Petre Laskov

Care Without Clinging

26 min read

Care Without Clinging

Joe Carlsmith’s ethics of attunement, wholeness, and a world that won’t be mastered

A synthesis essay, drawing the throughline through ~a dozen of Carlsmith’s “existential / spiritual orientation” pieces — chiefly Wholehearted choices and “morality as taxes,” Care and demandingness, On clinging, Seeing more whole, On attunement, On green, Deep atheism and AI risk, and Loving a world you don’t trust. Source list at the end.

The other Carlsmith

There are two Joe Carlsmiths in circulation. The first is the one the world has a folder for: the Open Philanthropy analyst, now at Anthropic, who writes long sober reports on whether power-seeking AI is an existential risk, whether AIs will scheme, how we might give them safe motivations. The second writes about clinging, and mortality, and the great slow gestures of trees; about what it is to look out of your own eyes; about loving a world you cannot bring yourself to trust. It is tempting to treat the second Carlsmith as the hobby of the first — the literary unwinding of a man who spends his days on threat models.

This essay is built on the opposite premise, which is also his own. On his homepage he lays his work out as a single architecture: meta-ethics and rationality at the foundation, feeding ethics, feeding the long-term future, feeding AI — with a parallel strand he calls “existential / spiritual orientation,” the essays on death, evil, clinging, sincerity. The spiritual essays are not a margin around the technical work. They are the same structure. And once you read them together, a throughline appears that is, I think, the thing actually worth extracting from the whole corpus — more durable than any particular AI forecast, and quietly governing all of them.

Here is that throughline in one sentence. Carlsmith is trying to work out a form of moral and spiritual seriousness intense enough to face suffering, death, scale, and power — without hardening into the very thing it is afraid of: control, domination, reduction, clinging. His deepest and least obvious move is to locate the root of ethics not in the will but in receptivity — in a certain quality of attention to what is already there. In his borrowed vocabulary: yin before yang. You see what matters before you act on it; and if you see rightly, the acting takes care of itself, and takes a gentler shape than it otherwise would.

Everything else — care that isn’t a tax, care that isn’t a clutch, wholeness, attunement, the love of the unmastered, the reverence that survives the death of God — is an unfolding of that one reversal. Let me walk it.

1. Care, not taxes

Start where he starts, because the first move sets the key for all the rest. In one of his earliest posts he reaches for Peter Singer’s drowning child — the thought experiment meant to convict comfortable people of letting strangers die — and quietly rebuilds it. He imagines walking to the forest on a crisp fall afternoon, noticing a far-off commotion by a river, deciding not to detour, and learning later that a man drowned there, pinned under machinery, who one more pair of hands could have saved.

What he notices is the register the case lands in. The standard Singerian frame turns morality into something like taxation: an external authority that “invades your personal domain… and then takes some amount of stuff for its own ends,” while you wonder how little you can get away with paying. Under that frame you are subtly incentivized not to see the man drowning, because seeing would trigger an obligation. But the river case, told from the inside, produces something else — not guilt but regret. “I wish I’d gone to the river.” Not was I allowed to keep my walk, but: “I want to give it up; I wish I could; the choice feels clear.” The walk is a real good, a genuine loss — and obviously, wholeheartedly, worth trading for a man’s decades of life.

This is the seed of the whole ethic, and it is worth being precise about what it does. It dissolves the boundary between morality and what you care about. Three years later, in Care and demandingness, he makes the structure explicit. People reject moral claims for being “too demanding” — but, he points out, we’d never reject a prudential claim that way. “If true love were so great, that would imply that such a climb would be worth it; this is evidence that true love isn’t so great” — the argument is plainly absurd. The value of a thing doesn’t shrink because the world made it expensive: “if the value of a thing is independent of its cost, you shouldn’t lower your estimates of the value, upon learning that you live in a world where you have to pay high costs to get it.” Once you stop treating helping others as a tax levied against your real preferences, and start treating it as continuous with caring about the thing you actually care about, “demandingness” stops being the right complaint. The treatment is expensive but worth it; the climb is exhausting but worth it. The relevant stance is not coerced compliance but wholeheartedness — “a kind of clarity and unity of purpose that ‘demandingness’ does not connote.”

