Driving
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Hello, and welcome to Overthink, the podcast where two philosophers relate big ideas to everyday life. I'm David Peña-Guzman. And I'm Ellie Anderson. Ellie, I want to begin by telling you an amazing story about the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.

Okay. Lacan was obsessed with cars, with driving, and with speed. He'd had this fixation with going as fast as he possibly could whenever he was driving a car. Sounds like me when I was 17. It sounds like you still.

because I've been in a car with you in Los Angeles. But Lacan, on top of driving really fast, also was obsessed with never stopping at a red light. Oh, okay. Yeah, that's a bridge too far. It's like overactive death drive, anybody. And this became an issue with all of his acquaintances, with his friends and friends.

with his family members, of course. Now, this tea is coming straight to you from an article that was published in the New York Review of Books by Jameson Webster, entitled Riding in Cars with Jacques Lacan. Ha!

Where the author talks about how anybody who knew Lacan would talk about this as an issue. It was a problem. So, for example, his patient and also lover, you know, breaking all ethical codes here. Okay, so we got the running red lights, we got the dating patients. Yes. But he had this patient and lover, Catherine Millot, who later wrote a book about her experience with Lacan called Love.

with Lacan. And she writes about how he wouldn't stop. He would go in the wrong direction all the time whenever he was in a car accident.

Okay, so you never want to go on a road trip with that guy. I mean, honestly, I don't think I would have wanted to go on a road trip with Jacques Lacan even before finding this out. But I think this seals the deal. I know. The reality is that he was kind of a dick and he has that reputation for a good reason. So I understand you not wanting to go on a road trip. But you know who did go on a road trip with him? Your boy, Martin Heidegger.

Wait, what? Yes, they had this trip together. And I want to read you a little quote from this Webster article. Once, he took Martin Heidegger and his wife, Elfrida, on a day trip to Chartres to visit the cathedral.

Though Heidegger was a hero of his, Lacan continued to drive at his characteristic high speed despite Elfrida's frantic protestations. As the story goes, Lacan was completely silent on the long drive back as he pressed harder and harder on the gas pedal.

Oh my God. Yeah. And so it turns out that Heidegger was really appalled because he got the sense that maybe Lacan was trying to test his fear of death. And so that definitely put a damper on their relationship. He's like, you wrote a whole book about being toward death. Let's see if you can walk the walk or rather like ride the ride. Let's be toward death. How toward death will you be? Ha ha ha ha.

Yeah, no, for sure. Oh my God, David. Okay, this is almost as, no, this is actually, this is way better than the anecdote I heard about Gottemer, the founder of hermeneutics, who apparently was riding in a car one time when they were like stuck in a roundabout and Gottemer told the driver, you know, the point of the hermeneutic circle is to get out of it. Yeah.

That's also an amazing story. I love that story, but this really takes the cake. Well, and some people close to Lacan have suggested that his approach to driving is actually emblematic of his philosophy. So it's not just like a personal quirk because his philosophy is rooted in the idea of following and disinhibiting desire. You know, it's like put...

the pedal to the metal in terms of psychoanalysis. And so independently of that, this anecdote has definitely fed into his personal mythology as this like philosophical rebel who doesn't care about rules. Although I don't know Lacan super well,

I do know that this is how he was seen in psychoanalytic circles, right? He was constantly pushing against certain norms of Freudian psychoanalysis and pissing off a lot of practitioners along the way. And so I think he very much built himself as a rebel psychoanalyst.

Yeah, and I mean, I had read about this story and his obsession with driving before. For instance, Elizabeth Rudinesco wrote a biography of Lacan where she also talks about this. But at one point, Webster in that article makes it clear that not only was he obsessed with fast driving, but he also used driving in his writings as a metaphor for thinking about the mind and about psychoanalysis. At one point, he even uses driving as a

metaphor for echoing a certain warning about psychoanalysis itself, where he says, look, psychoanalysis is like having a driver's license. The analyst may learn how to quote unquote drive somebody else's mind, you know, like the psyche of the patient. But the fact that you know how to drive the psyche doesn't necessarily mean that you know how the psyche is made and how it works from the inside out. You might have the driver's license, but you're actually not a mechanic.

Hmm. That's interesting. I'm also interested in this way that people are using driving as a metaphor for the mind. We'll come back to that later in the episode. And I can understand why it's caught on because I feel like anytime a new technology catches on,

Theorists are likely to use it as a sort of metaphor for consciousness. We see this especially nowadays with computers, or not just nowadays, but like in the past maybe 60 plus years, this idea of a computer as a metaphor for consciousness. And computers, of course, are quite new, but also so are

cars, right? It's weird that we're all doing this thing that's actually quite new. I did a bit of research on the history of cars for this episode, and I found that there was an explosion in the purchase of cars after Henry Ford introduced the Model T in 1908. And the Model T was one of the first mass-produced vehicles. And so after this came out, then by the middle of the 1920s, it had become very common in the U.S. to own a car. And by 1941, 88% of American households owned at least one car.

Other countries adopted cars a bit later. And of course, the U.S. still remains a very car heavy country. But Asia in particular has seen a big rise in cars in recent decades. And as of 2010, so that's like now, you know, 14, almost 15 years ago. Yeah. There were one billion cars worldwide.

