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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.)

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.

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 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.

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. 

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 -

- 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 was possible or that it could reach this level - 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.

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.

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 -

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.)

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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.) 

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.

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. 

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 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.