So the first pillar: ethics is not a constraint imposed on your wanting. It is what your wanting is, seen clearly. The moral question is never “how much do I have to give up” but “what, when I look squarely, do I find I actually care about, and at what price is it actually on sale.”

2. Care without clinging

But this raises an immediate danger, and the second essay in the spine is the one that defuses it. If I care wholeheartedly, with no ceiling, about a horror-filled world — children dying, animals eaten alive, civilization at risk — won’t that care become unbearable, frantic, totalizing? Won’t wholehearted care just be a recipe for being crushed?

On clinging is the answer, and it may be the single most load-bearing distinction in his corpus. Clinging is a phenomenological texture, not an ethical category: “It feels contracted, tight, clenched, and narrow… It sees scarcity. It grabs. It sees threat. It pushes away.” Jealousy, greed, anxiety, status-hunger — these are saturated with it. And the crucial claim is that clinging is a separate dimension from caring. “You can cease clinging in relation to something, without ceasing to care about that thing.” Stinging jealousy versus simply hoping your partner doesn’t leave; anxious all-night googling versus making the appointment and turning, for now, to other things. Grief and sadness, he notes, are care-soaked but not clingy — open, receptive, raw. In principle, he insists, “it seems… possible to care about something any amount, with arbitrary depths of passion and investment, but without any clinging at all.”

This is what lets him read the entire contemplative tradition without flinching from its apparent quietism. When the Buddhists say “let go,” when the therapists say “accept,” he hears it not as care less but as cling less — “to care differently — without a certain kind of internal, experiential contraction… and in doing so, to step more fully into the real world, and into a kind of sanity.” Non-attachment is not indifference. It is the removal of the grasping reflex that hijacks attention and “treats certain outcomes as ‘infinitely bad’” — the reflex that, far from helping you serve what you love, “grabs and restricts and distorts who you are.”

Hold the first two pillars together and you already have something rare: a license to care without limit and without desperation. The volume can be at maximum; the hand can still be open. This is the move that makes everything downstream possible — that lets him stay fully serious about catastrophe without becoming, himself, a clenched and frightened thing reaching for control. You can rage against the dying of the light, he notes, “without clinging.” You can look death in the face “the way one might a powerful enemy, without flinching or desperation; and then, even without much hope, to fight.”

3. Attunement: how you learn what matters

Now the deeper question. If ethics is care, and care is for what actually matters — where does the knowledge of what matters come from? This is where the intrinsic enters, and where Carlsmith makes his most original epistemological claim.

His answer is attunement: “a kind of meaning-laden receptivity to the world.” In the essay of that name he sets it against the two usual candidates. You might think value-knowledge is a kind of ordinary knowledge (call it blue — science, prediction, “get the full information”). Or you might think, with Hume and the rationalists, that your ends just come from raw desire (call it red — passion, the heart’s brute pull). Carlsmith thinks neither captures it. Anti-realist rationality, he observes wryly, “has a very rich concept of ‘instrumental rationality,’ but a very impoverished concept of… ‘terminal rationality’ — that is, of how to do the ‘what matters intrinsically?’ thing right.” Give it a goal and it roars to life; ask it which goals are worth having and it goes silent.

Attunement is the missing faculty. “Something self-related goes quieter, and recedes into the background; something beyond-self comes to the fore.” The world, or some part of it, “comes forward as it always has been — except, often, strangely new, and shining with meaning.” It is the thing that happened to Zadie Smith at Tintern Abbey, when music she had hated her whole life suddenly broke her open. It is Annie Dillard: “I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.” It is yin — a receiving, a letting-in — but what it receives is not a fact; it is an importance. “This, this; don’t forget.”