And the U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that the number of vehicles will grow to 2.21 billion by 2050. And much of this growth is driven by India and China. Those numbers are wild to me because they suggest that worldwide there is one car for roughly every eight people in existence. Today, we're talking about driving.

Why has the fact that so many of us zone out while driving been of great interest among philosophers? How has the rise of driving culture shaped our inner and outer landscapes? And how should we approach the ethics of self-driving cars? David, as you and probably many of our listeners know, I live in LA and I also grew up here. So driving has been a big part of my existence since childhood. I will say I am not as fast a driver as I was when I was a teenager, even though you still seem concerned about

my speed. I'm pretty normal now. I don't know. I beg to differ because I have a very clear image of one day when you and I were driving to Oregon and we talked about creating overthink and you were Lacan style pedal to the metal with one hand on the steering wheel and the other one holding a whole avocado

that you were eating for lunch. Yeah, we talked about that in our preview episode for Overthink because that was indeed a time when I was on a real health kick. And so I was actually, I was placing on top of the avocado, I was placing individual anchovies while driving. While driving on an avocado. Just to clarify, this was a personal health kick, not a public health kick.

What's the difference there? I don't think I get that. Well, that you were driving a crazy threat to public health. Oh my gosh. Okay. I just like truly didn't get the joke. I see. I see.

say I don't think I was speeding. I think I was just eating while driving. Yeah, no, no. For me, it was just shocking to see somebody eating like a whole avocado in one hand and like driving with their greasy hands. Well, in my defense, relative to where I grew up, I actually get in very few accidents. I grew up in Glendale, California, which has one of the highest insurance rates in the country. It's known as one of the most dangerous cities for driving. Anyway, so one thing that

One thing that I find interesting about driving, though, is that...

It gives us an immense amount of responsibility, but it's also something that we tend to do out of habit. You know, once we learn how to drive, we go through that arduous process of learning how to drive safely on the freeway or like maybe semi-safely if you're me at 16 years old, we get into the habit of driving, right? And then we're basically on autopilot. And I think this combination of the immense amount of responsibility with the fact that it's just sort of like

a habit that we often aren't even really explicitly paying attention to when we're in the act of doing it, especially if we're driving on roads that we're familiar with, is worth exploring a bit. Because I find that very strange. I don't think there are a lot of other common human experiences that have that combination. Like we're driving a death machine and yet we're like zoning out, maybe occasionally eating an avocado. And

Like, I also think in addition, something I want to talk to you about is the way that cars involve this really new and we might say unnatural way of experiencing time and space. Right. Like new in the course of human history.

But that this new way of experiencing time and space has become default or habitual for many of us, such that I think in Los Angeles in particular, a lot of times when those of us who are used to driving down certain streets end up walking down them, which is like maybe not that common. It's like, oh, my God, this is so slow. There's like nothing to see or do.

Because we're used to the pace of driving. Yeah, which is true in LA. And I mean, I think you're right about this transformation of time and space, of course, because of the change in speed. I mean, before the invention of the automobile, the fastest that you could go was the speed of a horse, right? And that's not sustainable for long periods of time. And the other side of the coin of that extension of speed is

is the compression of space, that suddenly you can go places that you could never go before so that the world shrinks. It's like the opposite of an expansion. And I would say that one of the really intriguing things about driving, aside from the fact that it's habitual, but it's deadly and that it alters our experience of time and space, is that it also alters the parameters of our body schemam.

Because one insight that comes both from phenomenology and from extended mind theory is that when you get used to an object or a machine or a technology that extends your body's typical capacities, those can be capacities for perception, for cognition, or in this case, for movement.

that object can get incorporated into your very sense of where your body begins and ends. And I think that happens with the car. When we drive, we have a feel for the car, right? Like we kind of like,

sense with the car as we are driving, much in the same way that, for example, a visually impaired person may perceive with their walking stick by touching the landscape and generating a certain perception of the environment.

And if you think about the kind of embodied knowledge that goes into driving, I like to think about it in terms of like squeezing into a really tight parking space where if somebody were to ask you, well, how big is that parking space?

You're like, well, I don't really know. I haven't measured it. Okay, well, how big is your car? Well, I also don't really know in inches or centimeters. And yet we have this felt awareness of being able to fit the car right into a parking spot that is millimetrical, even though we don't have that

explicit or reflective knowledge about the dimensions themselves. Oh my gosh. Yeah, David, I experienced this so...

intensely recently because I got a new car a few months ago. As you very well know, I had the same car since I started grad school when I was 21 years old. That was well over a decade ago. I had this car for a very, very long time, my sweet 2004 Acura. And when I finally got a different car a few months ago, it took forever.

for me to get used to the car's new dimensions. It's like a very different size. It's also way newer. I mean, one of the nice things about having a 2004 car is I didn't really care that much about being super nice to it. You know, like if I hit the curb a little bit with my bumper, it wasn't the end of the world. And then with this one, I'm like... A pedestrian here or there, who cares? Okay, no.

