(A stab of agony that he sets aside; it's not as if he was planning, himself, to survive this event as himself; or as if there was any realistic prospect in the first place of getting Carissa back for himself; or even of her living happily ever after as herself.)

Well, Heaven would be making lantern archons stupider and weaker, and that's an awful thing to do, which Carissa will never do. Hurting people is fine; weakening them is wrong.

(He can have her back. But only if he doesn't do this, and she understands why he's going, instead, to do this.)

...would she truly rather get turned into a lantern archon who'll, after that, almost never remember being Carissa, and stay that way forever?  Than end within Creation, and find herself elsewhere, undetectably-to-herself diminished in her reality, mostly in places that would let her become stronger and more herself and learn greater magic and mathematics?  If those were her only two choices and knowably so?

He can't yet feel it, understand it empathically, this choice to exist in places that feel so much worse; only so that some measuring instrument outside of yourself can say, undetectably to you, that there is more realityfluid in you; only so that the little lantern archon you became forever will be more encounterable to other people.

She wouldn't choose the lantern archon over the other world, but she doesn't really buy the premise that there are a lot of people who'll instantiate her elsewhere only if the lantern archon is destroyed, in which case it's better to have both the other world and the being a lantern archon. She doesn't care about what she'll in expectation experience next, compared to where she actually is and what all the hers are experiencing.

Maybe she'd be the kind of brave and impressive lantern archon who grows up into something bigger; maybe she wouldn't, and that'd be sad, but it wouldn't be so sad she'd rather have the space of all existing Carissae just be narrower and smaller and have a big hole in that universe.

He's not saying it's an incoherent utility function, it's definitely a coherent utility function, but he's guessing it wouldn't be most people's utility function without specific prompting in that direction.

...he is concerned over whether she thinks it's fine to hurt the people in Hell, after she takes it over, even if they don't want that, so long as they were bad people in life and the hurting makes them stronger.

....she does actually think it's fine but she understands that many people she'd like to cooperate with disagree, so she won't do it, and she hopes that some of them will see that and correspondingly do less annihilating people. Or that's how she anticipates the god Carissa shaping up.

Many people would rather become lantern archons than be hurt more.  Even if it's because they're weak, and afraid, and too exhausted by the pain they've already felt in their lives; yes, even genuinely evil people, who've dealt hurt to others, can feel that way.  And he would destroy a universe to protect even them, the same way he'd destroy a universe to prevent them from being turned into lantern archons.

There's a lot of gods he may be handing demands to, at the end of this, and it may be that the god CARISSA will be one of those.

She strongly suspects that preferring being a lantern archon, or being annihilated, to being hurt more, is generally a state that makes it also bad for you to hurt you. In a hypothetical where someone felt that way, but actually hurting them would make them healthier and happier and stronger and more whole, she wouldn't think it was wrong; but as she said, she doesn't intend to do it, since a lot of other people feel strongly about that and it's a pretty small share of cases.

It doesn't really have anything to do with them being bad; Hell is and always has been for everyone; that was once a linchpin of her loyalty to it.

A society which doesn't rely on people not being Evil, rather than one that needs them to be Evil.

She's done a better job of talking him into accepting some trades he would not otherwise have been inclined to, than he would have expected, even taking into account how much of himself still loves her.

There's an uncomfortable point to be raised here, which feels like a gotcha, or taking things back.  If Abrogail is not carrying his only child (modulo possibly also Jacint Subirachs and Willa Shilira whom Meritxell also disguised-as), and there are many more others - which he does not currently model as being the case, on the evidence he has, it depends on how hard the story is out to force him into corners - then if he waits to execute their plan, and it turns out he does have other irrevocably ensouled children, that, on his current psychology, affects what level of shit he's willing to accept from Pharasma.

It's one thing to accept that INT 29 Carissa has more rightful guardianship than he of the other life forms in Golarion; that it's her place to defend their interests from his weird extrauniversal morals and intuitions.  He's got a lot of probability mass on the people here not actually being all that real anyways.  He's not sure enough of it to leave them in Hell, but he's not sure they do exist either.

It's another thing entirely to let his own children grow up in a crapsack world, and maybe end up actually as real as himself in a sequel, within either set of possibilities.

....that does strike Carissa as a strong argument for destroying Cheliax before his children might be ensouled, if they determine that those children exist and aren't ready to go ahead with the ascension plan yet. It could perhaps be done without prompting the gods to reassess Keltham as a threat if, instead of Wish wordings they need for the main plan, they use some lesser power out of dath ilan, or get some other countries to invade.

If solutions in that genre are not available, the arks that are meant to survive the destruction of Golarion should be equipped with the resources to resurrect the children and provide them a good life on the ark, and the Church of Iomedae equipped to sweep in, conquer Cheliax, and make it nice if it continues existing.

