If he agrees with leaving Heaven versus Greater Reality to the individual then they might just...agree? Carissa doesn't think she is reasoning in deontological-rules, she's not sure how those fit into Carissa-values and they may not at all, she's mostly just thinking in terms of civilizations-she'd-want-to-preemptively-cryopreserve-or-not.

She thinks that as much as she hates it, Keltham is at least maybe-right about Hell, and she's just scared that because Keltham doesn't think anyone else is reasoning clearly he will make tradeoffs between non-Hell places and Greater Reality which aren't, in fact, those they'd make.

Yay for apparent-possible-progress-pending-further-discussion+toward-agreement, then!  But not to overpromise progress, he's worried for trope-based reasons that, after they have a few more days to mentally pursue this debate, they won't end up actually agreeing about the expected value of Greater Reality to people vs. "any living standards higher than literally Hell".

In particular, he's worried for trope-based reasons that the real heart of the disagreement between himself and Carissa will turn out to be that past-Keltham experienced his True Death and continuation elsewhere, and now remembers apparently direct confirmation of isekai-immortality being what truedying people actually experience.  That evidence centers on his self-observation and his update off finding himself to be this self rather than somebody else: noticing himself to be somebody who remembers beginning in a simpler more real world and truedying there and continuing in a less real one.  From the standpoint of somebody else watching past-Keltham get copied out of dath ilan, they haven't made that same observation, and it's fundamentally unshareable with them.

The famous central difficulty of writing a romance novel is finding a conflict that can't be resolved immediately through clear communication and emotional maturity; nobody wants to read a romance novel about silly people ignoring obvious solutions.  Anthropically unshareable evidence is one way of providing a romantic obstacle like that.

It would not have occurred to Carissa to complain that among the problems with their relationship were that they didn't have enough genuine non-manufactured conflict.

In fact she can't think of a single romance she's ever encountered in which that was the problem! Any two people naturally have irreconciliable differences as a product of the one of them selfishly optimizing for their own interests and the other selfishly optimizing for their own - okay now that she completes that sentence she can see how in dath ilan that would not describe the plot of many romance novels.

But the unshared evidence thing does seem like it might arise. Carissa does not really think that in an important sense the thing that happens, if you truedie is you waking up somewhere else; someone might make a copy of you somewhere else, which is good of them, and if you truedie enough places then on that planet, the copy might have the experience of truedying and finding itself on a planet that likes making copies of dead people from elsewhere. And she grants that she ought to care about exact copies of herself as much as about herself. But the intuitions from instead-you-wake-in-a-nearby-universe-where-you-didn't-truedie and instead-your-experiential-thread-usually-dwindles-slowly-enough-there's-nothing-to-continue suggest to her that she doesn't think 'you wake up in Greater Reality when you die' is the right way to think about it, even if it or something like it did happen to Keltham this time from his perspective.

Still viewing the conversational stack from a step back, they shouldn't be trying to fully-resolve this now unless it looks like it can be fully-resolved quickly.  The important thing in this conversation is to get an overview of the things that might form an obstacle to cooperation and kept oaths between them, going forwards.

The critical question here is: what happens if the plot successfully places the two of them in an epistemic Cooperation-Defection Dilemma, where rather than the two of them just having different goals, Carissa believes that he is mistaken about what happens when people greatly diminish in reality / get deleted from the universes that contained most of their instantiatedness; and conversely he thinks Carissa is mistaken about him being mistaken.  (This is the thing that's hard to do to a romance between INT 29 people who know about agreement theorems (as she soon will), unless the plot throws anthropics into it or something equally overclever; which is why he worries about overclever tropes.)

In this case, Carissa could end up believing that to play 'Defect' against him would be to serve even his own goals, better than her Cooperating would serve them.  Betraying him might seem like a friendly act, an act of aid.

(The classic presentation of this situation to dath ilani children supposes two 12-year-olds on an island otherwise full of 9-year-olds, and they're all facing a contagious disease:

The two 12-year-olds disagree about which disease it probably is.

The 9-year-olds collectively have enough resource that they can take thorough precautions against one disease, or 80%-effective sloppy precautions against both diseases.

Either 12-year-old could sabotage the other by waiting for them both to present their case, and then telling the 9-year-olds all the reasons why they're sure the other 12-year-old is wrong, in which case the 9-year-olds will take 99%-effective precautions against that disease only.

If both 12-year-olds Defect in that way, the 9-year-olds will be dispirited and only take 20%-effortful 50%-effective precautions against both diseases.

These two agents both have the same altruistic goal - to save as many of the people on the island as possible - but their believed Cooperation-Defection payoff matrix has the classic ordering of the Dilemma:  DC > CC > DD > CD.)