No, although, oh my God, David. Okay, I need to like stop anecdote land diving because we have so many things to talk about. But I'm usually really good with pedestrians. I think it's very, very important to be a safe driver for pedestrians. And I'm not like an unsafe...

safe driver. I want to resist this. I know, I do, especially because of the gendered stereotype of women being bad drivers. I think I also need to stop teasing you about that. No, you're good. But I did have one close call with a pedestrian in the past couple of years where I simply didn't see her. And then I was like, oh my God, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. I didn't like truly almost hit her, but I was about to turn right when she was crossing the street. It was Dita Von Teese, the very famous burlesque dancer. Oh, wow. And I was just like, oh,

I'm so sorry. Not because she's Dita Von Teese, but because she was a pedestrian and I was completely in the wrong. But yeah, all is well. It worked out in any case. So I was getting used to the dimensions of my new car and I have a really small garage. And so I was literally like palm sweating, absolutely terrified the first few times I had to get into the garage with my new car, getting out of the car, looking around, seeing if I was okay. And then now it's just like a piece of cake. And I think relative to that,

analogy you were making to the cane, which comes from Merleau-Ponty, this idea that somebody who's visually impaired who uses a cane develops sort of a sense of touch with

from that cane itself, right? We could say the same thing about people who are wheelchair users or like people who are glasses or contacts wearers like myself, just like these prostheses that we use that really become a part of our body in a sense or part of our perception, we could say. It reminds me of what we talked about back in our touch episode with the work of philosopher Matthew Fulkerson, who describes that kind of experience as distal touch, where it's not as though like when you go over a bump in the street,

It's not as though your car is experiencing a bump and you were experiencing it mediated through them. It actually feels like, no, I'm immediately experiencing this bump in the road. And this formation of the habit, I think, is what allows for the experience of zoning out or going on autopilot, right? That the car just becomes like a part of your experience or perception, especially when you're trotting the same roads over and over again. You know what to expect. You develop an intuitive or habitual sense of what's going on.

within your very motor intentionality. So I want to talk a bit more about this experience of zoning out while driving because it has been of real interest among philosophers. Yeah, and especially philosophers of mind who point to this mental state that we enter that is trans-like while we're driving, especially over long distances in roads or freeways that don't have a lot of interruptions.

Because that mental state raises a lot of questions about the nature of the mind, about the relationship between our baseline consciousness and altered states of mind as well. And that state is also called in the literature since at least the 1950s, highway hypnosis, because of the similarities that it shares with the

Trans that we enter when we are hypnotized by a hypnotist. And some of the features that you see shared by those two events are decreased attention to external events, right? When you zone out, you close yourself off to the environment, even though you're still kind of functional in your behavior.

You also see higher reactivity thresholds, which means that it takes a lot more for you to snap out of it, right? Like a sound that normally would get your attention doesn't get your attention, but a loud enough sound will bring you back to alertness. But the threshold for that kind of return is a little bit higher.

And the final similarity that I take to be worth exploring is that in both cases, we have short-term amnesia. So when somebody is hypnotized and they wake up, they don't really know what they just did or what happened to them, right? Right.

And the same thing happens to us when we zone out while driving. We get to our destination and then we're like, hmm, I wonder how I got here. I don't really remember. Turning right, turning left, stopping at a red light. And so that combination of decreased attention, higher sensory thresholds and short-term amnesia

Makes it seem as if the car and the road are literally hypnotizing us. That's interesting because I know a variation of this under a different term that comes out in philosophies of consciousness, including phenomenology and also philosophy of mind, which you mentioned, which is the long distance truck driver problem. Right.

which is that when we drive long distances, we often aren't aware of every step of the process, right? Like we realize only when we're pulling into our driveway that we've somehow driven ourselves home from work or from the long road trip. And when you, so to speak, come to at the end of one of these drives, the question for philosophers is,

Were you conscious during that drive? So this is a long distance truck driver problem. Can we say that you were conscious or not while you were doing that drive because you aren't aware of like having done any of those things that you were actually doing?

And this was a problem first introduced by the philosopher David Armstrong, who suggests that the driver perceives the road, but does not do so consciously. So to the question, were you conscious during the drive? Armstrong will say, no, you weren't. But other philosophers, including the phenomenologists Sean Gallagher and Dan Zahavi, suggest that the driver does perceive the road consciously. Like any perception is conscious by virtue of being perception. But the consciousness of the road is simply pre-reflective.

Yeah, and you can see how that question, our answer to it will depend on our view of consciousness, because in some ways, both answers are kind of limited, right? If you say, oh, no, you weren't conscious. Well, that sounds like you were unconscious, which also doesn't sound like an accurate description since you didn't crash your car. Yeah. You were responsive, you were functional, so on and so forth. And so some kind of engagement with the world must have remained in place despite this cognitive limitation. Yeah.

On the other hand, to say that you were conscious does require you to introduce some distinction between different kinds of consciousness, in this case, reflective or pre-reflective, so on and so forth. And I find that much more helpful than just saying, oh, no, you were outright unconscious because that really doesn't seem appropriate to the circumstance.

Yeah, I'm with you on that. I definitely side with the phenomenologists in thinking that consciousness is a, so to speak, lights on phenomenon, right? Like any experience that we have is conscious. It's just that there are different ways of conceiving of consciousness. And this doesn't mean that we are explicitly aware of all of our patterns, behaviors, etc. It's simply to say that consciousness is

isn't something that emerges through a reflective relation to a first order experience. Consciousness was already there to begin with, right? And so I like that way that you put it. It's not that consciousness emerges on the reflective level, but rather that conscious experiences can be reflective or pre-reflective.

