Utopia on earth and morality without guilt (with Joe Carlsmith)
Spencer Greenberg and Joe Carlsmith discuss categories of utopia, animal ethics, emotional attachment, and consciousness. They explore challenges in defining utopia, the ethics of creating happy lives, and the concept of clinging in meditation.
Deep Dive Analysis
12 Topic Outline
Defining Utopia: Concrete vs. Sublime Visions
Challenges of Creating Shared Utopian Visions
Inspiring Utopian Visions Through Extrapolation
The Value of Creating New Happy People
Objections to Creating New Happy People and Repugnant Conclusions
Morality: Wholehearted Approach vs. Morality as Taxes
Psychological Burdens and Set Points in Moral Action
Reversible vs. Irreversible Worldview Changes
Understanding Clinging and Non-Attachment in Meditation
Applying Non-Clinging to Real-World Relationships like Parenting
The Difficulty and Progress of Philosophical Questions
Rethinking Consciousness: Dualism and Illusionism
7 Key Concepts
Concrete Utopia
A type of utopian vision imagined in human-scale, specific terms, focusing on tangible details like meeting family or engaging in specific activities. While relatable, these visions often face objections when details become too specific.
Sublime Utopia
A type of utopian vision that foregrounds its incomprehensibility, emphasizing how radically different and profoundly good the best possible future could be. It aims to inspire by suggesting a goodness beyond current human comprehension, often by extrapolating from peak experiences.
Morality as Taxes
A frame for morality where moral demands are experienced as external obligations that invade personal space and require giving up something cherished. This perspective can lead to feelings of guilt, defensiveness, or despair about ever meeting moral standards.
Wholehearted Morality
An alternative frame for morality that bypasses defensiveness by focusing on what one would truly care about most if they fully understood a situation. It encourages direct engagement with one's values and can lead to actions driven by genuine care, regret, or sadness rather than external obligation.
Clinging
A specific flavor of experience characterized by contraction, tightness, clenching, and a 'not okay-ness,' often involving a grasping or pushing-away sensation. It is distinct from caring or valuing, which can exist without this contracted feeling.
Non-Attachment
The absence of clinging, characterized by openness, receptivity, freedom, and a willingness to relate directly to the world as it is, even if difficult. It allows for continued caring and engagement with the world without the suffering or restrictive nature of clinging.
Illusionism of Consciousness
A philosophical view that suggests phenomenal consciousness, as we typically conceive it, is an illusion. Instead of consciousness being a 'thing' or a 'screen,' it's understood as a story or representation told by the brain, where the brain represents something as phenomenally conscious even if no such 'thing' exists.
8 Questions Answered
Humans tend to envision utopia in two main ways: 'concrete utopias,' which are imagined in specific, human-scale terms, and 'sublime utopias,' which emphasize their incomprehensibility and radical difference from current reality.
It's difficult because as soon as specific details are added to a utopian vision, people tend to find objections. Additionally, dystopias are easier to write stories about due to inherent conflict, and many utopian/dystopian depictions serve as commentaries on contemporary political issues rather than genuine future possibilities.
Joe Carlsmith argues that there is something profoundly significant and good about creating new people who will live wonderful lives, based on a 'golden rule' intuition derived from his own gratitude for existing.
Common objections include the brute intuition that creating new happy people is neutral, metaphysical concerns about whether it can be 'better for' a non-existent person to exist, and practical implications regarding obligations to maximize population or concerns about overpopulation.
Instead of framing morality as external obligations ('morality as taxes') that can induce guilt and defensiveness, a 'wholehearted' approach focuses on what one would genuinely care about most if they fully understood a situation, allowing for altruistic action to stem from direct care and a desire to align with one's deepest values.
Clinging is a contracted, tight, and 'not okay-ness' flavor of experience, often characterized by grabbiness or pushing away, while caring can exist without this feeling. Non-attachment involves letting go of clinging while continuing to care, leading to a more open, free, and skillful engagement with the world.
While fundamental questions like 'what is consciousness?' remain largely unresolved, philosophy makes progress by clarifying conceptual landscapes, delineating distinct views, and identifying incompatibilities (e.g., impossibility results in population ethics). Sometimes, progress involves realizing that certain questions are confused or meaningless.
Illusionism proposes that phenomenal consciousness, as commonly understood, is an illusion. It suggests that our brains represent or tell a story that phenomenal consciousness is present, even if there isn't a distinct 'thing' or 'object' corresponding to that representation, similar to how an illusion of an apple is a representation without a physical apple.
16 Actionable Insights
1. Adopt Wholehearted Moral Frame
Instead of viewing moral demands as external ’taxes’ that require sacrifice, cultivate a ‘wholehearted’ frame by asking what you would truly care about most if you fully understood a situation. This approach bypasses defensiveness and connects with your direct care for things in the world, making altruistic action an expression of your values.