Carissa is, actually, pretty sure at this point that she is going to be a Lawful god; she wishes she had retained the option to betray Keltham to Otolmens, but she does not actually intend to do so, having not retained that option. That logic does not, to her, feel specific to whether she would be betraying Keltham for his own good or for the good of every other person in the world.

Yeah, he figured, but wanted to check explicitly.

Okay to shift discussion to continue a previous topic up the stack?

Yes. And she noticed he asked and will try to do the same if she's changing topics, though on the set of norms more familiar to her you just change topics and the other person can object if they object.

That sure is an impressively low amount of meta!  He's not sure he wants to go that low on meta.  Their conversation has been sorta uncontrolled, not really by his past-self's standards for arguing something complicated with a friend over a meal, but definitely by the standards of Very Serious People in dath ilan trying to use two people's intelligence in a coordinated way.  Though his guess made at the start of the mental meeting, and still held by him now, is that their time is still mostly better spent on mostly not-meta, due to their lack of mutually established protocols for meta, which is why his current meta-meta strategy is to do only very brief metas like that one he just did.  But you can still, like, briefly meta-think about whether it's okay to change topics or if the other person was still in the middle of thinking.

Carissa is going to go even less meta and just make an exasperated face at him.

(His body, back in reality, takes a half-round to breathe, for a moment, before falling back into the debate.)

Back up-thread, he mentioned how, from the inferred pre-prophecy-shattering suppression of industry in Golarion, he further adduces a Potent Intervener, probably a Divine Coalition.

One of his background guesses that this Potent Intervener is mostly coextensive and maybe cointensive with the Rovagug Coalition, the gods which cooperated to seal Rovagug, and could by different choices, then or perhaps now, release Rovagug instead.

As he mentioned earlier to mid-Carissa, but considers an important aspect of his model and worth reviewing now:

It is his further guess that every ancient god who participated in sealing Rovagug, did so as part of an agreement that Creation wouldn't be allowed to fall below their own value-of-nonexistence plus fair-share-of-trade-gain-for-not-that.  It may be more of an ongoingly tense treaty than a logically-verified binding bargain, since some Chaotic gods participated; when Dou-Bral was flipped to Zon-Kuthon, it's not clear that past that point the world was maintained in a state-at-least-minimally-pleasing to Dou-Bral.

Creation, on his model, has always been maintained in a state guaranteed to be satisfactory to those ancient gods who'd have the power to destroy it otherwise, and only those ancient gods.  That's just how Pharasma does business, or how the Divine Coalition does business.

Sarenrae may not maximally like this current state of affairs, but it contains enough redemption and healing that She prefers it to nonexistence.  He does, in fact, worry that Sarenrae is maybe a Positive entity, who might think that 10 people in Hell plus 1 person being redeemed and healed in Nirvana, is a net gain over all 11 of them having never been.  Gozreh and Calistria and Dahak may all think Creation could stand to be better; but none of them would prefer it not exist, and probably by a substantial and comfortable margin (though of that he is less sure).

Mortals have not been invited to that bargaining table, on his model, because they lack the power to destroy Creation.  He's worried that mortals can't get a fair share without being one of the Powers that can otherwise destroy Creation.

His plan from the beginning was simply to put his own lethal grip around Creation's throat, and then if Anyone happens to prefer Creation to go on existing, They can invite him to take a seat and bargain for the world to look okay to mortals too, and not just to ancient gods.  The gods themselves, on his model, chose to make that power the qualifier for listening to any being's pleading; they shouldn't complain, and he doesn't actually think they will complain, and if they do complain then everyone can take their batna and end Creation.

Carissa thinks that she just... rejects that frame, which Keltham likes to think in, for contemplating what he is doing.

Carissa does not actually feel that there is any unfairness in the fact that the entities who sealed Rovagug got more of what they wanted than entities which showed up much later and didn't seal Rovagug. That seems entirely fair to her. She doesn't think that "I'll help seal Rovagug, if you do X once Rovagug is sealed" is at all the same kind of conduct as "I'll destroy the world, if you don't do X which makes me not want to" -- a Carissa, obviously, would have helped seal Rovagug without conditions, but she's happy to work with entities of the first type and fundamentally thinks the second ought to be preemptively cryopreserved for everyone else's protection. And while if someone ELSE went and released Rovagug this week she would be willing to make concessions to get Keltham to help her fight him, they'd be concessions to Keltham's wants, not to mortals' wants, and it's another thing entirely to say that he should himself get the rewards of having fought Rovagug if he didn't.

Carissa thinks that mortals have more of a seat at the table in Sarenrae's values, or Shelyn's, or Desna's, or Shizuru's, than in Keltham's; she thinks that those gods have something closer to the median values of a mortal in Golarion than Keltham does. She thinks that dath ilani morality is - askew in important respects from human values which make Keltham a particularly bad representative of humanity.