Yeah. And sometimes in the analytic philosophy of mind literature, you get a similar distinction in terms of first order versus second order or higher order experiences. But, you know, this is interestingly enough, really close to my area of research, which is animal studies, because in that field, there is this ongoing debate, of course, about whether or not animals are conscious. And that means that we need to think about in what ways animals are conscious if they are conscious.

And there is a very famous philosopher by the name of Peter Carruthers, who has made a name for himself in the field by arguing that the zoning out mode of consciousness that we experience when we are driving those long distances where we are unresponsive to the world, unaware, amnesiac,

That's the kind of consciousness that non-human animals have at all times. So he basically wants to use this experience that we have while driving as a model for thinking about the consciousness of all non-human animals at all times. So they're always like zoning out while driving. Yeah.

Well, and that's already in Armstrong, actually, in the place where Armstrong develops the long distance truck driver problem or what's since become known as that. He talks about this as being the consciousness of animals as well. Yeah. And I reject that view. I think it gets a couple of things wrong about animals and about consciousness.

And there is another philosopher by the name of Mark Rowland who has written about this. So I'm getting some of these arguments from him. But he points out that one of the problems with thinking about animal consciousness as the zoned out consciousness of the long distance driver is that it conflates two different conceptions of consciousness that we actually want to keep apart. Right.

One is what is called creature consciousness. So when we talk about creature consciousness, we're talking about the property of an organism to have consciousness at all. So we would say that animals have creature consciousness, whereas books and tables and chairs do not.

And so in that sense, we would say, yes, animals are conscious. But the problem is that when people like Carruthers and Armstrong say that animals are not conscious and then they point to the long distance driver problem as evidence for that,

What they're really alluding to is something else. And that is what is called state consciousness. That is, there are some mental states that are conscious and some mental states that maybe are unconscious. So their consciousness is not a property of the whole organism, but of particular mental states. And so when we think about zoning out, zoning

Zoning out is a mental state. And that means that it occurs in the context or within this much broader category, which is creature consciousness. And so the fact that we can have an unconscious moment in the middle of our otherwise conscious life doesn't mean that any organism, human or otherwise, could ever exist in

fully in that moment alone, without that moment being nestled or nested into a larger consciousness. Does that make sense?

Yeah, that absolutely does. And I feel like that puts words to sort of my intuition around this as well, which is just that there's like way too much that's being asked in these higher order theories where we're initially unconscious when we perceive and consciousness only comes about through reflection or some higher order state. There's way too much that's being asked of consciousness because it's limited in that conception to an explicit thematic awareness of what we're actually doing. And I think when you're

conceiving of that, it always has to be in contrast to a different form of awareness. And I think a lot of the critiques of reflection theory have to do with, well, how could the combination of a non-conscious state with another state result in consciousness, right? Like how could the combination of those two manifest in consciousness if the first non-conscious state didn't already have some consciousness effect?

Within it, because how would the higher order state recognize that first order state as itself and which would be what we needed in order to get to a sense of consciousness? Otherwise, it would just be, oh, I have this like higher order perspective on perception, but there's no internal relation between the perceptual state of conscious or sorry, the perceptual state and the conscious state.

So I don't know. That's maybe a bit orthogonal to what you're talking about. But that is, I think, an interesting rebuttal. I hadn't thought about it in terms of this creature versus state consciousness. Yeah. I also think that this view that animals are just consistently zoning out betrays a not in good faith

account of animal behavior, because if you look at me when I zone out while driving, it's very clear that I've zoned out, right? Like, as I said, I look as if I am hypnotized, as if I am absorbed in something that you cannot see, but that controls my mind. And that makes me amnesiac. It makes me inattentive, so on and so forth.

If we take those features of the zoned out state and we apply them to everyday animal behavior, it's very clear that it's not a match, right? Animals are responsive. Animals are attentive to their world. They engage in all sorts of flexible behaviors. And so even without digging into the details of this distinction between first and second order thinking or pre-reflective and reflective experience, I think

That idea already commits you to a really impoverished understanding of animal consciousness that very few people who actually interact with animals would feel comfortable with.

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You've probably gathered by now that this episode is about the experience or phenomenon of driving. And so I just want to mention here as we get into another facet of this discussion that this episode is about driving rather than cars.

And the reason I say that is because we're not talking here about the effects of cars on the climate, which is obviously extraordinarily important. It's just not the focus of what we're talking about today because it's not about the object and effects of cars themselves, but rather about like what it means to drive. Right. And of course, like those are related, but I think conceptually distinct just for the purpose of this episode, because there's like already so much to talk about with driving.

And independently of whether we can or cannot differentiate cars from driving, the fact is that driving has changed our identities over the course of the 20th century. Now, here I want to make a couple of observations about the role of driving in American history and American culture based on Kenneth Jackson's book, The Crabgrass Frontier, which is a book about the ways in which American life has

has been molded from the inside out by the advent of cars and the spread of driving. To begin with, Jackson talks about driving as something that is so pervasive that it has become a

a kind of rite of passage in our culture. For example, when people choose their first car, it's almost as if they are choosing an aspect of their identity, right? We all want a car that fits our personality, as if the car is literally an extension of us for the public eye. And in connection to this, he also talks about the symbolic significance of getting your driver's license, because of course, that's the moment at which you become a real teenager in the United States.