But crucially, this is not a problem Pharasma is going to be able to solve.

Pharasma probably hates the baby situation; Carissa has been reading up intensely on Pharasma and now infers it to be an ongoing source of annoyance to Her, because babies don't have enough traits to be sorted. If She had a way to fix the baby situation She would have done it. Playing hardball with Her about the babies won't achieve anything, because the babies are a problem Pharasma wants solved, and which will be solved if the universe goes on existing through contraception and so on.

They have to come up with a clever and sufficient plan for protecting all of Keltham's babies which does not involve Pharasma at all, that's all there is to it.

He apologizes for his mental sloppiness in using "Pharasma" as a shorthand to refer to "Pharasma plus the rest of the ancient gods", which he had modeled, high probability but not certainty, to form an effectual coalition with respect to Creation.

+6 intelligence headbands exist, yet industry only started picking up after Aroden's death and the shattering of prophecy.  Interplanetary Teleport exists, but there's no sign that worlds which can produce diamonds more cheaply than spellsilver are trading diamonds for spellsilver with worlds that can produce spellsilver relatively more cheaply.  Axis with very high probability has knowledge they're not allowed to give to Golarion; if Abadaran theology is true, then Abadar has copies of Azlant tech manuals, but isn't allowed to sell those back even to the planet that created it.

He infers massive, ongoing intervention by some divine coalition within Golarion and surrounding planets and planes, with macro goals being effectively pursued.  He puts high probability that this Potent Intervener would be able of delivering some pretty major asks about Golarion, if it wanted, even if Carissa is right that Pharasma can't do it Herself.  He himself puts more probability that Pharasma is just reluctant given inhumanly noninterventionist goals.  But even if that's false, clearly Something exists, some collective, that's able to satisfy goals like "No industry advanced to the point of diamond synthesis, anywhere that prophecy still holds."

It is his strong guess that Pharasma plus the ancient gods have collectively the ability to decide that Creation doesn't need to look like this; decide that mortal industrialization is allowed, not just in Golarion where it's too expensive to stop, but everywhere.  Pharasma plus gods could turn the same efforts that they put into suppressing mortals, to shutting down the most horrible particular elements of Creation, the Nidals and Xovaikains, lest otherwise the world become something that his ascended-Self preferred to not exist, and would destroy.

Or it's possible that even that much positive action from the Divine Coalition / Potent Intervener wouldn't be required, as his thoughts covered before; that if the Good gods didn't need to fight Hell, and the gods stopped actively suppressing mortals, then that would be enough by itself to set Creation predictably on a course to Pharasmin Civilization as would be fine by him.

If it is genuinely actually true that Pharasma and the ancient gods lack the power to, by action or inaction, let Creation not be such a crapsack - then future-him can consider then whether to destroy it.  But he mostly strongly suspects that Pharasma plus the ancient gods have the power to steer the future somewhere else which is not that.

Carissa’s present theory is actually that there’s more industrialization elsewhere in Creation, that Golarion has historically been subject to more meddling because it has Rovagug in the middle of it and industry, going off dath ilan, can give mortals the power to let him out. She doesn’t know anything about whatever civilization sent the thing that crash-landed in Numeria, but Golarion doesn’t have the capabilities to send things across the stars, and that civilization evidently did.

She’s not sure this matters to her very much either way; there are still lots of cool and valuable things happening on planets without industry.

There might've been an over-update on what past-Keltham described as the difficulties of interstellar travel faced by dath ilan inside of non-magical physics, where you don't just have mortal-Aroden doing Interplanetary Teleports all over.  He'd guess that wasn't an industrial spaceship, just one magically hacked together; or a magically star-traveling lifeform from the Dark Tapestry, or some other draw from all-other-possibilities.

Seeding diamonds out of hot 1% methane 99% hydrogen in a zero-gravity space-looped demiplane is much much easier than interstellar travel the hard way, and nobody was selling synthetic diamonds to Efreet in the City of Brass before they got there.  (Unless the Efreet themselves, and not just Efreet trade goods, are partitioned by planet; and the Golarion-trading Efreet can't buy Wish diamonds for even their own use from Efreet who trade with hypothetical industrialized planets; it's possible, but improbable, counterevidence that adds to other counterevidence.)

How does Carissa feel about demands that divinities at least stop actively hindering mortals from making their lives better?  Does this feel like something she's terrified he can't get, will constitute asking for too much, and then Creation ends?

She thinks he shouldn't say 'or I'll destroy the universe' about it? 'or I and my allies won't do any positive-sum trades with you and will consider ourselves in a low-key state of war with you' is fine! That doesn't entail destroying the universe! Carissa will absolutely back him on withdrawing-cooperative-relations from gods that get in the way of mortals making their lives better. She'll back him on trying to assassinate Them!

