinds of Entities:

Greater Reality: One:  Entities that only care about their own experiences, or realityfluid in their own immediate vicinity of causality/spacetime.

Call these Locally-Caring Entities.

Greater Reality: Two:  Entities that care about realityfluid regardless of whether it's in their own vicinity; such that, compared to a baseline of a null-simple or typical-average configuration of realityfluid, their best configuration of that realityfluid gives them a much larger relative positive bonus, than the relative negative loss of the worst possible configuration of that realityfluid.

For concreteness:  Suppose that, compared to the way most realityfluid everywhere they can affect is put together by default, putting it together their best possible way, scores a gain of +100 utilons; and putting it together the worst possible way, loses -1 utilons.

Call these Positively-Caring Entities.

Greater Reality: Three:  Entities that care about realityfluid not only in their immediate vicinity; which can lose a lot more from the worst configuration of that realityfluid compared to null/baseline, than they can gain from the best configuration of that realityfluid.

Take a random bit of reality they can affect in any physical or logical way, the way it usually is, and make it the best way a bit of realityfluid can be: they gain +1 utilon over baseline.  Make it the worst way it can be, according to their utility function, and they lose -100 utilons under baseline.

Call these Negatively-Caring Entities.

Greater Reality: Considering the imaginable case where Greater Reality degenerated into beings mostly trying to extort and blackmail and threaten and retaliate against each other, doing the worst they could do to one another, spending lots of effort on pessimizing each other's utilityfunctions:

The Locals would defend their own bubbles of reality and not care about anything outside of that;

The Positives would be slightly sad...

...and the Negatives would go to extreme lengths to prevent that possibility from ever materializing.

Greater Reality: Then (one might speculate), all of the Negatively-Caring Entities that didn't have very strongly opposing utility functions, and had logical line-of-sight on one another sufficient to engage in binding logical negotiations, would have a potential target of logical coordination that could perhaps be summed up as:  "No pessimizing the utility function of anybody within this coalition."

Of course, any particular Negatively-Caring Entity would only care directly to avoid having its own or similar utility functions pessimized.  But the Entities large enough to extrapolate distant Entities that could in turn extrapolate themselves, might execute a logically binding agreement to act against almost-any utility pessimizer they ran across, even one that wasn't targeting their own utility function, if that pessimizer was targeting a utility function likely to reappear within the coalition.

They would have an incentive, even, to oppose whatever it was that flipped Dou-Bral to Zon-Kuthon; or on a smaller scale, Asmodeus figuring out what mortals like least, and doing that to them.

It's not, in this case, that the mortals are part of the mutually-negotiating coalition.  The mortals don't have logical line-of-sight on the Negative Entities; the mortals cannot Cooperate in a way that is logically dependent upon the Entities Cooperating back.  Possibly even Dou-Bral, as He then existed, would not have possessed the cognitive resource to extrapolate Negative Entities in enough detail that He could have made a logical compact that bound them, chosen to prevent pessimization of their utility functions only if they would do the same for His utility function.

But the mortals have greater nephews, Powers such as dath ilan might have one day birthed, Future-Civilizations elsewhere in Greater Reality; and those Powers predictably have their own utility functions pessimized, to some degree, when Dou-Bral gets flipped to Zon-Kuthon, or Asmodeus tortures mortals.

Even Positively-Skewed+Caring-Entities have an incentive to not allow pessimizers to exist.  They can be hurt too, when realityfluid gets configured the way they like least, if their Positive skew is not total.  But their incentive to wipe pessimizers out of reality is much relatively weaker than it is for Negatively-Skewed+Caring-Entities.

Negatively-Skewed+Caring-Entities will engage in negotiations to remove Zon-Kuthon, or whatever flipped Dou-Bral, from Reality - even if those negotiations incur large uncertainties and inefficiencies.

Greater Reality: Before meeting Carissa, past-Keltham would have considered it obvious that human beings are Negatively-Caring Entities, in both their Local and Nonlocal components.  He still thinks most of the people in Golarion would qualify as Negatively-Caring, based on other reading and conversations, and that the unusual woman he landed next to at the Worldwound will prove to be odd about that.

For most people, the very worst thing that can happen to them, or to anyone, is worse than the best thing that can happen is good.