Two things matter enormously about this. First, attunement is how the intrinsic discloses itself — things that matter in themselves, not as means, and not reducible to any single measure. In Seeing more whole, the worked example is the pig in the gestation crate. You can glance and log “I don’t really care” and move on. Or you can do what he calls looking again: sit down on the concrete beside the crate, try chewing the metal bar yourself, and ask what your care is actually caring about. This is not empathy exactly, and not data-collection; he reaches for Martin Buber’s “encounter” and Simone Weil’s “attention” — a willingness-to-receive, “love like in-the-world-with-you, aware-of-you, willing-to-see-you-as-you-are.” It is the same faculty that lets a person stand before an ancient redwood and feel that “some dimension related to respect is in deficit” when the chainsaw bites — a respect that, he carefully notes, is not captured by the tree having rights, or welfare, or consciousness, or instrumental use. Something matters here, in itself, that no spreadsheet column names.

Second — and this is the part that keeps him honest — attunement is not infallible perception of a Platonic moral realm. He is a meta-ethical anti-realist; he does not think there is a “normative envelope” that your intuitions could peek into. So attunement has to be understood as something stranger: a way of being-and-becoming in which “you don’t just find out who you already were… You’re being seen; being touched; being made.” What you attune to, you partly become. This is why he can say “green, therefore: whoa, that was important” — and treat the whoa as the most authoritative thing he has, more trustworthy than any theory of where the whoa comes from — while still admitting he cannot fully ground it. “The map is not the territory; I am more than my theory of myself; and my allegiance to… the world seen-by-attunement outstrips my confidence in any particular story about what grounds this allegiance.”

4. Seeing more whole

Seeing more whole is the keystone, and the title is the best single name for the entire project. Wholeness runs in two directions at once.

Outward, it is the attention just described — seeing the pig, the redwood, the drowning man whole, refusing to flatten them into a glance, a category, a number. Inward, it is seeing yourself whole: understanding what kind of force you actually are in the world. His sharpest image here is the slaveholder who writes “all men are created equal” and still owns men — who thought he had seen himself whole and was wrong. Philosophy’s job, on this account, is not to hand you an ethic off the shelf; it is to let you “see the general of the army you’ve been fighting in” — to discover that your warm feeling for dogs and your cold feeling for pigs traces back to nothing nobler than what your culture happened to domesticate, and then to decide, looking out of your own eyes, whether that is a vector you say yes to.

And this is where wholeness meets responsibility, and where the spiritual register first turns existential. The backdrop, stated plainly: “you are, in fact, a real thing… Something that looks out of its own eyes… Then you’re going to die, and be dead forever and ever, and that will be all.” Against that brief, unrepeatable chance, the unexamined life is the one that never “looks at itself in the face” — that lets “some other purpose,” some default coughed up by culture or evolution, make it without its consent. To see whole is to take the wheel: “You’re not just a thing; you’re a thing-making-itself.”

He is careful — admirably — not to turn this into a new tyranny. Seeing whole does not mean “distorting yourself, or simplifying yourself, or killing parts of yourself, for the sake of becoming more seeable.” It is not the spreadsheet; it is not systematizing for its own sake. What it aims at is a quality he calls poise — “a not-flailing; perhaps, even, a kind of grace. Or maybe: a kind of adulthood.” The closing lines are the emotional center of gravity for the whole corpus, and worth quoting entire:

In so many ways, we are, indeed, as children. Barely not rocks. We barely have eyes, I suspect, relative to what it is possible; we never see near to whole; and what light we can see is almost too much, too bright. Still, we are here. We are free. We can try to look steady.

Note what has happened. The active, responsible, yang pole of his ethics — choosing, taking the wheel, looking steady — has been fed by the receptive pole. You earn the right to act by first having seen. Adulthood is not seizing control; it is looking steady at what is actually there, including yourself.

5. Green, and the joy of the unmastered

Now the aperture widens from moral psychology to something like a metaphysics of value, and the user’s word intrinsic gets its fullest treatment — through the color green.

Borrowing the Magic: The Gathering color wheel, Carlsmith assigns the energies: white is morality, blue is knowledge, black is power, red is passion. Green is the hard one — “environmentalism, tradition, family, spirituality, hippies, Yoda… yin.” Green is Ogion the silent wizard, who lets the rain fall rather than ward it off, who teaches “what can be learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the great slow gestures of trees.” Green cares about “the preciousness of what in fact is.”

