"Unfortunately I don't know how to test any of it. And it has implications, right? If every possible series of events can happen, does that affect what it means to try to accomplish anything? If writing about a series of events makes them happen, or makes them happen more often, or something, then everyone should stop writing dystopias, or only write dystopias with ridiculous plot holes or something, and make sure to mention in all their fictional settings that everyone goes to a nice afterlife. If writing with plot holes actually causes the timelines of other universes to be inconsistent that's a different kind of horrible. I've been ignoring all of this stuff in favor of trying to fix the thing where demons are invading the material plane, but a time-pausing bar with every book ever written and a door that people from any universe could walk in through is a good opportunity to investigate this if anything is."

He nods along, then says, "So that makes sense as far as it goes, but I'm in a universe where Tom Riddle is a high school student. And so are the Pevensies, from the Chronicles of Narnia. And so is Tintin from the Adventures of Tintin. And before I became a Mary Sue, my life didn't have a plot. It was just a life. There was just stuff that happened. Now it definitely does have a plot. I think... there's some difference, here, a qualitative difference maybe, between universes that are—fictional versus not. Or maybe it's not qualitative? Maybe universes can be more or less fictional with respect to each other, somehow?

"And also, there's..."

"...give me a second to hide behind the bar."

She pointedly avoids looking at him while he's hiding. Instead she looks at the exploding stars and thinks about anthropics and infinite Brendas taking infinite samples from an infinite distribution of realities, while being natively smarter than your unfortunate narrator and wearing a +6 INT headband on top of that.

So he takes an unobserved moment to himself and...

"Okay so I remember you took the mental immunity suite but I don't know if that means you'll immediately know what changed here or if I'll need to tell you to pay attention to your eyes and not your brain when looking at me now."

"Woah, who did you Dragon Fairy Elf Witch for that?"

"No one, this is an anime character called Astolfo from my Earth. When I was designing my femsona while talking to the notebook I kept having him in mind and then when I finally accepted the powers and appeared here this was what I was looking like. Which I thought was hilarious. But it... with the Pevensies and Riddle and Tintin thing...

"I'm not sure if every possible universe is real but I think that it might be the case that some universes are—more real than others. Whatever that means. That, uh, a given person is more likely to find themself in a place like our Earth of origin than in Golarion, maybe? Or something? I'm not sure. I think there is probably something there, though, about causality being more there than narrative, and narrative being more there than pure chaos. If that makes sense? Like, it may well be the case that there is an infinite number of possible things that may happen next, an infinite number of Petes and Brendas having this conversation in an infinite number of universes, but I think I intuitively expect that whatever happens next is very likely to follow causality, and somewhat less but still quite likely to follow narrative conventions we're used to, and very unlikely to be completely random. If there is an infinite number of Milliwayses with an infinite number of uses having this conversation, there are more uses having this conversation in a way that follows causality than there are uses having this conversation just before an enormous fluffy plush bunny appears out of thin air and smothers us."

"Hmmm. There's something to that. It's definitely an explanation of our observations, I'm just not sure whether or not it's the most parsimonious one. There's also the possibility that every internally consistent sequence of events happens equally often, and there are lots of casual sequences that are normal and fewer but still lots that feel like they follow narrative logic and almost none with giant plush rabbits. So every individual timeline is equally likely but not every category of timeline is the same size."

(Could she be smothered by a sufficiently immovable giant plush rabbit? Yes, because she would eventually run out of oxygen, but it would take longer than for a baseline human because a baseline human would die of CO2 poisoning first and she's immune to poison. But of course if her struggle against the giant plush rabbit counted as a fight she would be a match for it.(This train of thought runs in parallel to the main one; she doesn't stop talking.))

"There's also the possibility that we can't reasonably use our experiences to infer what kinds of timeline are more real generally, because we've both gotten the attention of an entity that can increase or decrease the realness of particular timelines and is pushing us toward timelines with things recognizable as stories of the sort that would be written in our cultures of origin. Whether by nudging things in the world in real-time by the same kind of interventions that back up our powers, or by picking the exact right starting point with something akin to simulation-based precognition."

"It can't be true that the category of possible timelines that make sense is bigger than the category of possible timelines that don't because of... well, one, entropy in the information-theoretical sense, and two, something akin to Cantor's diagonalization argument but for timelines. Do those shorthands make sense and point at something useful to you or should I explain, a lot of the time I spent agonizing over this stuff back on Earth involved looking into anthropics and I've got all of these cached thoughts in my head that are probably not super useful to other people."