Greater Reality: The larger Entity that created the Magical Continuum that contains Pharasma's Creation is Locally-Skewed+Caring, as is Pharasma.  Reasoning:  Pharasma is large enough that She should be able to extrapolate at least some distant Entities that could extrapolate Her, and engage in logically binding negotiations with those.  Golarion does not look like it should look if Pharasma were trading with those distant Entities.

Similarly, if the Larger Entity wasn't Local, It'd have traded with distant Entities in ways that would have visibly shaped the Magical Continuum, and would have imposed constraints on Pharasma's Creation and Golarion.

Wherever they are right now, it's not a trading equilibrium of lots of Entities.  It's something's personal backyard.

Greater Reality: Pharasma's Creation, however, is an exceptional pit of horror from the perspective of the Negatively-Caring Coalition.  Mortals don't just live miserable lives and die, they live miserable lives and then get tortured in the afterlife into wrecks that might be hard to rescue-by-continuing-simulation.

Those mortals are not in the class of agents with which Negatively-Caring Entities true-negotiate, execute mutually binding logical arrangements.  But sending mortals to Hell is going to pessimize the utility functions of many particular kinds of Negatively-Caring Entities, like those Entities born of a place like dath ilan.  This is an easy fact for any large Negatively-Caring Entity to extrapolate.

Future-Civilization, when it grows up and can engage in logical negotiations of its own, will not wantonly step on and crush the utility functions of any large Entities with lots of realityfluid, whose utility functions are easy to foresee.  If it's predictable that some foreseeable classes of Entity would hate the imprisonment of mitochondria inside of cells, Future-Civilization will arrange that there are no imprisoned mitochondria.

And in return - it will be logically bargained, and only logically-conditional on that bargain's predictable execution will Future-Civilization make its concessions - in return, Negatively-Caring Entities that run across some event Future-Civilization and its logical kin would hate, will try to prevent that event from happening.

So a Negatively-Caring Entity that happened to be standing next to the Entity operating the Magical Continuum, bargained for something to be done about Pharasma's Creation inside.  Possibly only after Aroden died and some other future remedy was derailed.

That's his basic guess as to what happened, here, what's really going on.

Greater Reality: The Entity/Entities that made the Magical Continuum care about it locally and in a weird way.  The Magical Continuum is not being efficient at any ordinary instrumental goal.

The Makers prevent Pharasma and her fellow Outer Gods from being eaten by superintelligences; the little Outer Gods have a garden to play in undisturbed.

Similarly, the Makers probably Locally-Cared about, and optimized for, the Creations of Outer Gods containing many mortals who didn't just get consumed for their resource-value or externally uplifted to technological civilizations.

The Makers could intervene at any point, yet they intervene almost nowhere, their actions almost entirely null.  Just like Pharasma mostly doesn't intervene in her Creation, and the gods mostly don't intervene in Golarion.

It's against this background that the incredible weirdness of Keltham-insertion as an intervention needs to be considered.  A Negatively-Caring Entity with some foreseeable utility function paid for that intervention, on behalf of everything like Future-Civilization that would consider Pharasma's Creation as a really unusually bad place -

(By the standards of Greater Reality, within which, it is to be hoped, most Entities are optimizing their own utility functions, rather than spending lots of their resources on pessimizing other Entities' utility functions. It's not an unreasonable outcome to hope for!  Most Entities have reason to want Greater Reality to end up that way - though the Negatively-Caring Entities have a much stronger reason to want it.)

- but paid as little as possible, of course, for the intervention that would annoy the Makers least, cause them the least loss of utility for which they'd demand compensation.

The Negatively-Caring Entity didn't pay the Makers to send in a superintelligence, nor to send a Keeper to Absalom.  That, presumably, would have been much more contrary to the Makers' Locally-Caring utilityfunction, and demanded a higher price, than dropping Keltham next to Carissa at the Worldwound. 

Greater Reality: This theory obviously does not compress all of the evidence available to them that looks like it ought to be compressible.

In particular, Golarion's past weirdness such as might be pleasing to the Makers, seems different in character from the strangeness of past-Keltham landing where he'd end up with multiple romantic prospects.  Though he hasn't been staring too directly at that, himself, because it seems like it might also have been a Cayden Cailean tactic to arrange some of that tropiness; he knew that future-augmented-Carissa would be able to think about that more safely than himself, if it needed thinking about.