Dath ilani mostly are easy to get to no longer want to live. Golarionites aren't. Dath ilani mostly experience cognitive enhancement as personality death. Golarionites don't. Dath ilani mostly think about morality in precise theoretical terms borrowed from bargaining - fair shares, what mortals would have had if they'd helped seal Rovagug - and Golarionites don't. dath ilani don't seem to have the same care for tradition and history that Golarionites have. None of the things Keltham is saying are Golarionite things. He does not represent Golarionite values, and his having power would not make the world more of one in which Golarionite values, especially the extremely common Golarionite value of not being annihilated, would be represented.

Keltham is another alien entity who wants to destroy the world if it doesn't meet with his approval, and he is not an alien entity whose wants actually serve the people whose lives he is toying with. 

That Carissan take is kinda the only reason besides sheer lingering attachment to Carissa, for why he's considering throwing Golarion mortals under the tractor-wheels at all; that she, who'd be Lawful Evil goddess of Hell, does claim to be more their protector and to speak for them, than could he of dath ilan, and does most earnestly tell him that they're fine with their crapsack world.  He doesn't really believe her right now, but it shifts him some, and there are some experiments they can do to learn a little more.

It's a harder sell if some of the people in there are his kids.

Whether any of them are, is undetermined; but if it becomes this much of a factor, he'll want to probe Cheliax about it, and eat the added risk of imminent Cheliax attack if Cheliax notices the probes.

And if he does have that many kids - would Carissa rather he move now, when they're not ready, or would she rather he make more stringent demands of Pharasma?  He's... really not happy about the concept of destroying Cheliax just to buy a couple more weeks of time, and there'd be the chance they'd have moved some of his kids outside Cheliax.  It would - just read to him like a stronger story-prompt/prompt-from-above to shut up, stop trying to wiggle out of things, act with alacrity before he has to destroy Cheliax.

Or maybe a prompt/nudge/demand not to let this stay a crapsack world, not to yield so much in negotiations, to hold it to the standard of a worthy place for his children to grow up.

- she thinks she'd rather they move early, if those are the only two choices, but she needs to think very carefully, if that's the tradeoff. She thinks that if Keltham is ascending with substantial intent to bargain for much more than Hell, then probably they lose. Her best read of the trope-logic is that in this story, if they can't compromise, they lose everything and everyone dies. The forces arranging this are not, in her read of them, pushing for "Keltham boldly demands, and gets, everything he wanted" - if that would have worked, it would've worked without Carissa carefully engineered to be at his side. The reason she's here has to be because otherwise he asks for too much and loses.

He hardly needs to be reminded that Pharasma might refuse a demand and then he'll need to destroy Creation.  He is always forcing himself to reason as if Pharasma will reject all demands and the question is which universes he then wants to destroy.  If a trope-sign that Pharasma might not yield to him, changes his demands, it means he's fucking that up, and Pharasma would refuse that demand in any case.

And while he knows that Carissa hates it when he thinks like he's in a story, for the record, he does in fact hate being in a story.

Carissa is again too busy not having emotions to bond with Keltham over their common loathing of being in a story but wishes to do the social handshake that would correspond to.

(Correct format for communicating with him, helpful explicit metadata annotation; social handshake acknowledged.)

One of the major factors he's worried about is that the state of the romance between them is trashed in a way that - wouldn't correspond to being on track for the Good Ending of a dath ilani eroLARP, or of a story based on deconstructing one.  Which may nicely mean they're off the story rails, in some important sense, but may non-nicely mean they have no guardrails either.  What he and Carissa were meant to be, together - was probably not this, that they have come to.  Or maybe the tropes governing these events are just not what they would be in dath ilan.  Or they are headed for some upset that lets them be together after all - but he mostly doesn't believe that, the wounds between them look too deep.

Her hypothesis may still be - a valid inference about what Keltham and Carissa were meant to have been.

Well, there could always just not exist the kids he's afraid of.  He mostly thinks they won't be there.  Not least because, if those possible kids are actual, it undoes a lot of what Carissa seems to have accomplished inside the story.  Probably she slays Abrogail Thrune and his one unborn child and that's, enough.

(His body seems to want to cry, about that; he's not sure they have that kind of relationship any more, to cry in front of her, and he is mostly inclined to not let his body do it.  "Tears and hugs don't solve anything," goes a proverb out of dath ilan, "so don't offer them to people who need solutions.")

Carissa observes that if they need to have repaired their romantic relationship to get a good ending, then possibly they should take steps towards doing that, now that they're smart enough they probably won't just emotionally shred each other every few seconds. She is not herself convinced of a framework in which they're - supposed to be in love, supposed to be together, as opposed to just having been cynically engineered into a position where he would listen to her and she would have learned from him how to figure out what she actually wants. There's no reason, she thinks, that the story-writers would engineer a happy ending for the two of them being part of a happy ending for the world; in many stories, they'd have to pick which one they really wanted.