2. Distinguish Non-Clinging from Indifference
Understand that the goal of non-clinging in practices like meditation is not to become indifferent or blank, but to shed the contracted, tight feeling of clinging while continuing to care deeply about things. This resolves the confusion that spiritual practices require abandoning all values and investments in the world.
3. Practice Non-Clinging in Meditation
Use meditation to build the mental muscle of noticing the ‘clinging’ flavor of experience—which feels contracted, tight, and pushy—and learning to let go of it. This practice helps promote a more open, fluid relationship with what’s happening internally and externally.
4. Reduce Clinging to Alleviate Suffering
Actively work to reduce clinging in your life, especially in relationships, as it often leads to suffering for yourself (e.g., anxiety, control) and others (e.g., restriction, compromised relationships). A non-clinging mental space fosters openness, freedom, and more skillful engagement with reality.
5. Skepticism Towards Totalizing Ideologies
Exercise skepticism towards arguments that demand radical life alteration or totalizing ideologies, especially those requiring extreme sacrifices. Your hesitations might be valid forms of resistance or healthy balance, not signs of moral defect, as many such arguments can lead in very bad directions.
6. Prioritize Healthy Moral Orientation
Recognize the risk of psychological harm and self-destructive responses when engaging with moral demands. Pragmatically choose orientations towards ethical issues that are most healthy and appropriate for you, as internal psychological friction can hinder effectiveness and lead to burnout.
7. Mind Your Moral Set Point
Be aware that your psychological ‘set point’ for moral comparison (e.g., moral perfection, average person, past self) significantly impacts your self-perception and well-being. While there isn’t one ‘right’ answer, it’s possible to make mistakes by misunderstanding your own values or the world.
8. Balance Trust and Skepticism
Navigate life’s irreversible commitments and choices by balancing trust (in people, communities, ideas, yourself) with appropriate skepticism. Avoid both excessive hesitation (being ’too cool to believe’) and believing ‘way too hard’ in a way that leads to irreversible negative outcomes.
9. Defer to Future Wisdom
When facing deeply uncertain philosophical questions (e.g., consciousness, morality), recognize our current ignorance and try to defer irreversible actions. Make room for future generations to gain more wisdom and understanding before making definitive, unchangeable decisions.
10. Abandon ‘Start from Scratch’ Philosophy
Recognize that you cannot build your worldview or philosophical understanding from a blank slate or ‘out of nothing.’ Instead, acknowledge that you are always ‘in motion,’ using your existing brain and frameworks, and avoid the frustrating project of trying to build everything from scratch philosophically.
11. Extrapolate from Peak Experiences
To envision utopia, identify moments of profound goodness (joy, love, beauty, connection) in your life, relationships, or community, and then imagine extrapolating much, much further in that direction. This provides substantive evidence of what’s possible and helps connect emotionally with the idea of utopia.
12. Embrace Sublime Utopian Vision
Cultivate a more sublime vision of utopia, being conscious of just how radically different and good the best possible world could be, rather than limiting it to concrete, human-scale terms. This helps avoid the failure modes of concrete visions, such as objections to specific details or feeling small and parochial.
13. Envision Dynamic Utopia
When imagining utopia, incorporate a dynamic quality of ever-deepening journeys, increasing intensity, beauty, and understanding, rather than a static state. This can make the vision more compelling and less prone to feeling boring or repetitive.
14. Acknowledge Future People’s Importance
Recognize that actions affecting future, non-existent people (e.g., setting a bomb that will harm them) are morally wrong, which implies that non-existent beings matter to some extent. This challenges the view that only existing beings have moral standing.
15. Improve Life for Existing Beings
If you have the option to give a created being a better life, it is wrong not to do so, regardless of the initial conditions of their creation. This implies a continuous ethical obligation to enhance well-being for those who exist.
16. Use Intuition Pumps for Dilemmas
When grappling with complex moral dilemmas, like population ethics, try to find a relatable ’equivalent’ (e.g., puppies instead of lizards) that evokes a clearer emotional or intuitive response. This can help you better understand your own moral pulls and the tensions in the argument.
6 Key Quotes
What if the great apes had asked whether they should evolve into homo sapiens? Pros and cons. And they had listed on the pro side, oh, we could have a lot of bananas if we became human. Well, we can have unlimited bananas now, but there's more to the human condition than that.
Spencer Greenberg
It's good to make people happy. It's not necessarily good to make happy people, that is, create new people from scratch that are happy.
Spencer Greenberg
I don't want people to be neutral about creating me. So I shouldn't be neutral about creating them.
Joe Carlsmith
I sometimes wonder about whether there's a sort of low-level trauma that a lot of the kind of generation exposed to Peter Singer-type thought experiments are sort of carrying.
Joe Carlsmith
The aspiration to stop clinging can look like an aspiration towards a certain type of indifference or blankness. And I think that's really not, at least as I think about it, the point.
Joe Carlsmith
I have this most palpably, I think, with consciousness. You know, when I kind of look at the human discourse about consciousness, including my own thinking about it, I have some feeling of like, oh God, we just, we know not what we do.
Joe Carlsmith