But it's an obvious thought that the Negatively-Caring Entity that sent past-Keltham into Golarion might've split the cost with something that had strange preferences about isekai stories, so long as they were arranging an isekai at all... or something.

He does not, in fact, expect to succeed in decoding what actually went on there at his current level of augmentation.

But depending on the size of the Makers' causally-connected local section of their Higher Universe, in terms of how many different Entities are active traders there, there could be something in there that erupted out of a civilization that got stuck in some weird equilibrium where it poured more and more resources into an increasingly sophisticated interactive isekai romance.  Say, because that civilization was even worse than Golarion at handling existential threats like the Worldwound; and the interactive romance novel succeeded in being a romantic superstimulus to the species' members, and was therefore an extremely selfish-profitable investment of computation, and they managed to pour billions of labor-hours into that company, but not into the public good of surviving their own transcendence.  That level of coordination failure would've seemed implausible to him before Golarion, but now he buys that as a plausible dysfunction mode for aliens.

The resulting Entity which ate that civilization, then cared a lot about having isekais look more like romance novels.

(It's more likely that one such Isekai Entity exists within causal contact of the Makers of the Magical Continuum, if there's a lot of Entities in mutual causal contact with the Makers, but this doesn't seem implausible.  The kind of computations the Makers are throwing around do not seem characteristic of three-dimensional space with a tight lightspeed limit.)

The Isekai Entity might care more about 'natural' versions of those events than those it arranged for itself, due to having evolved some earlier taste for the natural, or a prohibition against tickling its own rewards (as its makers might have tried and not-totally-failed to imbue into it).  Or it could be a Negatively-Skewed+Caring-Entity, which made for itself quintillions of the cheapest events it classified as isekais, but would still be very unhappy about any isekai-categorized event occurring anywhere that wasn't a correctly designed romance novel.

The Isekai Entity would of course refuse to pay to modify isekai events that were planned only as threats to itself.  But the original Negative Entity's paid intervention into Golarion would have been an isekai purely of that Negative Entity's own natural interests; it would not have started as an isekai only for purposes of threat.  So the Isekais-Must-Be-Romances-Entity paid to further modify those events - paid a lot, because it wouldn't run across naturally-occurring isekais in need of fixing very often, and would have a lot of generalized money to spend on that.

Keltham+: He realizes it's not a good theory.  He's just keeping it in mind so that he has a probably-false theory he can use to organize his evidence, and at least notice when something contradicts or confirms that theory, rather than leaving his observations wholly unorganized and untheorized.

Carissa Sevar: It's a very Keltham theory. She agrees that it's not a good theory. While it does seem to her like Keltham-related events have a distinct character from the events of Golarion's history, that feels mostly-fully explained by Cayden and Nethys's meddling plus the degree to which a legend out of history gets distorted by the retelling.

She's less sure than Keltham that Greater Reality isn't mostly local, entities creating their own universes that run by their rules. It doesn't seem like a natural thing, after all, to care about things happening in other universes; it feels like resolving a muddle in a particular way where you might expect most people not to. (What's Keltham's theory on why entities would care about things outside themselves, in general, anyway, or at least why humans do it?)

Keltham+: He doesn't stare too hard at Cayden/Nethys, so that's Carissa's future job if it produces relevant factors.  He was trying to reason mainly from Pilar's, Carissa's, and Asmodia's prior improbability in their base characters before any divine meddling started.  He's reasoning from the improbability of Pilar's potential for tropian stories, rather than the Cayden-meddling realization of that potential.

Caring about everything everywhere that matches a pattern is computationally simpler than caring about only things that match the pattern in a particular region of space; also, if you only care about a short time in the future, somebody will trade you a small amount of resources today for all of your resources later, which eliminates you as a lasting Power of Reality.  Or:  Caring about 'experiences' of the 'self' requires defining 'self', and if that definition cuts off all strong growth and self-modification, that entity is again filtered away as a strong Power of Reality.  Or:  Things that get optimized into existence by something like natural selection, which is trying to solve a problem in an environment, may well end up caring about something in the environment; or rather being made up of a muddle that could easily shake out that way for at least some things.  (That's how it happened for humans, leaving out some complexities of reflection-towards-coherence along the way.)

