"Well, you had your version of the Rovagug problem and we had ours."

"And - I'm sort of not getting the 'exist less' part?  If you offered to suddenly inject a bunch of realityfluid into me and have me exist five times as much for the next week, I wouldn't be particularly excited about that because, from my perspective, it wouldn't feel like anything to exist more.  It's not like getting to go on an additional date with you, it's like going on the same date but there's five times as much of it."

"If a Keltham has such a thing as a natural lifespan, even in a world with souls and the chance of godhood, it's determined by how much time he can spend being Keltham before he gets tired of that.  Why spend that limited time you have to be yourself, before you have to move on and become somebody different, experiencing not having fun?"

"Also in a certain pragmatic sense, if you're going to live for billions of years before the stars burn out - and then, I guess, move on from there by death-travel, after your universe gets cold - are you really existing that much less, if you skip over a couple of unhappy decades to get to the Future a few centuries later?"

"...maybe I've just never not been having fun but that doesn't sound right, somehow. I - think I won't get tired of being Carissa, and if that's a failure of imagination I'd get tired of being Carissa once I've explored all the states Carissa can be in, including the ones which aren't fun, and learned all the things I can learn from them, and grown all the ways they opened up to grow in, and so time not having fun isn't stealing from time that is. 

...and I guess if my lifespan is infinite it makes no sense to be defensive of any specific decade but I guess I - don't feel sure enough it's definitely infinite to stop clinging?"

And -

Can someone ask Snack Service whether it serves Asmodeus for me to try to explain the interaction where I tried to dare Abrogail to torture me until I wanted to die. 

This feels ridiculous but also she's pretty sure it's the right question to ask and the right person to ask it of.

"Snack service says that this isn't one of the points where it has instructions about which rounded rectangle to select."

"I have no idea what that means either."

That's upsetting and she'll process it later.

"I have a potentially relevant thought but it's about Abrogail and something I otherwise might not have told you for many more months. Yes or no?"

"Maybe - not for now.  I feel like I'm pushing around as fast as I should be pushing, on my sadism and Evil, and we did want to put some governors on how emotional our cuddleroom conversations end up."

"Mmmkay. 

The reason your Rovagug cultists strike me as more horrible than ours is that ours didn't have children they thought would be - broken like them and not want to exist, on purpose. Which seems worse than just being excessively Good and thinking you should do all existing people the favor of destroying them, not that that isn't quite bad."

"They weren't having fun themselves, but they considered the prospect of Civilization growing to colonize other stars, and eventually disassemble other stars for raw materials, and there being trillions and quadrillions and septillions of people having fun, to be a much more horrifying problem."

"They said their children would understand and agree with them that it'd been worth the disutility of bringing them into existence, so that they could take up the vital cause of exterminating all life before it was too late and the universe ended up with sentient life all over the place."

"Which, you know, it's sloppy generalization, and a generally invalid form of argument to say that you could've solved a problem using a particular heuristic, and therefore that heuristic must be right across all cases."

"But still, one would've preferred them to go with the heuristic of people not having a duty to stick around where they're not being happy."

" - or the heuristic of just doing what you actually want and not being Good but I guess I can see why dath ilan doesn't want to tell people to adopt that one."

Shiver. 

"Existing is great and it feels like this is some kind of fact I could explain if I found the right metaphor even though it can't possibly be."

"Yeah, I think that's just the utilityfunction, probably, in the end.  We're not coherent and we don't know what our values are, we can learn facts and arguments that change what it is we think we want and even what it is that we actually want, but - all of that is ultimately inside a framework that you're born with, that can never become known to you - and there was a very long and very hard-fought argument inside Civilization, between the 'negative utilitarians' and everyone else, before both sides came to accept that the other side wasn't making a mistake.  The negative utilitarians didn't want conscious life colonizing the universe, if that meant running a risk that people in any significant numbers would ever feel any amount of pain and unhappiness, even a small amount.  That was, so far as anyone could tell, just their utilityfunction and their framework they'd been born with.  If it'd been a question of the very smart people coming up with the right argument to talk them out of it - everything would have been simpler and much much less creepy."

