"I was - pretty explicitly not trying to be anyone, after I got out of Cheliax.  I'd lost all my girlfriends except Ione who would have been third on my list for emotional support and not on my list for physical intimacy, found out that all my hard work up until that point had made Golarion worse, figured out that Cheliax was holding my prospective child or children hostage, found out about the Boneyard, found out about Hell, didn't decide immediately to destroy Pharasma's Creation but I knew that if I couldn't think of a solution I would have to do that, didn't want -"

"- didn't want, didn't want, never wanted, to hurt anyone -"

"And at Splendour 25 I can, apparently, just bull-rush through letting myself feel some of that, if not all of it, so I have spent a few hours curled up sort of blacking out and not doing anything, and then another few hours letting myself starting to feel some of the more bearable things.  But it is still not clear to me yet that - I want to be a person, here, or would benefit from being one, while I have to do the things I have to do."

"I think I'm made pretty differently from you, but, uh, trying not to feel things and just to do what I'd calculated was correct without letting myself catch up emotionally and while scared to even think....worked really badly, in my case. It'd be a very unusual mind that worked better when half of it was out of commission."

"I am not scared to think.  I at no point during any of this decided to model the world incorrectly.  It's what's wise to let myself feel that's the question."

'scared to think' is about the Cayden Cailean stuff but his reason for being scared to think about it makes perfect sense and aren't emotional in nature and probably it'd be unhelpful to push further on it. "Sorry. 

I really want you to recover yourself and feel things but I think I am motivated in part by hoping if you do that then you won't destroy the universe.... I would still want it if it were magically stipulated not to affect the odds of destroying the universe, though."

"When were you trying not to feel things and calculate and that worked out poorly?  Like... all of your life in Cheliax, or...?"

" - mostly no, actually? Mostly just when you left and we were trying to figure out Project direction and, uh, Aspexia Rugatonn said if it took me killing twenty thousand people to figure out how to make ilani that'd be worth it, and I felt - uh, probably what I felt was basically some part of me noticing that Asmodeanism is incompatible with even a tiny shard of human values - but I ignored it, obviously, and when I was hurting Maillol I didn't want to but I had all these good arguments for why I should, and actually even by my priorities at the time I shouldn't have -

- it's not that my feelings are a perfect guide, I also tortured some people and didn't feel bad about it, but - the feelings were information about my values and ...your values are a dangerous thing to be wrong about while you're trying to do something big and important."

"I suppose.  My values seem not ambiguous or complicated, here, and my assessments didn't shift between before and after I augmented my intelligence."

"As I noticed after I asked the question, I asked it in part to deflect from - you saying you wanted me to recover myself."

"I do not, actually, even now, feel that there is very much point to that.  It became - clear, after I left Cheliax - that the sum of my issues would not let me be happy unless I walked away from all of them and probably resorted to magical mind control to make myself not think about them.  There comes a point beyond which you can't be happy and there's no point in trying.  So I took my augmented intelligence and started trying to roll my own pseudo-Keeper skills, which, obviously, I am not getting right.  Also I suspect that headband Wisdom is another thing that interfaces poorly with dath ilani, or at least, the people here did not seem to know what I was talking about when I asked them if there were methods for handling the thing where staring at your own emotions with +6 Wisdom makes the emotions go away."

"I would have put more relative effort into solving that sort of issue if I had not been trying to - just speed ahead to where this is all over, and hope that, somehow, I'd be able to get back together with Carissa at the end of it."

"Which wish, it seems, will also not be granted."

"....I notice the impulse to say that if you don't destroy the world I will absolutely and happily be yours forever. That sounds like the most doomed romantic relationship conceivable on every level but it is not in fact false."

"I assume you meant to say that about if I don't try to destroy the world, at all, prohibiting also my trying to the point of Cayden showing up and presenting an alternative to destroying the world."