There's nothing forcing an agent to shake out that way, but it is simple to care about every part of reality by running your utilityfunction over its configuration, and if a component of many humans' values lands there, then plausibly so do a bunch of other things' components.

Even if Reality did end as mostly Entities that were mostly Locally-Caring, the non-Local Entities would still trade with each other; trade-optimized regions would then just be a smaller total fraction of Greater Reality's dispensation of its intelligently controlled realityfluid.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa agrees that something probably not-Cayden put Pilar there as well as Carissa; Asmodia feels less suspicious, to Carissa, as a person, Asmodia seems like the kind of person lots of people are. …except that maybe someone had to be a person who'd say to Carissa that they wanted to not exist, so that she could understand that as something a person might actually want for themself and not just want inflicted on others, so that she wouldn't report Keltham to Asmodeus the instant she realized that his plan might destroy the world. 

She understands that natural selection produces muddles which can then shake out in many many ways that aren't what created an advantage in the selected environment, and probably other processes for producing intelligent beings - breeding them deliberately? - would do the same thing. It still seems like there are powerful forces in the direction of caring about yourself and your family and your nation and your species more than you care about all sapients; she expects most evolved creatures not to care about everybody, though tentatively.

Keltham+: Asmodia was oddly adept at learning the more mathematical parts of Law, for somebody to just happen to be in the same class as Pilar.  The second group, sent over when Cheliax assigned the project a higher priority and was trying to allocate smarter people instead of gift-girls, didn't seem to contain another Asmodia.

Greater Reality: Lots and lots of evolved things, and probably even more of the Entities that the evolved-beings birth (if they mess it up) would end up not caring about sentient beings at all, whether Locally or Everywhere.  The categorization he's suggesting generalizes beyond caring about sentients, for example:

Suppose some being cares a lot about particular shapes of matter, for example, and prefers matter being curled up in one squiggle shape - a rounded-rectangular spiral pattern say - while greatly wishing that no pattern ever be squiggled up in a hyperbolic spiral.  It might feel no pain or pleasure, no joy or happiness, about the fact; it might just act so as to bring about the rounded-rectangular squiggles, and avoid the hyperbolic spirals.  Or it might feel pain or pleasure internally, as it learns about spirals or squiggles being created, but be indifferent to this as it plots its goals.

From the perspective of the Squiggle-Caring Entity, some other Entity that cares a lot about people having conscious experiences is then just a strange being that cares about some weird and more abstract and complicated pattern that matter can be squiggled into.

Playing out some additional particulars in case the abstract pattern didn't make it across the telepathic gap at the speed they're trying to think at each other:

That Entity would be categorized as Negative-skewed or Positive-skewed in that utterly sentient-uncaring utility function, depending on whether one ill-shaped squiggle pattern cancels out the utility of 100 good squiggles or 0.01 good squiggles.

A Negatively-Skewed Squiggle Entity, whose utility function arose in any way suggesting that this utility function arises more often in Greater Reality than its (Positive) inverse, has incentive to be signatory to a compact whereby the Future of dath ilan's Civilization would spend lots of resources to intervene, if Future-Civilization ran across some smaller thing that also really hated hyperbolic spirals, and some mid-sized Pessimizing Entity was therefore making lots of hyperbolic spirals because it had decided to pessimize the smaller agent's utility (maybe after making a threat that was decision-theoretically-properly refused, and having evolved to be hateful itself).

Future-Civilization wouldn't care about hyperbolic spirals as such, and the smaller thing might not be a kind of being that experienced unhappiness as such, or had even chosen to have any conscious experiences at all.  But in return, the original larger Squiggle Entity would intervene if it saw somebody torturing a mortal; not because it cared, not even because the mortal was trading with it, but because Future-Civilization had agreed to avert the pessimization of Negatively-Skewed Entities in general, conditional on its expectation that a lot of Negatively-Skewed Entities would do the same, and Entities signatory to that compact were expected to occasionally avert small or large squiggle-caring beings from being pessimized by having lots of hyperbolic spirals created at them.

