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

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

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

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

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

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

Probably let them be sad, yes; she thinks it’s actually much better to be sad than to be muddled. And probably she'd let people set to be forcibly cryopreserved choose to be enslaved instead, with an ongoing choice about that, though she understands it to be the case that probably few dath ilani would go for it.

But it also feels to her like…something has gone very wrong to put those things into such tension? One of the ways in which dath ilani are very alien to Carissae is that they would, in fact, be worse off from having a bit more wisdom and noticing an obvious fact about their own minds and desires. It makes it hard to say you'd do anything in particular to make them predict reality better or understand themselves better; after all, it can be stipulated that then they'll be sad. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keltham can take his time. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Call these Locally-Caring Entities.

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

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

Call these Positively-Caring Entities.

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

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

Call these Negatively-Caring Entities.

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

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

The Positives would be slightly sad...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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