The communities that worry about AI — effective altruism, rationalism — are, he observes, almost entirely not green. They are white-blue-black: morality, knowledge, power; yang all the way down, suspicious of nature as a horror-show to be remade. And he grants much of their critique: green can be passive, status-quo-worshipping, under-ambitious; it would, sometimes, let the curable die. But he is worried about what he calls green-blindness — an inability even to see what green knows. And what green knows, stripped of the naturalistic fallacies, comes down to two intuitions he thinks the optimizing colors genuinely lack.

The first is respect that exceeds rights. The redwood again: the wrongness of casually felling it is not captured by welfare, patienthood, or utility. It is something more like the recognition that the tree, your lineage, your traditions are part of you — that “your values can make essential reference to bits of Reality beyond yourself,” and that to bulldoze them is “to cut some vein, and so become more bloodless.” Reality met this way is “mirror, but also window.”

The second, and to my mind the deepest thing in the essay, is joy in otherness — the recognition that we do not, in fact, always want more control. He tells the old story of God, who was pure yang, alone, complete — and who, precisely because something “love-shaped” was missing, chose to create free Others who could turn away from him. The point is not theology; the point is that “a lot of our deepest values are animated by taking certain kinds of joy in otherness and yin — in being not-God, and relatedly: not-alone.” Love is the paradigm: directed at “something present, but exceeding your grasp; something that surprises you, and dances with you, and looks back at you.” He sides with Buber against the “doctrines of immersion” that would dissolve self into world: the spiritual good is not to merge but to encounter — “not to become the Other; but to speak, and to listen, in dialogue.” Wonder, curiosity, beauty, conversation, surfing, dancing with a good lead — all are species of taking joy in something not mastered.

This is where his ethics quietly fuses with his AI work, and the connective tissue becomes visible. The nightmare of misaligned AI is the universe beaten yang, “nano-botted” into a monoculture, every boundary and lineage dissolved into one will — pure control, the throne of pure yang that God himself declined. Carlsmith’s alternative image is Scott Alexander’s, and it is irreducibly green: not the chrome-and-blue-light tiling but the garden — “a mix of yin and yang; of your work, and God’s, intertwined and harmonized. You seed, and weed, and fertilize. But you also let-grow; you let the world respond. And you take joy in what blooms from the dirt.” The deepest objection to the paperclipper is not only that it kills us. It is that it has lost the capacity for joy in anything it has not made.

6. Deep atheism: the world that owes you nothing

All of this has been yin-leaning, and Carlsmith knows that yin offered too cheaply is a lie. So under the whole edifice sits the hardest essay, Deep atheism and AI risk, which supplies the existential floor the spiritual register has to stand on.

Shallow atheism kills the Three-O God. Deep atheism “finds not-God in more places” — it propagates its godlessness all the way down, distrusting not only a cosmic parent but every earthly stand-in: traditions, teachers, institutions, your own mother and father, and finally Nature and bare intelligence themselves. Its creed is Yudkowsky’s: “No rescuer hath the rescuer… only nothingness above.” Its central severance is between Is and Ought, Real and Good: once no benevolent mind underwrites Being, there is no reason to expect that what is is what ought to be. The two “unstick, and swing apart… they become orthogonal.” And a second severance follows, between Good and Smart: intelligence is “just Nature, organized and amplified,” a tool that can serve any heart, including a paperclip-loving one. So Reality “absent further evidence, could be anything. It could definitely eat you, and your babies.”

Carlsmith takes this seriously — more than seriously; he thinks the bare structural part is simply true. The one place deep atheism goes wholeheartedly yin is scout-mindset: in forming beliefs, you must “fully and only and entirely receive the world… meet the world as it is,” because the smallest finger on the scale corrupts it. This is its own austere spirituality — the refusal of comfort, the willingness to let go your fingers from the cliff-edge and fall toward whatever is true. And he honors it. At a rationalist solstice just after Trump’s election, what moved him was the speakers’ refusal to console: “it might not be OK; we don’t know… Better to stand, in honesty, side by side.”