A logical trade like that comes with friction costs.  So Negatively-Skewed Entities are more likely to be signatory to a pact like that than Positively-Skewed Entities; because even if they only assess a 10% chance of Future-Civilization actually existing to execute the bargain that they predict Future-Civilization to execute if it exists, and even if they expect Future-Civilization to underestimate by a factor of 10 how much the Negatively-Skewed Squiggle-Carer exists to pay them back, it's still worth sacrificing the opportunity cost of 100 rounded-rectangle squiggles to prevent one expected hyperbolic spiral from being made.  A Positively-Skewed Squiggle-Carer would conversely demand 100 units of realityfluid be spent on preventing hyperbolic spirals in order to justify sacrificing 1 unit of realityfluid that could have been spent directly on rounded-rectangular squiggles.

Carissa Sevar: She doesn't want to invest too much in contemplating how as a god she'd handle that problem, when it's a probably-wrong model Keltham sketched out and probably not a description of actual reality. But it is the bleakest possible imagining of the universe, that it's mostly full of entities who'd consider the universe not existing to be among the best possible outcomes, who are set up structurally such that almost everything that could possibly happen is bad and all the good things are worth losing to slightly reduce the chance of bad ones. 

Pharasma and the winning god-coalition destroyed the gods that sided with Rovagug, and she would do the same thing to entities that would side with Rovagug, if she could.

(Probably in some universes Rovagug and the gods that sided with Him won and everything got eaten, and she's not in those universes because they don't exist, and she understands how that counts as triumph for some people, how they might just want to peel more and more Golarions away from the branch where people live and die and love and fight and laugh and cry and squeeze them dead and make the "Golarions eaten" branch of the tree a little thicker. But it's not what she wants.)

Keltham+: Negatively-Skewed Universal Carers don't need to end up wishing that somebody would erase their universes!  Unless they really hate the way that reachable matter is shaped by default, compared to it not existing; but hopefully such beings are few... or configured in such a way that they're not experiencing constant suffering about that; he himself wouldn't want them to be unhappy, though it's not like they themselves need care about "unhappiness".

So long as Reality isn't allowed to end up full of Zon-Kuthons and Asmodeuses and other such utilityfunction pessimizers, most Entities, even Negatively-Skewed ones, could mostly be getting things they want, and not things they hate.

People who feel like Reality loses more when one person gets crushed and tortured, than when ten people lead happy lives, aren't necessarily out to destroy Reality.  If no one is being tortured, there isn't a problem!  (Or rather, if nobody reachable is being tortured, there isn't a problem you can solve by destroying the local universe, and you might as well not think about it or be sad about it either.)

Civilization would have fought to defend itself from destruction, and did fight to defend itself - because while there were possible states of matter that would lose more (compared to a null state of lifeless matter) than the best states of matter would gain, they managed to stop those bad things from happening, and be mostly happy.

That's the grand dream and vision, from the Negative standpoint - that Reality not contain a lot of utilityfunction pessimizers running around and occasionally pessimizing beings with utilityfunctions similar to their own, so that Reality as a whole is something they're still glad to have around.

That's why Pharasma is being given an out.  She doesn't need to have Her Creation destroyed, if She's willing to have it not contain such a large element of utilityfunction pessimization.

Carissa Sevar: That did actually occur to Carissa, or something like it, when she first decided not to betray Keltham and to come to him instead.

She thinks she may have made an error there, but -

- but it seemed to her that Golarion would not, really, endure for the forever she wanted for it, while it had Hell in it, that even if she warned them and they crushed Keltham there would be another like him someday, that the only way for Golarion to endure forever, like she wants it to, was for it to be something large shares of reality didn't want to destroy.

She understood a thing Keltham said on her first day here as a claim that this wasn't true, that he didn't think he was extending Golarion's lifespan in expectation. But - with caution about the mind-states that permit her to help him without being a threat to Pharasma - she does, actually, strongly value the destruction of Hell for that reason and think some substantial risk of destroying the world would be warranted, though by her own preference you'd spend decades exploring other Hell-conquest options first.

Keltham+: It's not a consolation he feels honesty-safe and epistemically-safe about offering her.  That Hell has been allowed to persist this long within Creation (on those hypotheses where all of this is as real as themselves, and not quantitatively much less real than that) is evidence (within those hypotheses) that intervening in Creation is expensive; and only became some combination of affordable+attractive after the death of Aroden lost other hopes, or the shattering of prophecy made it less expensive to act against gods.  It is possible that if this intervention against Pharasma fails, no other will be sent.