And I mean, beyond that, Jackson talks a lot about the ways in which driving has completely transformed the built environment. He talks about driving theaters, motels, mega malls, and of course, the explosion of suburbia in the 1950s. Yeah. And I think that, as we mentioned earlier, shapes so much of our experience of these spaces, too, because at least...

In LA, it's so obvious that so many swaths of the city are not built for pedestrians. They're built for drivers. And so if you end up being a pedestrian, like it just feels weird. It's not an engaging experience. You sense this was not made for somebody walking. This was made for somebody driving. And in his work, Jackson talks about how some of these changes that in this case you're mentioning in connection to the street extend all the way to our homes.

For example, he talks about the evolution of garages in the U.S. He looks at architectural blueprints of homes from the 1920s to the 1960s, and he notices how over the course of those four decades, the parking garage starts slowly migrating from the outside and the back of the house to the inside.

Yeah, yeah.

By the 1940s, the garage has sort of attached itself to the side of the house like a barnacle so that now you just like pull up, park, and then go into the house without having to hide it. And so even our aesthetic judgments about cars being visible started to change where it was okay for you to see it from the street. Well, and it's almost like it's so common for the garage to be visible that now if we see the facade of a house, we're...

with a garage, we almost like don't even notice it, right? We filter it out in our consciousness. Correct. And he says that that really happens by the 1960s, where the garage actually migrates into the home and it takes sometimes even up to a third of the home. And he has this phrase where he says the car has become a

part of the family. So he's talking about the domestication of the car by virtue of the spread of driving culture and the extent to which we can no longer differentiate inside and outside just from the perspective of domestic life, right? Like the car is inside like a family member or like a pet.

Yeah, I think that is far-fetched to me because we wouldn't say that about the Peloton bike or the treadmill, right? Those are tools. I don't think it's fair to say that the integration of the car into the house means that it's like a family member or a pet. It seems more right to me to say that it just like has become an appliance.

in the house. Maybe, but there is no Peloton room. Well, in some people's house there is. I do have a Peloton, Ellie. Don't say anything. No, that's fine. I'm just saying some people get to devote a whole room to it because they have big houses, unlike me. Yeah, fair enough. And the other structure that I wanted to talk about, because this one hits really close to home, given my experience living in the United States, is the mobile home.

So initially, the mobile home was for recreation or for travel, for leisure, basically. But then it became an object of necessity during the Great Depression. So especially for people who worked in entertainment and for people who worked in sales during the Great Depression, they had no choice but to live in their cars. Eventually, after World War II, the mobile home started morphing into a full-blown office.

And it began to be recognized as such by the state. So, for example, if you lived in a mobile home by the 1950s and 60s, suddenly you needed home insurance and you also were expected to pay real estate tax. And so here we have the inverse of the garage, because if the garage represents the car entering the home and living inside the home alongside us, then

The mobile home represents the car becoming home and us living inside it. And the reason that I say that this is really close to me is because, you know, I come from a low income background and my parents live in a trailer park. Their home is something that you can drive. I didn't know that, actually. Yeah, yeah. Well, actually, in their case, I don't think you can drive it, but you can pull it with a

Yeah, yeah. It's like a double wide or something, maybe. Yeah, exactly. You learn something new about your friend of well over a decade every day if you do a podcast with them. But this is really interesting as an account of how driving has altered our experience of domestic space. But I also think we need to mention how it has altered our perception of time, which is something that we mentioned briefly at the beginning of the episode. Yeah.

The philosopher Paul Virilio has spent a lot of time working out what he calls dromology, which is the study of speed. And it comes from the word dromos in ancient Greek, which means course or path. And dromology, according to Virilio, is the science of the ride, the journey, the drive, the way.

He points out that speed is linked with society's attempts to gain greater and greater wealth. And so he says that when we're thinking about the history of the world, we shouldn't only be thinking about the political economy of riches like wealth, money, capital, but

but also about the political economy of speed. And he says, if time is money, as they say, then speed is power. Over time, Virilio suggests, societies have become more and more accelerated. We can see this through cavalry, right? The move from fighting on foot to fighting on horses, right?

railroads in the 19th century, airplanes in the 20th century, and of course, the car. And I think the car is a particularly interesting case because that's like usually an individually owned and driven vehicle. First,

For Virilio, analyzing acceleration and speed is important, not just like from an experiential perspective, but also as a major political phenomenon. Well, yeah, especially when we think about the ways in which modernity was experienced primarily as a phenomenon of speed and the way in which

Speed also got recruited for all sorts of political projects, including fascism. I'm here thinking about like the Futurist Manifesto. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where fascist enterprises were seen as moving into uncharted terrain at full speed as a way of destabilizing the kind of retrograde political structures of the past. And so I can definitely see that.

