And Keltham continues to hold forth upon the Way.

Here are some of the experiments and games that dath ilan uses to show its children their innate conformity, that they may be warned against the tendency - very young children, obviously, you couldn't pull that sort of crap on an eight-year-old, by then they've got enough individualism and confidence in their own reasoning not to say that Line C is the same size as Line X when it's obviously not.

These are some tests you can apply to determine whether a thought is meaningful or meaningless to you.

This is what it feels like to want to believe something you don't actually believe.

And the thing to remember above all is that you cannot be any smarter than the process that actually produced your beliefs.

If you look up at the sky and see it's blue - you're no better and no worse than your eyes and the vision-processing part of your brain.

If you close your eyes and decide that your favorite color is orange, and want the sky to be orange, and argue that the sky is orange, and build orange-colored filters and produce paintings of it to try to convince others - you are no smarter than the process 'pick your favorite color and then think that things are that color'.  (Though it's fine if you wish the sky was orange, or start planning to make the sky orange; the error is if you try believing that it's orange already.)

And the only way to do any better than you're already doing, is to go through a different process and produce a different belief.

Not every change is an improvement, but every improvement is necessarily a change.

There'd be no point in Pilar trying to be a Keeper, if she tried to keep all her old beliefs in the process; why bother becoming a Keeper, if she already knows all the facts correctly?

Keltham does not know the way of Keeping, only a few signposts around the first steps there, placed to warn dath ilani off starting down that path unless they mean it.  Still, that part is knowledge and Keltham has it.

It is said, there is no ordinary thought that Keepers would hesitate to think.

There are exotic thoughts not to think - maybe especially in Golarion, directions you should not look because something from that direction might look back - or inhuman patterns of thought that higher Keepers devised, maybe, as might destroy unready minds from the inside.  Keltham does not know details for obvious reasons.

But nothing along the lines of, say, how the prediction market is assigning only a 40% probability that you stay married for fifty years to the person you promised your eternity, or that you're a romantically obligate sadist with no accessible masochists.  That, you're not afraid to think about, not if you're a Keeper.

Even among the ordinary dath ilani, you learn that when you notice that your mind is not-looking in a direction, you're past the point in your childhood where it makes sense to not look there anymore.

Even among the ordinary dath ilani, as you grow more knowledgeable in Law and by simple age more practiced in thinking, you become better at it over time, at noticing the directions you aren't looking.

Even among the ordinary dath ilani, every time that happens to you, you naturally learn a bit more about how you work, in that regard, and it becomes easier to notice what you aren't thinking.

That's just growing up.

But the Keepers push themselves to grow up as quickly as possible, like a child forcing themselves to leave their parents' home seven years earlier than would be usual.

'That which can be destroyed by the truth should be', goes the proverb, and ordinary dath ilani and Keepers alike both hold to it in the limit.  If you look at it from the standpoint of the Future, if you somehow get some wrong thought into your head, do you want to still be thinking it a thousand years later?  Do you always want to be that small, or that warped, that you could go on holding a false belief forever?

For the ordinary dath ilani, though, they say, 'That which can be destroyed by the truth should be eventually.'

And the Keepers say, 'That which can be destroyed by the truth should be immediately.'

- though, to be clear, that doesn't mean they run around telling other people truths that will wreck parts of their personalities.  It means that they themselves will destroy whatever of themselves they can, with whatever truths they've come to hold.

Does Pilar still want to become a Keeper?

It's not a matter of wanting; Pilar cannot choose to be anything else.

Brave, poetic words.  Possibly worryingly so; good decisions made for good reasons should perhaps not sound so optimized to be poetic.  It'd be fine for an ordinary dath ilani, if they were making a brave decision, to try to have it sound inspiring and poetic too.  For a Keeper the potentially tiny resulting bias might be a problem, unless they were very confident of their prior ability to not be influenced at all towards the decision by how poetic and brave it was.

Ordinary human beings should not try to live like that.  They need bits of bravery and poetry in them.  Not bravery and poetry they know is false.  But trading off some tiny tiny breath of precision in their thoughts, to have emotion and color?  Not giving up their art and believing something false.  Just - daring to, in the course of making what they think is the right decision, also being brave and poetic about that?  That's a reasonable benefit to go for, even if it comes with a tiny risk of making the wrong decision.  So long as it's not a big risk, one where you've gotten to the point of, like, noticing a tiny quiet note of disquiet.  Then even an ordinary person should rethink it as clearly as possible.

But, like, in the course of everyday life - you don't want to be trying to root the bravery and poetry out of yourself in case it influences you in the wrong direction.

Unless you're a Keeper.  They presumably don't try to get all the emotions out of themselves, then they wouldn't want anything or do anything ever.  But they would - Keltham thinks - be disturbed by the prospect of a note of bravery and poetry influencing their thoughts in an invalid direction at all, and if they didn't destroy all bravery, they'd be doing something else to - optimize their thoughts, somehow, so that they couldn't be influenced in some way they defined as undue, or invalid -

Keltham doesn't know, actually.  He is not in fact a Keeper, and these arts are themselves held infohazardous to those who would not practice them.