Decades seems like quite an unreasonable amount of time for smart people to think.  He'd take that time only if there was sufficient value-of-info; and he didn't expect to slip up, tip off the gods, and get squished, inside of that delay.

It does seem clear enough to him what he is sent here to do.  He's not happy about it; he's a lot less happy about Hell.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa is largely resigned to the fact he is going to try it.  She wants to convince him that only Hell is worth doing it for, and that if he gets Hell but Pharasma is unable or unwilling to change any other things about Creation, then that should be sufficient for him not to prefer the world destroyed. She hopes to narrow the specification further: figure out the actual minimum ask and make sure it's a concession Pharasma can grant if She wants to.

She sees that Keltham isn't going to be willing to not try to destroy the universe. She hates him for this, on some level, but she doesn't predict anything different.

Keltham+: He is, in fact, presently minded to demand of Pharasma that protections be set up to make sure this doesn't happen again.  Among the reasons why he would hesitate to simply press a button and destroy only Hell and Asmodeus, if he could come up with a scheme that he was sufficiently convinced would do that on a first try, is that Pharasma might just build a new Hell, and then take Zon-Kuthon out of the vault and put Him in charge of neo-Hell.

The problem from his perspective is not just Creation as it stands being horrible, but that Creation has no rails against becoming even more horrible in the future if he solves the present horribleness.  It may not be a way that people in Golarion are accustomed to thinking, who have so many problems today that need to be solved right now, but dath ilani try to put systems into states where they will knowably not go bad later instead of just being okay right now.

If Creation isn't knowably on a trajectory that takes it permanently out of being a miserable hellhole, it unfortunately seems to him that his utilityfunction strongly suggests smashing the whole place and letting sentient beings exist elsewhere instead, and the present inhabitants likewise having futures that continue mainly elsewhere.

He's not sure why (earlier?) Carissa expects/expected their continuations to be awful.  His model of Outer Gods and Entities is that the ones which don't care about people will mainly not use matter in a way that involves it being people.

Even the Makers of the Magical Continuum, which very likely don't care about people, aren't taking all of the matter and realityfluid in the Magical Continuum and turning it into unhappy people.  Past-Keltham, possibly, got sent to Golarion because it was a particular kind of intervention that was cheaper to buy from the Makers than anything more sensible; he was not put someplace that would hurt him as much as possible.

He doesn't think that Entities with simulating-eyes on Pharasma's Creation, or who trade with the Makers of the Magical Continuum for information from it, that care about the sentients within it at all, would be trying to continue the people there past the end of Pharasma's Creation with a goal of hurting them.  The ones who care about continuations at all, he would hope, are themselves nice; or trading with Entities that are, in the sum of their goals and auction bids, nice.  If that's not so, he's substantially more peeved with whatever hypothetical Entities sent him here to destroy Creation, and also it seems less probable that caring Entities would want that of him in the first place.

That he is sent here, who will deliver an ultimatum to Pharasma to improve living conditions or be destroyed, is some evidence that he wouldn't have been sent here if the expected result of destroying Creation were to isekai everyone here to worse-than-Hell.  Though of course, the Entities that sent him here could be acting deceptive about that, expecting himself, or Pharasma, to be deceived by the apparent evidence of Their actions.

Carissa Sevar: Safeguards against this ever happening again definitely need to exist, but if they can be negotiated without Pharasma, say among the other gods, then that's preferable to making them part of the Pharasma-ultimatum.  If future disasters are sufficiently unlikely then Creation shouldn't be destroyed just because its laws don't prohibit them, after all dath ilan's laws don't prohibit it either.

She's hoping they can negotiate around what 'sufficiently unlikely' means. For one thing, she thinks Pharasma wouldn't, actually, create another Hell and put Zon-Kuthon in charge of it; that would be a change on a scale that hasn't happened and might not even be possible and that would serve the interests of no existing non-Zon-Kuthon gods and not be consistent with what Pharasma is known to care about. Perhaps Iomedae or Erecura can give better estimates of its plausibility, but it'd be good to know how much implausibility is sufficient for Keltham.