Either way, I think part of that analysis also needs to be an exploration of the actual experience of driving a car, not just like the theoretical concept of speed and movement in the abstract. And you and I read a chapter of Lynn Pierce's book, Drive Time, which is about what she calls automotive consciousness. And I want us to talk about this chapter because it's a really fascinating look at the relationship between the car and the car.

and the mind. Yeah, I came across this book in my research for this episode, and I was like, oh my God, this is so overthink. And we decided to read chapter one of it, which is on theorizing automotive consciousness. And the overall thesis of that chapter is that driving is paradigmatic and formative of the way we think. And so as I understood Pierce's

Part of what she's saying is that driving has really appealed to us because it actually echoes the way that we think already. Our thought tends to move across different landscapes, right? We get easily distracted or move on to other things. And so that's part of why we find driving appealing because it actually echoes the character of our consciousness to begin with. But also that the experience of driving in turn helps form thoughts.

our ways of thinking. Yeah, I have to say that I find really titillating this idea that the journeys that we go on in our cars are similar to what the American psychologist William James would call the stream of consciousness and that the two share this kind of cinematic quality where we're seeing scenes pass one after the other. But I'm curious about what you thought about just the analogy that she establishes between those two.

we can certainly establish an analogy between thinking and driving, but I don't buy the claim that there is what she calls an uncanny similarity between the roving of our mind's eye and an automobile's progress through the world. I think this idea that, oh, wow, driving is really similar to the way that we think is

think is an overstatement. I think it really more goes the other way. It's like thinking is such a malleable process and consciousness is such a flexible, aka malleable, sorry, just a synonym, phenomenon that it becomes really easy for us to make analogies between it and whatever is like the main technology of the time, as we mentioned at the beginning of the episode. And so I just think it's

a bit far-fetched to be like, whoa, driving is really similar to the way we think. I actually think it's more the case that thinking is like a lot of different things. Stream, computer, driving, so many writings. Yeah, yeah. Clay, writing tablet. Thank you. Yeah, like these are just some of the metaphors that philosophers have used over the years and millennia to describe the way that the mind is. And I think they all have something right about them, but I don't think it's fair to...

focus on anyone as having a particularly, quote, uncanny similarity to consciousness itself. So I share your hesitation about the analogy because she, Pierce, really kind of digs her heels into this comparison and says that the way in which we can like reverse a car, like change directions is similar to the way in which our mind can go in different directions.

And I actually just straight up disagree with her on that point. There are a number of things that you can do with a car when you're driving that you cannot do with your mind when you are, I guess, existing or like subsisting in time. And just to give you two examples that come to the fore here. One is that you can stop a car. You can.

literally park it, but you cannot park the mind because the mind doesn't stop. The mind continues to have experiences. Yes. Okay. Yes. And so like that already gives me a sense that the analogy breaks down very quickly. Beyond that, I think even though there is an appealing claim to be made that when we like remember the past, we are reversing the car or turning around. I

Actually, there's a limit even to that because I can go on a long journey and then just like turn around and drive all the way back and I will find myself at my starting point. But I actually don't think we can...

retrace our steps in terms of our short-term memory as much as we think we can. Like if I tried to really go through the steps of everything that happened to me in the last four hours, I'm not going to be able to. And so I don't think we have the same relationship to the past in conscious experience than in driving. Although I did like her point that part of what's cool about driving is that it allows us to coexist and

in both the past and the present at the same time, because it's so common that we're engaging in remembering things or like flights of fancy while we're driving. And so that's one thing that I did like about this a lot, because I think there's a lot to like about this, even if I disagree with her on some of these key points, because she says that her experiences driving have instilled in her a love and need for driving as valuable and indeed exceptional thought space. So driving is a slice of time that

where you can just engage in thinking unimpeded. And she says this has actually changed quite a bit since she was first thinking about this in the 1990s and early 2000s, because now with things like Bluetooth technology, you can, you know, like listen to Siri, read your text messages or call people and everything.

actually engage in a more communicative fashion than you could if you were just listening to the radio, let alone driving in silence in the past. And I wonder whether you think that there's something lost there, David. I can say for myself, I love the ability to listen to podcasts, audiobooks, call friends, listen to my text messages while I'm on my long commute home from campus. But Pierce is suggesting that something

is really lost there. Yeah. And she says that the change happened from the 1990s to the 2010s, right? At least in her experience. Yeah. And so I agree with you and with her that driving does produce what she calls a ring-fenced thought space, right? It's like this protected enclave for us to engage in a kind of meditation or rumination that we often are unable to do because we are constantly bombarded by distractions from the outside world, especially other people.

And so I agree with that. And I think that forces us, as she says, to reimagine this vision of driving that we have inherited from the 20th century, where driving appears as purely mechanical, perfunctory, fundamentally alienating because you're, you know, just this atomic subject floating through space in an advanced tin can. And so that I like, although...

She also recognizes that that kind of mental space is not unique to driving. It's something that you can also bring about through

through walking, you know, see our episode on walking or through running, anything that protects the mind from the external world would be able to fulfill that function. And David Pierce also talks about something she calls the driving event. Like, tell us a little bit about that and what you thought of that. Yeah, so the driving event for her is literally the event of driving, which sounds like a terrible way to define the term. Yeah, great description, David. Maybe next week.

We don't want to hear you talk about this. I know. No, but she says that if you look at most anthropologists and sociologists who have written about driving, they all treat driving as if it's always the same thing, just from a different starting point to a different destination. But the actual phenomenology of driving is interchangeable. And she believes that that's a mistake.