The point is, the Keepers are willing to step further away from their humanity and try to think in stranger patterns, for the sake of knowing the truth, for the sake of obtaining their goals, for the sake of protecting the children who don't want to grow up so quickly.

Does Pilar still want to be a Keeper?

Pilar bets that devils, though they have grandeur - which probably subsumes bravery and poetry - don't go reasoning in invalid ways on account of their grandeur.

Or if lesser devils are still doing that, Pilar would guess that Asmodeus is annoyed about it.

Pilar is with Asmodeus with that, as she is with Asmodeus in all things.

As far as Keltham can tell, Pilar is not currently acting like her mind is disintegrating due to any of the things that Keltham has said already.  Keltham does want to check in explicitly that this is in fact the case.

Pilar is not in the slightest danger of disintegrating due to any of this.

That's not nearly as reassuring as Pilar seems to think.  'So far as I know, I don't visibly seem to be in danger of disintegrating down any pathways I can foresee' is a sensible thing to say, at this point.  'I'm in zero danger of disintegrating' sounds like bravado and something that a Golarionite could not reasonably know about themselves.

"Acknowledged.  I don't see any danger of myself disintegrating, here."

"If you were asking that as a preliminary towards hitting me harder, go ahead and hit me harder."

Keltham will take a deep breath and not follow up on any alternate possible interpretations of that statement.

And Keltham will go ahead and hit her harder.

He'll explain the concept of an Edifice, which he knows of as more of a psychiatric symptom, than something that sane adults do on any regular basis, but it seems to him like an Edifice would also be something that happened if you grew up without any training in mental skills at all.

It's what happens when somebody gets sick and goes on assembling more and more arguments in favor of something, explicitly by trying to do that, implicitly by flinching away from every counterargument; and they make their beliefs and goals more and more and more rigid, nailing themselves into place, drenching their thoughts with glue.

If you grow up in Golarion you may not know not to do that.

And once the bottom line is written, it is as reliable, as Lawful, as correlated with reality, as the process that originally produced it as the bottom line; and no more.

Does Pilar... possibly have any sense, right now, that she knows there is something inside her that she has argued to herself a lot, that she is maybe flinching away some from looking at, that she will brook no counterarguments to?

If she wants to undo her having grown-up-unLawful, to reach even the fifth part of the standard of an ordinary ilani, never mind becoming a Keeper, she is going to have to go through that part of herself at some point, and rethink it all.

"Are we talking about my faith in Asmodeus, here?"

See how you like it when all the subtext gets turned into text.

"It's giving me some vibes of that, yeah, though I don't pretend to know what's inside another person's mind.  If not that - maybe something else?  Maybe a dozen other things?  I've been trying to think of how Golarionites would have real mental catastrophes from Law exposure, and it only recently occurred to me that maybe they're full of Edifices."

"Well, it would have been that before my trip to Elysium.  Where, I thought at first, the Chaotic Good outsiders spent a lot of time trying to poke at my faith in Asmodeus and pointed out a lot of things I'd always flinched away from looking at, exactly like you're describing.  And then at the end they were like 'Just kidding, we only wanted you to be sure of your own choices.'"

"So yes, at this point, I've already been through all that."

"That... sounds a lot like they knew you'd try to become a Keeper later, and they were trying to help you along."

"Chaotic Good, like Chaotic anything else, is really really hard to figure out, sometimes."

...it doesn't seem particularly hard to figure out, to him?  Like, he just did figure it out.

"I don't suppose you'd be willing to share details, if they're not private?"

Privacy!  What a helpfully un-Chelish concept.  "Pretty fucking private, yeah."  Oh wait, she should also invoke that other un-Chelish concept.  "Sorry."

Well then, if Pilar is sure she's handling all of this totally fine, he'll go ahead and keep dumping on her the entire list of dath ilani advice that he can remember off the top of his head for undoing major false beliefs.  That includes, let's see...

- How to notice when you're avoiding the real weak points in your beliefs by rehearsing more comfortable and winnable battle points, but obviously it's not Lawful to update on the same observation twice;

- The difference between feeling obligated to investigate something, wanting to have finished investigating it, and feeling curious about it;

- The general way of noticing when you're completing a pattern in a precached way, and exercises to try to re-see there from scratch;

- The litanies children are taught for 'If snow is white, I desire to believe snow is white, if snow is not white, I desire to believe snow is not white, let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want' etcetera;

- How it's actually less unpleasant, when you're fighting a rearguard action against a mistake, to just say 'oops' and not defend anything or cling to anything and let it all go and be over with;

- More guidance on seeing thoughts you're flinching away from in a corner of your mind;

- Averting the need-for-closure and letting problems hang around unanswered for a while, pondering problems more thoroughly before jumping to proposed solutions on them;

- Missing alternatives to policy proposals where you want a policy proposal to be the best one for reasons other than the stated utility criterion;

- Fake humility as an out, where you don't want to know something you're starting to see, and so claim that nobody could possibly know it...

(it goes on for a while)

Is Pilar still doing okay here?

Yes.

She's doing fine.

Is there more?