She doesn't mind if he cries in front of her, though she's still not really having emotions and so is unlikely to naturally-rather-than-deliberately respond in the way he might be hoping for. She could scoot over to him, and hold him, and weep with him, but, well, it would be on purpose because maybe tears and hugs do actually solve problems related to being in a story.

Yeah, he's pretty sure that doesn't work tropewise.  Not if the tropes here are anything like dath ilani, and if they're that alien from it then who knows the sign of anything.  Trying to just patch things over, force things over, because the two of them think the story needs it, is not a romantic victory.

He hopes that this all works out to his trusting Carissa; and that she knows how to scan Cheliax, in a way that doesn't give too much away, but shows whether or not they tried to steal children from him and hide them; and that the scan of Cheliax turns up negative, so that Carissa gets to hold on to the small triumph she has, that was all he found himself able to give her, and the meaning she thinks she has in this story.

If the story seizes that from her, it won't be a good sign about the kind of plot arc they're inside now.

Carissa thinks that Keltham is, perhaps, not directing his own intelligence sufficiently at the problem of making things go well for his children, if they exist. She has seen him apply his full creativity to problems, and usually when he does there's a brilliant sideways solution there, not just a well of despair and impossibility.

Would it be sufficient if they just pay Heaven and Nirvana to adopt every Golarion child in the Boneyard and raise them all in ilani-acceptable ways. They can't do it sustainably but they could do it for one cohort.

...he'd probably want his kids going to Elysium, or maybe just delete the souls before they actually have qualia, but - okay, yeah, she has a point, if he can identify his kids from a divine vantage point, or anyone trustworthy can, he can optimize for them specifically.

...it continues to feel to him that this would be wrong, if he did that, that you can't ask special treatment for your own kids and leave everyone else's kids to rot in Golarion's misery.  That the point of throwing Suddenly Kids into the story would be to force him to realize that everyone in Creation is somebody's child, that everyone in Creation deserves better than the negotiating-equilibrium of Pharasma plus the ancient gods deemed fit to leave them.

But she has proven a point that he's obviously not thinking about this clearly, that he's still running the wrong adaptive-pattern-shapes for directing his thoughts.  Scanning through everything and rewiring himself is not going to be instantaneous, especially when he's got to juggle not being extortionate through a modified self as proxy.

The instinct, in him, that it'd be wrong if he did that, feels like a recognizable parallel of Carissa's feelings, earlier, that there was no point in putting her family on an ark in Elysium. She thinks he was right about that one.

Oh, he'd absolutely have his putative kids sent to Elysium, the question is just how he ought to feel about everyone else's kids after that.

Carissa doesn't herself have children. She wanted to, but it wasn't quite time -

- no, that's not it. She was worried she'd care about them, and that seemed like a liability, so she was going to wait until she got monetary incentives, and was then doing it for totally mercenary reasons.

She wasn't accustomed to thinking about - doing other people kindnesses you can't call in on them - so it didn't occur to her to think about whether by having the kids she would be doing them a favor. If she had she'd have had them sooner, because - because obviously getting to be born into Golarion is a favor? A whole glorious shining world, with dirt and water and sky and gossip and magic and impossible dreams -

It's not perfect, not yet, but they're working on it, and not everyone wants to be born somewhere perfect, some people want to be part of the work of getting there -

- if Keltham is right, they'll have all of eternity to live in universes which are in fixed states, ruled by vast entities that make sure nothing goes too awfully wrong. And they'll have only this brief beautiful instant, to live in a universe that needs fixing.

She is sad, that she was too scared of caring about other people to give some children that.

Well, to be exact, he'll have his kids sent to Elysium if he can't otherwise negotiate a Golarion where they'd be okay living, with a sufficiently high probability of being fixable if they try...

This unfortunately feels a lot like his emotions-rather-than-abstractions were going along with Carissa's suggestions because the people in Creation were aliens and maybe not all that real, whereas his kids would be real and have actual feelings and ought not to be condemned to a Carissa-acceptable world... he will have to track down the difference between his Sys1 and Sys2 here, it is not something he can do in an instant.

There is something here that his emotions are not easily willing to let go.  He will have to think about what it means.  And whether it ought to be extended beyond his own children to Golarion-variant humanity or if it's specifically about heritable dath ilani emotional makeup, and whether he is willing to destroy Creation about whatever this is.

He should learn more of other species, if their psychologies are different enough to notice.  Maybe he'd demand that humanity be removed from Creation, but dwarves would be fine to go on having children that gods will keep as cattle or pets and never permit a true Civilization.  Does Carissa have a take on that?