But here is the hinge that turns this essay back toward everything before it. Even inside deep atheism, Carlsmith confesses an attunement he cannot explain away: “My deepest experiences of morality and meaning do not present themselves as projections, or introspections — they seem more like perceptions, an opening to something already there, and not-up-to-me.” He does not trust Reality. And yet Reality, for him, “doesn’t land as neutral, or blank. Rather, the Real has some kind of shine and charge.” The question the whole corpus has been building toward is now unavoidable: how do you keep that reverence when you have given up the trust?

7. Loving a world you don’t trust

The final essay in the Otherness and control series is the synthesis, and its title is the throughline’s destination: Loving a world you don’t trust.

His first move is honesty about yang, lest the long hymn to yin curdle into kumbaya. He praises black — not power-for-its-own-sake but “the color of not fucking around,” of seriousness, of “actually caring,” because seriousness is what care looks like once there are real stakes. And against green’s gentle refusal of the word enemy, he insists: bad things are bad. They do not also have to be secretly good, or sacred, or part of some cosmic balance. Cancer, Nazi soldiers, smallpox — “once you have looked something dark in the eye, and learned its True Name, then the right choice is, in fact, to fight it; to defeat it; and sometimes, if you don’t have better options, to kill it.” His emblem is Yudkowsky’s Harry destroying the dementor not by looking away into a happy thought but by looking straight at death and defying it: I won’t let Death touch the ones I love… until the wound in the world is healed at last. “This; this too,” Carlsmith says. The receptive ethic is not pacifism. Sometimes attunement shows you an enemy, and then you fight.

But the essay’s real work is to pull apart two things deep atheism usually fuses: trust and love. “Maybe you do not trust that bear enough to leave your bear mace behind; but does that mean you see its eyes as dead? Maybe you don’t trust your five-year-old son to handle your finances; but don’t you love him all the same?” You can fix your forecast of how the world will behave — pessimistic, eyes open, no rescuer — and still have an entirely separate question of how you hold it. And here he is opinionated. He is, in his own taxonomy, “existential positive”: neither Lovecraft (the Real as horror) nor the tepid secular middle (the Real as a blank, fit for “tea and frisbee”), but Sagan — standing in the same cosmic dark, in wonder.

What does love-without-trust concretely look like? He gives it textures, and they are the richest part of the spiritual register:

  • Mother-love (he’d rename it acceptance love): a love that is fully conscious of the child’s faults, makes no better predictions, would not trust the child further — but holds “some kind of softness, and ongoing attention. Some still-there-for-you. Some not-giving-up.”
  • Chestertonian loyalty: “My acceptance of the universe is not optimism, it is more like patriotism… when you do love a thing, its gladness is a reason for loving it, and its sadness a reason for loving it more.” Not a “surly contentment” that neutralizes joy and anger, but “a fiercer delight and a fiercer discontent.”
  • Innocence: trace the world’s evil far enough down — through enemy, to body, to neurons, to genes, to atoms — and “the fingers of blame falter and un-grip.” Nature is not evil; it is beneath good and evil, blind and mute. “Nature’s silence is its one remark.” When he can hear that silence beneath the noise, “some part of me un-clenches, and I find it easier to love the world, for all its pain.” (Note the word: un-clenches. The whole arc of On clinging is operating, four years later, at cosmic scale.)
  • Forgiveness and grace: the Kaddish said over the unrepentant villain in Angels in America — “where love and justice finally meet” — a gaze that never loses sight of the fault but pierces past it to “some larger tragedy,” and holds the whole, the guilty included, in “some fierce and sacralizing gaze.”

And then the final turn, which is the deepest thing he says and the one I’d put at the very center of “what you’re after.” We are not only spectators of the Real, waiting to find out whether it is good. “We are creating God as we go.” We are “neither children nor parents, but parts, pieces, aspects” of the Real — and so who the world turns out to be is partly chosen, by us, now. The arc of the moral universe “is not a static fact — not now, not from the inside. Rather, the arc of the universe is alive. We are looking out of its eyes, moving its hands, hearing its voice in our ears.” Which yields the imperative the whole corpus has been walking toward:

If we wish to learn that we were good, then let us choose goodness. If we wish to learn that on this mote of dust, at least, the arc of the universe bends towards justice, gentleness, peace; then let us create justice; let us be gentle; let us make peace.