"This is all before I was born, by the way, but an endlessly famous part of history because it's, like, one of the greatest moral stress-tests that Civilization was ever subjected to, and it generated so much drama, and the way it ended sure did not help."

"It sounds creepy. And - terrifying, for all the people who thought that faction might win and murder them all -"

"I doubt that was ever in the cards.  I don't think the people of Civilization would've let all intelligent life be ended over their commitment to democracy.  I don't know whether you'd call that Good, or Evil, or Lawful, or Chaotic, in Golarion's system, but it is - who they are."

"The threat that the negative utilitarians held against Civilization was that Civilization would have to put aside democracy to stop them, if they just played out the game the obvious way that was there for them to play it to end all life.  That was - their negotiating leverage, that Civilization could either give up on its system of law and property to stop them, or bargain with them that nobody would ever be allowed to suffer in the future, not even the smallest bit of pain."

"The Keepers took a third alternative and, yes, incredibly incredibly creepy, but nobody called them out on it being wrong, given that it was apparently an option."

"I mean, if they just explained to them that there's life everywhere and Civilization seems way more concerned than most of the rest of it with avoiding suffering, then that's not even very creepy except for how it's secret. 

I hope they didn't - commit Civilization to try to stop other Civilizations that have more pain in them because of having different kinds of people, who want it and grow from it."

"There's not life everywhere in dath ilan's universe.  Calculations suggest the nearest aliens are half a billion, two billion years away by the fastest you can travel in a non-magical universe, which is the speed of light, which is around... uh, three hundred million yards per second very loose figures in Golarion units."

"But if you're going to be Good at all why limit yourself to caring about one universe?"

"Can't see and touch the other ones by any known possible means."

" - maybe I'm thinking about this wrong, I'm not Good and haven't worked through it much, but - if I think there are only a thousand people, and that it'd be better if they didn't go turn into a billion people, so you kill them all, that's one thing. But if there are infinite people, and there's a group of a thousand of them that's going to turn into a billion, and you kill them to prevent that, and there's still infinite people, that - seems even stupider."

"Our cuddleroom conversation is literally getting into anthropics at this point, but I'm a finite fraction of everything that exists, you're a finite fraction of everything that exists, if we were an infinitely tiny fraction we'd be somebody else instead."

"I'm no doubt a much tinier fraction now than when I got on the airplane.  This does not bother me."

" - that would definitely bother me! It sounds like you're saying - it's not bad to be murdered if the murderer first spins a coin and only murders you if it comes up heads - but it definitely still seems bad."

"You're probably like two trillion times less real than my last girlfriend."

"And I would like to be more real than that. I might not know how to get it but I still care about it."

"Think your three options here are to create a lot of copies of yourself, become a god, or investigate whatever weird disturbing options Golarion might have on offer in the foundations of its reality if those have any cracks or flaws."

"Three seems risky. But one and two are both appealing, once I know how to pull them off."

"I have straight-up never gotten the thing where some people say they want there to be more copies of themselves, which I guess is good, because otherwise I'd be incredibly sad about however much of my reality I lost in the plane crash."

"It seems like only part of it being good by my values that I exist is that this specific thread of consciousness gets to experience existing and the other part of it is some other thing to do with charactistically-Carissa thoughts and experiences happening, and the other thing is more satisfied if I exist more. But I will admit I haven't thought about this much.

That said I'd have a hard time being sad about the plane crash or about existing two trillion times less than your last girlfriend, because - that wouldn't change it any -"

"Does it make a difference if I say that my last girlfriend wasn't a wizard, wasn't a masochist, would not have been as difficult to injure by biting, lived in a world where Spellcraft didn't exist, and all of these things are because she was so much more real than you or I am now?  Would you become two trillion times more real at the price of your magic?"