There is a section of her chapter where she says, look, you can make the same commute from your home to your work for 15 years from Monday to Friday. And each driving event is ontologically unique. And the reason that each driving event is ontologically unique is because each event is defined by three characteristics. You, of course, have inner variables like what's your state of mind? What are your feelings during the drive?

external variables, what is happening around you. It's not always the same sounds. It's not always the same events that are occurring. And finally, she says the meaning of a driving event is always constituted retroactively from the standpoint of the destination having been arrived at. And so, hmm,

You always have this moment where you consolidate the meaning of the drive that you just did and retroactively project meaning onto it. And she turns to Virginia Woolf, who wrote an essay on driving, to talk about that. And so she's trying to get us to see driving, again, not as this repetitive, mechanical, alienating act, but a meaningful and meaning-creating event that is always hyper-individualized.

That's the driving event. I think maybe I need a little bit of that because I will say I don't really have that moment where I think about the drive I just did and think about how meaningful it was. For me, it's like really most often a point A to point B. And if I'm enjoying a long drive to campus that I'm doing, it's because I'm enjoying listening to a podcast or an audio book. But maybe she's encouraging us. I remember recently I was having trouble like fitting in a daily meditation session.

into my work days when I go to campus. And one of my friends was like, why don't you just make your driving a mindfulness practice? It's not going to be formal meditation, but like at least a mindfulness practice. And I was like,

Oh, interesting thought. And then I proceeded to like not do that. So thanks, Pierce. Maybe I should. Well, that's hard for you to do, Ellie, I think, not because of your personality, but because of where you live. Because in LA, there's a lot of traffic. And Pierce does say that the thing that breaks that ring fence thought space are things like traffic jams.

And those make it impossible for you to have this automotive flaneur experience of really constituting a positive driving event. Well, good luck to those of us trying to find driving events in traffic filled cities. In 2021, Elon Musk told the attendees of a conference hosted by The Wall Street Journal that self-driving cars are absolutely coming and will be one of the biggest transformations ever in human civilization.

David, one of the ways that this has started to show up in our daily lives as Californians is with the rise of Waymo. Waymo is a company that offers self-driving cars as taxis, kind of like Uber or Lyft, but just without a driver. It has this funny kind of

whirring fan on top of it, maybe to alert you to the fact that it doesn't have a driver. And we just got it in LA recently, actually. They're like piloting a program here. But Waymo can't go on freeways, which I think is going to be a pretty big problem for those of us who live in Los Angeles.

because a lot of our Uber or Lyft drives involve freeways. But I know you've already had it for a while in San Francisco. So like, tell us about your experience. Have you driven in a Waymo? Have you, I'm sure seen them around. Like, what's your relationship to Waymo? Okay, so it's really funny that you asked me this because I have a friend from LA who is visiting right now. And so last night we went to a party and we got a Waymo to go to the party. Okay, it's almost like we planned this. I didn't know you were gonna say this. Yeah.

I know. And he was really startled by the very notion of a self-driving car. But then once he was in it, he was really excited to ask questions about it. And we started also talking about the fact that they've been in San Francisco for many, many months now. And once you started looking out for them, you see them everywhere in the city. So on our website,

eight minute drive from my house to this party, we saw no less than 20 Waymos on the streets. Oh my God. At one point there were like five or six at one intersection. So in San Francisco, they have been completely normalized. They are competing with Lyft and Uber, and they give you this kind of personalized experience where you go from point A to point B without a human driver.

Do you like them? I mean, they're a taxi. They're just like any other taxi. I don't understand. Is it like nice not to have to make small talk with somebody? I don't mind the small talk. I also don't mind not having the driver. I'm very indifferent about how I get from point A to point B when it's a paid service. Come on, David, give me something here. Yeah, I know. Okay, so because I'm so desensitized to it, but the first time I got in it, I was a little bit...

That was a little afraid. I'm going to be honest. The truth comes out. Well, there are a couple of things that the Waymo does that you have to get used to. For example, when it starts, it starts a little fast. Like just like it steps on the gas faster than maybe a human driver would because a human driver is like thinking about maybe like comfort for the passengers. The Waymo doesn't give a fuck.

Honestly, he's just like, we're going. And also when it changes lanes, it doesn't merge smoothly. It does a little bit like a turn, a turn into the lane and continues. So it's almost like a 90 degree angle while going fast on a street. Not quite, but it feels more jagged or more abrupt. Okay. But that's probably just like, that's easily something that could be programmed out. Oh yeah, I'm sure. And so the reason that they have been so successful in San Francisco is because San Francisco doesn't have a lot of

highways or freeways. It's a small city and it's been overmapped by self-driving car companies. So like those cars know the city inside and out and they show you a screen while you're driving where you see almost like a video game. The road is

all the cars that are around and little avatars of all the people that are around the space where you're driving. Oh, interesting. Philosophers have been aware of the potential issues with self-driving cars for a long time. Indeed, I think this idea that people sometimes have that philosophy is an ivory tower discipline without real world implications is

reveals itself to be completely false if you know anything about the ethics of self-driving cars and how philosophers have been some of the main players in that conversation. And even before self-driving cars were conceived of as a real live possibility,

There was a thought experiment that's very well known in philosophy that has been used in many discussions around the ethics of self-driving cars. And that is the trolley problem, first theorized by the philosopher Philip of Foot. The trolley problem invites you to consider a situation in which a trolley is hurtling down its tracks. It's completely lost control. And there are five people on the tracks, unaware that the train is approaching.