"Are you sure you're filtering correctly for timelines containing sapient observers with coherent memories? I would expect the vast majority of such universes to be simple in the, ah, Kolmogorov sense, thank you Omniglot I didn't have a word for that, which drives down the likelihood of what I'm going to without loss of generality call giant rabbit scenarios." Pete is such a kindred spirit, this is fantastic.

It is fantastic, he's starting to trust the Spirit on a visceral level again because it was absolutely worth it to meet her.

"Yes! But that was sort of what I was getting at. If every timeline is equally likely then giant rabbit scenarios vastly outnumber normal ones; if for some reason timelines are weighted in reality according to their Kolmogorov complexity then you get back the common sense result that normal things should happen instead.

"But the thing is, just conditioning on timelines having contained coherent observers up to a given point isn't actually equivalent to that. Even if we do that, the relative number of realities that then go on to have giant rabbit events is still overwhelmingly high. You do need to go 'actually, reality is weighted inversely proportionally to Kolmogorov complexity' as a thing in itself, just knowing that it's had coherent internals up to a given point doesn't suffice. I'm pretty sure."

"You're right--I was being sloppy with my use of the word 'timeline', equivocating between the meaning 'a set of boundary conditions and a set of laws producing successor states from predecessor states' and the meaning 'a sequence of states that may or may not be tied together with laws simple or otherwise'. So then the question is, how much evidence do our experiences provide for or against the complexity weighting hypothesis, bearing in mind both the anthropics angle making my experiences more useful evidence for you than for me and vice versa and the fact that we're an extremely unusual non-representative pair of people and possibly so is everyone we've met since we Isekai'd."

"To be honest I'm not even sure that is the question, so much? Because like... examining this from a couple of angles.

"So first, if everything is equally real, then nothing matters, it's whatever, you can literally do whatever you want, so you might as well ignore this possibility, right? And this possibility kind of in principle is impossible to ever be concluded, you'd kind of need infinite evidence for it, so its probability should be zero and you should act like that."

"That's only true for values of everything that include timelines without solid causality where people's actions aren't affected at all by the contents of their minds, otherwise you can make some things impossible by your choice of what decision process to be, but so long as we're stipulating that I follow you."

"Yeah, pretty much. 'Follows causality' is a way in which we can predict to find ourselves in some realities with higher probability than in others.

"Which is the second possibility: everything is not equally real—if there's some reason why some realities are more real than others, then it could be because only some realities exist at all, or because some realities exist more than others in some way, or because there is something bigger than them that is making us experience some realities and not others. I think 'only some realities exist at all' is kind of just a special case of realities existing more than each other so we can treat them the same."

"If there is something bigger than them that is making us experience some realities and not others, that thing is either the Spirit or something controlling the Spirit or something that acts through the Spirit, and that thing wants the kinds of stories the Spirit wants. In that case, trying to think about any realities that don't follow the Spirit's narrative sensibilities is an exercise in futility until and unless we can outgrow and overcome the Spirit itself. Whatever we will experience will be what the Spirit wants us to experience, in a certain sense, and then the only thing we can control is the kind of people we are, and we have to be the kind of people who will do the right thing according to our values in the worlds the Spirit is putting us in. I'm not sure if this means that when we interact with worlds we're just kind of creating them when they didn't exist before for our stories to happen in or, or what, but in terms of what actions we should take I don't think it matters, so much, because all other realities are beyond our reach."

"I would be very surprised if we were creating realities by interacting with them, for a couple reasons. For one thing, I don't know how that model handles the thing where the universe I went to was separately a Pathfinder campaign in the universe you came from. For another thing, something that human-scale is a weird thing to have involved in universe creation; I'd expect it to be something more like advanced civilizations simulating new universes, or black holes budding off their own universes like some cosmologists suspect, or something more mathematical where sets of physical laws inevitably exist the way syllogisms inevitably exist. Of course it's very plausible that the Spirit is an advanced civilization simulating entire universes and we're someone's cheat-code-using Sims characters or whatever." She considers making a joke about hoping she doesn't get drowned in a swimming pool but can't put together anything that sounds more funny than creeped out. "There could even be multiple explanations for our existence at the same time: if two universes and/or/AKA computers programs contain the same chain of conscious experience, there's a sense in which the same person is in both worlds at once until they encounter a difference between the programs and diverge."