"I'm not sure? One basically reasonable thing a person could say is 'I really like you but I can't get over you trying to kill everyone; we can only be together if you don't try to kill everyone'. But ....I think the thing I'm feeling is more - I want something Keltham really wants to live in the world where he doesn't kill everyone, regardless of how we ended up there. Which is plausibly even more doomed! But it's closer to how I actually feel."

"I didn't understand 'want something Keltham really wants'?"

"Right now, it seems like you are very miserable, and even if the world doesn't end, there isn't anything that you care deeply about that you expect to get to enjoy, in the world that continues existing and doesn't subject you to any personality death.

And - while I suppose this is a rude sort of assumption to make about someone - it feels possible that you wouldn't want to end the world, if you expected to be really and deeply happy if the world kept on existing. Or that you'd have a little more motivation somewhere deep inside you to come up with an alternative, or that you'd be a little more willing to compromise if you were getting most of what you wanted but not all of it. 

That possibility makes me want to offer you anything I possibly can, if the world survives. Not conditional on you not trying to end it - just to say to you, if the world exists, we'll live in Civilization and be happy and I'll be yours forever, there's something worth living for here.

I can imagine Carmin making such a face about this but that's where I'm at."

"Needs to involve people not being in Hell as that basically exists now, better childcare in the Boneyard, some protected landing areas in the Abyss and Maelstrom, and neither of us needing to be a god..."

"Ironically enough, if we get an ending like that, it will imply further things about - what happens to people like me, after we die in plane crashes - such that, in fact, destroying everybody in the multiverse would have probably sent them to pretty safe destinations on average."

"Two of the items to argue on my items to argue list are 'will technological development fix the Boneyard situation anyway inside a century' and 'are the Abyss and Maelstrom actually bad enough to defensibly risk the multiverse over if Hell is fixed.' But I don't know if we're moving on to that conversation yet, or if there's - more personal stuff to argue first -"

"I'm finding myself wanting to back up from - what potentially sounds like a promise, or an offer, that we could be happy together under sufficiently optimistic circumstances - because I don't know whether you think you'd just, actually be happy, or if you're offering to sign yourself back over to me and let me use mind-control on you if I want you to be happy, or if it's the second thing but actually that's just how your sexuality rolls... how much of that was reality?"

"I'd be really surprised if mind control was needed but am not intending to say 'by any means short of mind control' or something, if we have to use mind control to make it work we can do that." She can see Carmin's face in front of her going "wow! no! let's back up!" but she's not in fact going to retract that, not at all, not if this in fact helps Keltham think about the world as something he might want to live in. 

"I - told you the truth about how my sexuality works, except I think actually there's something about what you were doing which a Chelish person in your place would not have been doing which was in fact an important ingredient of it being good for me rather than just not hard for me to endure. And I do think that probably my not really having a sense of who I am as a person would play badly with belonging to someone else but that solves itself inside a year, I'm not expecting to need that long to figure out who I am as a person. - I want to travel the world. Read the histories in lots of different countries. Talk to people. Visit the Outer Planes too, talk to people there. Figure out which of them are - ways a Carissa might turn out - and what I want to do about that."

"Sounds nice.  I ended up in an entirely different universe and never got to explore very much of it at all.  Not a lot of different scenery programmed in the game, apparently."

"There's an angry thing I need to get out of the way - not about exploring, about the whole, destroying the multiverse thing.  Even if it's unwise, I think I should say it before we talk multiversal destruction, so it's not just running through my brain over and over."

- nod.

"You were emotionally loud at me about how much you think it's not okay to destroy the multiverse.  As I understand Golarion rules for political debate, I'm supposed to be loud back at you about people in Hell who are too broken now, in too much pain, for them to pray to me, or anyone, for rescue.  About infants who wake up in the Boneyard and cry for their parents and nobody comes for them until some feral older toddler bites off their hand and then they heal because that's how the Boneyard works, and they grow up like that too and go to the Abyss and then cease to exist locally and, I hope, end up somewhere with good psychiatric rehabilitation."