You're watching the whole situation and you're standing by a lever that will change the train's direction to head in a way where one person who's also unaware of the train stands. If the train is definitely going to kill whoever stands in its way, what will you do? Will you let the train keep going along its merry way and kill five people or will you actively pull the lever, change the direction, and move the train?

changing the outcome of the train, but killing one person. There's a lot more to say about this than we have time to do so here, and I'm sure some of our listeners are familiar with this problem. But when it comes to self-driving cars, the question is really the utilitarian ethical one of how do we minimize suffering harm or death when it's not a human in the driver's seat, but

How do we program these cars to make decisions based on these utilitarian calculuses? And are those calculation-based decisions even the right way to go about this? And ultimately, for some people, this becomes a matter of, well, maybe we shouldn't even have self-driving cars because they would have to make these kinds of calculations that are moral and we should leave morality to humans. Yeah.

Yeah, and the trolley problem, it brings up a lot of moral dilemmas for us. Of course, some of those are about numbers. You know, obviously killing one is better than killing five. But some of the tension, the moral tension that grows out of it also involves moral incrimination, because in the case of you just letting things unfold,

Five people will die, but you're not morally responsible. But if you divert the trolley and you kill the one person, then you personally cost that one death. And so people have very different moral intuitions about that. Yeah, about letting die versus killing. Exactly. And so to be honest, I think the trolley problem is not the right way of thinking about the ethics of self-driving cars because cars are...

very unlikely to be in a situation where they have to choose between the certainty of letting die versus the certainty of killing. But I think it does raise questions about how do you program self-driving cars to make

decisions under conditions of uncertainty. And there is an article from 2020 by Stamatis Karnouskos called Self-Driving Car Acceptance and the Rule of Ethics, where the author, who is a German researcher who works at an AI company called SAP, asked a bunch of people, whatever

ethical school of thought they thought should be built into these cars. And he gave them the options of utilitarianism, deontology, relativism, absolutism, and pluralism. And his survey found that the majority of people are typically on board with either a utilitarian or a deontological regime for self-driving cars, where people

They try to save the majority of people by numbers or they try to do everything in their power to respect the sanctity of life no matter anything else.

else. But they were not on board for the other ones. So relativism, moral absolutism, and moral pluralism were kind of out of the question. Yeah, that doesn't surprise me. I feel like most people are like low-key utilitarians with a dash of deontology. Yeah, I think that's, well, I'll have to think about that. But one really interesting question that came out in this research that made me think a lot was whether if we get to a future where these self-driving cars are privately owned,

Mm-hmm.

And vice versa. Karnouskos asks the following question. Would there be any side effects, for example, the creation of a black market where the technology specialists or those who can afford to pay them would have their cars rigged to deviate from any standard profiles, i.e. turn a utilitarian car to a self-safety first?

Interesting. I feel like the answer would be, yes, certainly. And that's what wealth inequality leads to. And, you know, I think we should keep in mind throughout all of this discussion, too, that

It's not as though humans are particularly good at making these decisions either, nor do we necessarily have the same motivations. Like, we have different programming, let's say, in terms of who we're protecting and not when we're on the road, especially if you were from Glendale like myself. But I think...

So there's something to be said for one about the fact that the conditions of moral decision-making for self-driving cars are really different from the considerations that we have in the trolley dilemma. This is something that the philosopher Andreas Wolkenstein writes about. But I think too, any discussion of this has to keep in mind that humans are horrible drivers. And so there's this book called Karmageddon that I took a look at some excerpts of for this episode. And the author writes that

94 to 96% of car accidents are caused by human error of various types, right? Including speeding, aggressive driving, drunk driving, distracted driving, et cetera. And so I think while self-driving cars seem scary to a lot of us because we're so unfamiliar with how to

think about ethical considerations in like this programming fashion, it seems safe to say that they would generally be way, way, way safer than human driving. And so this actually leads people to question whether now that we have self-driving car technology, humans should actually be banned from driving. And the philosopher William Ratoff talks about this, where he says that there's an argument that by choosing to drive...

drivers are violating the right of other people not to be subject to the unnecessary risks of their driving. Ratov doesn't ultimately agree with that. He concludes that humans still should be able to drive, but that is like a relevant argument to consider. Yeah.

Of course, especially when you make analogies to things like secondhand smoke, right, where you're like causing an unsafe environment for other people. That's what we do when we drive, especially because human psychology is prone to all kinds of errors and lapses of attention. And when you think about the safety of these self-driving cars, you know, the Waymos have never been in a single accident, whatever accidents they've had, because they haven't

cameras going all around have been caused by other drivers. They're not just saying that because they're an evil San Francisco company. Look at my skepticism after just defending the potential safety of self-driving cars. This episode brought to you by Waymo. But I think especially the moral panic that we see around the safety of self-driving cars is kind of

unjustified because of the statistics. And it's really important to focus on the number of lives that would be safe by switching to a transportation system that is not human controlled. And that might be a rational conclusion to make, but I think so many of us are justifiably afraid of the death that these vehicles could cause. We're like Heidegger and Elfrida in the car with Lacan, terrified of what might come next.

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