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. 

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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. 

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 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. 

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 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.)

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’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?

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.

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.

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 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. 

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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 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.