"Oh, I mean, I'd consider advanced civilizations simulating stuff and black holes and whatever relevantly creating realities? In the sense of, like... a totality of experience, I guess. I, hmm, I don't think there's a version of Pathfinder's Wrath of the Righteous that has a Brenda in my universe and I think it wouldn't be insane to imagine that your arrival there forked the, ah, Platonic concept of that story into a specific instantiation of it that now has you and that could be said to be a sort of new reality you created by arriving in it."

"Oh, I agree that those things create realities, I was positing them as alternatives to humanoid fiction writers and our notebook choices and stuff creating realities. But I agree that simulators could totally have forked their Wrath of the Righteous program for different sets of characters."

"Oh! I mean, hmm, in principle yes, but... The thing I mean, here, is more that, well...

"All of that preamble I was going on about was to say that there's something that's determining what kinds of things we're likely to encounter, which may be the Spirit as implemented through advanced civilizations simulating us or whatever or it may be the Spirit, as implemented through some high-dimensional superintelligence that can make people exist just by thinking about them or it may be some other guiding principle that means some realities are fundamentally more encounterable than others...

"But I don't think it really matters, in practical terms. Whatever reality is, whatever fundamental reason there is for things to be the way they are, it has to be consistent with our experience and observations. And what I have experienced since meeting the Spirit is a life with a plot, and assuming that there is a narrative structure scaffolding me has yielded good predictions. Prior to that, it was just causality; now, it's causality and plot. And because of that, throwing back to the topic that started this conversation, I think that reasoning about something like having writers or authors or plotwrights or whatever else, and maybe equating those with the Landlords and/or the Spirit, is useful, because of this observed structure of our lives. Or at least of my life. At a micro level, this here interaction between us, since you arrived in Milliways, it's totally a kind of story I'd have enjoyed reading, and thinking about it from that angle would have and has yielded good predictions about what actually happens.

"So that's the sense in which I mean that we have someone writing our story. It yields good predictions."

"Hmmm. I don't think my post-Spirit life has no plot, but it sounds like it has less plot than yours? I've also been tracking how good narrative logic is at making predictions, and it's better than I'd expect in the total absence of plot but far from perfect. Though that might just mean I enjoy stories that subvert the obvious expectations, or it might mean the Spirit noticed how much I value things being in principle scientifically understandable and put down some of its scarier tools as a kindness. But I agree with you that none of this is actionable right now, and we just need to go on solving the problems we're equipped to solve with the tools we have, including the tools we learned from reading fiction."

"Which makes me wonder whether I should immediately read the entire Wrath of the Righteous setting documents and every Pathfinder handbook or . . . not that. Because I might be the kind of person who would prefer to read the story where the books turn out to be describing a slightly different world and trusting them too much will lead me into error, over the story where they're straightforwardly correct and I use them to win at everything--no, I'm being ridiculous, I wouldn't stick myself with a story where the right thing to do was avoid reading a book. Even if they're wrong in some places I'm guaranteed to be better off reading them as long as I don't trust them unquestioningly."

"I was going to suggest exactly that. And, you know, to the extent your experience in Golarion does follow the campaign, if it does at all, that would in fact be it following a plot. As a thing to keep in mind.

"But I may be more sensitive to the ways things are or are not plots, too, as a separate explanation for the difference. Everything that's happened so far to me would be something I'd enjoy reading about or, or playing as a game, or something. ...even the awful parts with Riddle because they're awful in compelling ways and also kind of hot. And you saw my modified-to-be-ethical version of I Can Fix Them, yeah, I'm exactly that kind of person."

That gets a little smile. "It's pretty brave of you, that you're that kind of person. I looked at I Can Fix Them and went 'that sounds like a really useful power I could do a lot of good with, but it would be unpleasant so I'm not going to'. Fortunately I immediately met a woman who's basically I Can Fix Them in elven form, so I've been keeping her alive while she shows demon cultists the error of their ways by being sympathetic to their problems."

"It is unfortunately the case that I was already the kind of person who would try to Fix Them even without the magic notebook giving me powers ensuring it'd go well. It, ah, often did not, in fact, go well. But the tendency was already there. The notebook said that that's the Spirit's favorite power and I freaked out a little bit—you read all of that. My friend Vivian called it 'self-identification through the other' and said that the Spirit is kin with me.

"So no it wasn't bravery it's just that I am exactly that kind of idiot."