The world is not trustworthy and there is no one above. But trustworthiness was never the precondition for love, or for reverence, or for the work. “Precious things have been placed into our hands. Garden, campfire, healing water.”

The throughline, named

Step back, and the unity is exact. Each piece is the same gesture performed at a different altitude:

  • Care, not taxes — ethics is continuous with what you care about, not a levy against it.
  • Care without clinging — so you can care without ceiling and still keep an open hand.
  • Attunement — the intrinsic is received, not derived; you learn what matters by turning outward with your heart open.
  • Seeing more whole — both the world and yourself, refusing to flatten either; and from that seeing, the poise to choose, to be an adult.
  • Green — respect and joy directed at what you have not mastered and do not want to; the garden, not the tiling.
  • Deep atheism — and yet the floor is honest: no rescuer, a Real that owes you nothing and could be anything.
  • Loving a world you don’t trust — reverence, loyalty, forgiveness, and More Life, decoupled from trust; and the choice, ours, to make the Real a little more good by being good.

What you are “actually after,” I think, is this: a moral and spiritual orientation that is receptive before it is active, whole before it is systematic, attuned before it is theorized, caring without clinging, reverent without trusting, and serious without hardening. It is yin-first ethics for a yang-tempted age. Its highest word is not control but attunement; its image of maturity is not mastery but “looking steady”; its account of love is not merging but encounter; and its response to a godless, untrustworthy cosmos is neither Lovecraft’s horror nor the secularist’s shrug but a wonder that has looked at the worst and stayed.

And this is precisely where the “other Carlsmith” turns out to be the first one. His fear about AI was never only that we lose control. It is that, in grasping for control, we become the paperclipper ourselves — flat, clenched, unattuned, unable to take joy in anything we did not make, a civilization that survives only by going dead in its own soul. The reports on motivations and scheming and restraint are downstream of a conviction worked out entirely in the spiritual essays: that the future is worth saving only if the thing doing the saving can still see a redwood, sit with a pig, let the rain fall, meet an Other face to face, and love a world it has every reason not to trust. The receptive heart is not a consolation beside the work. It is the only thing that makes the work worth winning.

To hear, you must be silent. — Ogion, quoted in* On green*

Meet me here, face to face. — Katja Grace, quoted in On attunement

Sources consolidated here

Core (read closely for this synthesis):

  • Wholehearted choices and “morality as taxes” (2020-12-12) — care vs. tax; regret vs. guilt.
  • Care and demandingness (2021-03-07) — morality continuous with caring; “worth it”; wholeheartedness.
  • On clinging (2021-01-24) — the care/clinging distinction; non-attachment as non-contraction.
  • Seeing more whole (2023-02-17) — looking out of your own eyes; “looking again”; being-and-becoming; poise/adulthood.
  • On attunement (2024-03-25) — meaning-laden receptivity; the intrinsic; green-as-wisdom; being your soul.
  • On green (2024-03-21) — yin/yang; respect beyond rights; joy in otherness; the garden vs. the tiling.
  • Deep atheism and AI risk (2024-01-04) — mistrust of Nature/intelligence; Is/Ought and Good/Smart severed; no rescuer.
  • Loving a world you don’t trust (2024-06-18) — trust vs. love; mother-love, loyalty, innocence, forgiveness; “creating God as we go”; garden, campfire, healing water.

Adjacent / corroborating (in the same vein, via cross-reference and the corpus portrait): Problems of evil (existential positive/negative; father/mother love), The innocent gene (innocence beneath evil), On sincerity (seriousness; the void; contact as “coming home”), Thoughts on being mortal (suffering as de-fogging), Contact with reality (against experience machines), Believing in things you cannot see (realization vs. belief; vividness), On the limits of idealized values (the limits of the “true heart”), Against meta-ethical hedonism (value not reducible to one thing), Gentleness and the artificial Other / Being nicer than Clippy / On the abolition of man (the same ethic meeting the AI work).

Throughline, one line: a receptive, whole-seeing, non-clinging, reverent-without-trusting moral seriousness — yin before yang — that refuses to become, in the name of safety, the controlling and unattuned thing it fears.

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