Carissa agrees wholeheartedly that the gods could probably stop getting in mortals' way, and that getting the gods to stop getting in mortals' way should be the highest conceivable priority. But it is not acceptable to murder trillions of people because it was too hard to achieve, and so the means by which it is achieved cannot be threatening to murder trillions of people. They will simply have to pursue this incredibly important objective in some other fashion, once Hell is destroyed.

Mortals are creative, and prophecy hasn't been gone for long.  She doesn't think the hindering will succeed for long, let alone for forever.

And if, from a godly angle, it looks to him like the hindering will succeed?  If it looks like only Golarion alone will ever be free, unable to liberate anywhere else?  Or if the ancient gods demand Golarion be destroyed, as the price of other bargains?

Those entities are kind of assholes, Carissa.  These are eventualities to be considered.  They obviously don't want mortals getting uppity and, if it turns out They believe They've got a plan for keeping mortals firmly down, should he disagree with Them about that question-of-fact?  If they don't have a plan, like that, if Golarion survives, why wouldn't they demand some arrangement like the deliberate destruction of Golarion?

Why would they not demand every last scrap that she was willing to concede, if she persuaded him to concede it?

They haven't destroyed Golarion yet, despite prophecy being broken there, despite all the headache it has given them. Presumably because Rovagug is contained within.

Destroying Golarion and letting Rovagug out would be, she thinks, a great victory, for those gods who want to keep mortals down, over those gods that don't - and it's not all of them.

She doesn't think it's Abadar. Abadar kind of jumped at letting the mortals build Civilization, even in the face of what he knows is some risk they'll use to destroy themselves. They can ask Erecura, actually, a bunch of her questions for Erecura relate to god-alliances they can offer and join on ascension.

She just wants Keltham to, when he ascends, look around and see which gods he's allied with, and then be allied with them, instead of trying to unilaterally wreck everything.

Already part of the plan once he's legible to the Lawful ones and can do binding logical deals not to have info he provided be used against him.

He'll have unfortunately needed to do a lot of grim work before then, on his best present plan, like destroying Absalom and releasing Rovagug (both as a distraction, and to preemptively defang Asmodeus by placing Him in a situation where he'll fight on the anti-Rovagug side).  But if it were possible to just show the gods how it would go, and have that be credible, and move straight to the negotiated outcome, none of this would be happening inside reality at all.

She doesn't think she can get him to be sure that there's categorically nothing other than Hell worth destroying the world over.

But the system not being fair, fixing it other ways being extremely hard and uncertain - she thinks that actually, humanity would take that, over a high risk of being destroyed, and anyone trying to act on behalf of the mortals inside Pharasma's system would remember that, overwhelmingly, if not facing Hell, mortals don't want to be annihilated, that when slaves they don't want to be annihilated, when prisoners they don't want to be annihilated, that the route ahead being hard and uncertain and unfair is not a problem they solve by dying about it.

From a godly standpoint there'll just be a probability estimate.  Not "the road ahead being hard and uncertain and unfair", just a probability of victory.  If you don't like your thoughts and feelings collapsed into probability estimates, then don't become a Keeper; and the same presumably applies to becoming a god.

Suppose that the probability of fixing the system looks like, say, 0.01%, because the ancient gods will it not so; and They demand of him that he personally scour clean Golarion with antimatter, in exchange of the end of Hell.  Does she bid him then concede?

Certainly it'd be absurd to destroy the universe rather than do it, what with how destroying the universe has all the downsides of doing it and then some. 

And...if that's the price of ending Hell it's a price worth paying. Even she thinks so. 

Depends on whether you think a god-corralled and herded subpopulation of the human race and the sapient kind, as that greater population exists across all the realities, is a positive or negative contribution to the whole.

And it doesn't have to be the price of destroying Hell.  It could be something the ancient gods demand only because they're assholes and Carissa is titanium-bent on conceding them everything they ask.  Why wouldn't they demand it, if he's predictably going to concede to every demand?

The proposal is that he not destroy any universes which are pretty excellent.

Carissa thinks that the universe, without Hell in it, with no other changes, would be pretty excellent, and constitute mortals - not Keltham, maybe, but normal mortals -- having gotten a great deal relative to their alternative of not getting this life at all. She thinks that if you take Hell out of the picture, mortals mostly live interesting and challenging lives, doing things that matter to them, around people who love them, and the ones who hate it could suicide without worrying about Hell; and Carissa, when she catches them, can do whatever they want done for them including sending them to Greater Reality if they want that. The difference between that and the universe not existing is much much much larger than the difference between that and a better universe.