"If I don't come with a good, persuasive, loud emotional response like that, then, as I understand the rules for Golarion discourse, I've lost the argument.  Possibly the person who made an angry argument and didn't get an angry counterargument feels that they've definitely won the debate, there, even if the other person is unreasonably not changing course despite having lost so badly."

"I want you to imagine that you are the villain in control of everything, and that I am the protagonist who has to steer reality only by persuading you.  Imagine that I, the protagonist, come in here being very emotionally loud at you about how dare you not destroy the multiverse when there's somebody on fire in Avernus right now and it's maybe not too late to send them on to their next reality while there's still something left, if we work fast enough."

"Imagine that you don't say back anything at high voice volume and emotionally loud, about the importance of people getting to live, back at me.  You just state that the importance of people getting to continue existing is the deciding factor according to your own utilityfunction."

"What are you feeling when you decline to respond to my emotional loudness with more emotional loudness of your own?"

"If I imagine that person, I mostly feel...sorry for them that they're missing so much, that there's so much human value it seems like they can't understand? But presumably I'd have a script for responding to this, if it comes up regularly, and that'd - shape my feelings about it - like, I'd know what response actually helped get through to people like that, or at least have - guesses I was curious about? I guess I might be annoyed, if they'd interrupted something important?"

"Right, well, what I feel is something like, I am having to be the adult here, I am doing the emotional work here.  While it might under other circumstances be searingly annoying that the other person might think they'd won the argument, having the deciding power would make up for that, so what I would actually be wondering about was why they were trying something so ineffective as being indignant at me, when I could not plausibly be persuaded by that, about this issue they seemed to feel was important.  I would think they were probably just, acting out their own emotions, by reflex.  Saying that I would feel dismissive about it, would not be wrong."

"I am not saying that you cannot have and express feelings about how much you don't want the multiverse destroyed.  Expressing them indignantly, at me, as if I shared your background assumptions and just needed to be shown the self-evident truth, acting out those emotions at me -"

"It's not particularly likely to work on me.  I make only that argument and no others, because I think it is the part that you, by your own principles, ought to care about.  It won't work.  It will hinder you in what you say is your purpose."

"The part I feel 'shouldness' about, I suppose, is that two dath ilani, no matter how extreme the situation they were in, would never do that to each other.  That's why they'd be able to continue, trading, working together, maybe even not hating each other, even if they had an unresolvable difference of utility.  Clearly everybody in this planet ought to behave that way, the way I think they should behave.  When the universe doesn't behave like that, it's doing so to personally hurt me and I should yell at it, and you, in this case, are being the universe, so I am yelling."

"- I think I wouldn't find an argument at all less persuasive because it was emotional? Like, it it were an argument we should destroy the world it still wouldn't move me because that is really really overdetermined as a horrible idea, but I wouldn't feel any differently about the person who came in to yell about it and the person who came in to calmly ask about it, and therefore wouldn't really be more confused about the emotional person than the calm one, except insofar as in Chelish terms being unable to conceal your emotions means you're weak and contemptible."

"I have to say that if this was otherwise a nice planet that should absolutely not be destroyed, and some ill-advised people were doobling along doing something that would destroy it, like an ill-advised Wish spell; and this wasn't even a values difference, such that they did share all my emotions and could theoretically be persuaded by those; I would still not just start screaming at them, about all the people explicitly asking not to be killed, and all the children who didn't want to be killed, and all the waiting souls in cryonic suspension who'd trusted themselves to the Future, and how so many people had happy lives that ought not be destroyed and the Future would be even more full of happy lives that shouldn't be destroyed.  I would still, even in that case, expect that getting emotional at them would not actually work."

"...maybe this isn't the important thing and we should move on.  I got to say the angry thing, you heard it, and if that's not enough then too bad for me."