...theory related to this. Dath ilani don't seem happier than Golarionites, and she suspects that some of that is them having bred themselves wrong; but the other obvious theory is that people are pretty much the same amount of happy under a really wide range of situations, and letting Golarion become like dath ilan in wealth levels would be only a small favor to the people in it.

They could run a lottery, if they wanted to test this: if you win, you get 10,000gp, enough to never work again and live in luxury, and if you lose you get fed to daemons. Carissa predicts that basically no one will take this lottery (and the ones who do will be doing it to save sick children or resurrect damned loved ones, not for selfish reasons) and it's the lottery Keltham proposes entering for them as a collective.

He would want to explain about anthropic survival and Greater Reality; and he's not sure he can, even leaving aside the unshareable evidence-from-his-own-perspective of starting in dath ilan and ending up in Golarion.

Carissa spoke of slaves choosing not to die.  The vast majority of those slaves don't have the guarantee of Axis or Elysium, if they died.  Especially if they suicided, as Pharasma defines to be the 'Evil' of murder.  (Another Evil that isn't remotely bad!  Another way to end up in an Evil afterlife without being a bad person!)

But perhaps Carissa is right as a matter of human-variant psychology, that even a slave with the promise of Elysium would still not want to die.  Would this be coherent reasoning?  And not, for example, the result of natural selection against people who took afterlives seriously, who really believed in Hell and didn't have kids, or who took Heaven seriously and sacrificed themselves altruistically against demons?

He remains skeptical about the proposition that clinging to an awful life is something that Golarionites would be selected to really coherently prefer, rather than them just being selected to not-really-anticipate the promised afterlife.  Assuming, of course, that a slave with the promise of Elysium would not just want to go to Elysium like a sane person.  (Further assuming that Elysium doesn't turn you into a cheerful bright glowing ball, which would be another excellent reason to want to stay alive though miserable.)

Mostly, that should be set aside for later experiment; it's the sort of disagreement they might be able to resolve by using Detect Thoughts on a volunteer, at this intelligence level.

But if the Golarion variant of humanity is bred not to really believe in Hell or Elysium, it's probably also impossible for them to really emotionally believe in anything he says about Greater Reality.  Even if they use 15 wishes and a +6 intelligence headband and an Owl's Wisdom to make the underlying arguments understandable.  He supposes that they could find that somebody with that boost would suddenly say, "Oh, wait, what the ass was I thinking, of course I'd rather go to Elysium than be a slave," and then they might be able to coherently process arguments about Greater Reality; but that experimentaloutcome would still undermine Carissa's point.

Carissa expects that for the most part, for most people, there has never been any serious selection at all around ability to think or not think about afterlives, because the overwhelming majority of people are farmers who know only vague legends about the gods that may or may not cohere to anything in particular. Most people who have ever lived probably have no idea if Hell is real, or if it's really very bad, or if Elysium turns them into a strange alien, or if they'd prefer either to nonexistence. (This is testable: they can go ask people in remote villages someplace). The thing Keltham is postulating, selection, where people who thought clearly about the world and realized they didn't want to live in it had fewer offspring, could only possibly have happened among a tiny segment of the population which had any confident knowledge about the afterlives (high-level spellcasters and people who get trustworthy information from them) and the ability to based on that control whether they had children, which most people can only do through lifelong celibacy.

(She does suspect that humans are selected against finding lifelong celibacy easy.)

Furthermore, coherent reasoning is useful for tons of other things that affect whether your children live to adulthood: planning which crops to plant, how much seed corn to hold in reserve, how to interpret signs of a coming storm, how to decide when to flee and when to stand and fight. There is extremely strong selection in favor of coherent reasoning; her best guess as to why everyone isn't ridiculously good at it is that there are some deep physical tradeoffs.

Regardless, she doesn't think this matters. The process by which people arrived at their current reasoning abilities and attitudes about the afterlives aren't relevant to her. The reasoning abilities are relevant and the attitudes, but not the process.

And she doesn't care if they 'emotionally believe' anything Keltham has to say. If they, in fact, told about Greater Reality and about the existing afterlives, want to go to the existing afterlives, then even if this is not what Keltham thinks they should want, or not what he thinks a different person with different abilities would want, it doesn't matter, because they are not Keltham's slave to dispose of as suits him; they should get the thing they actually want, not the thing that Keltham believes they would want if they were bred for or otherwise predisposed to greater coherence.

It really and truly feels to Carissa like it is profound Evil Keltham is describing here, to destroy someone's soul over your own conviction that, while they prefer Heaven to the distribution of outcomes in Greater Reality you described to them (or reject the premise that experiential-thread is what matters), if they were better at reasoning they'd most likely want something else. She just doesn't think it's all right to do that to people, ever; she thinks you'd kind of have to lack some essential human sensibility that dath ilan perhaps bred out of its own population in order to want to.