The loneliness of the long-distance
truck driver
WILLIAM G. LYCAN AND ZENA RYDER
In one sense (among many) of the word
‘conscious’, a mental state is a conscious state iff its subject is aware
of being in that state. Thus, in this sense of ‘conscious’, a conscious
decision is a decision that one is aware of making, a conscious memory
is a memory that one is aware of having. ‘Inner sense’ or ‘higher-order
perception’ (HOP) theories ‘of consciousness’ are concerned primarily with
consciousness in the sense just outlined.
According to
such Lockean theories, for a mental state to be a conscious state (again,
for its subject to be aware of being in it) is for the subject to detect
or register that state internally, to be in a quasi-perceptual state that
represents the original state. For Jane’s mental state M to be conscious,
Jane must have a higher-order perception-like representation of M, and
if M is not conscious, it follows that Jane lacks such a higher-order ‘perception’.
Armstrong (1968,
1981a, 1981b) is the leading contemporary proponent of a HOP theory. He
illustrated the theory using a memorable example that has become very familiar
in the consciousness literature: that of the long-distance truck driver.
If you have driven for a very
long distance without a break, you may have had experience of a curious
state of automatism, which can occur in these conditions. One can suddenly
‘come to’ and realize that one has driven for long distances without being
aware of what one was doing, or, indeed, without being aware of anything.
One has kept the car on the road, used the brake and the clutch perhaps,
yet all without any awareness of what one was doing. (1981a: 12)
In this kind of case, Armstrong thinks that
‘something mental is lacking’ (1981a, 12). So what is it that the
driver lacks when he is on autopilot? Armstrong says,
The driver in a state of automatism
perceives, or is aware of, the road. If he did not, the car would be in
a ditch. But he is not currently aware of his awareness of the road. He
perceives the road, but he does not perceive his perceiving, or anything
else that is going on in his mind. He is not, as we normally are, conscious
of what is going on in his mind.... The driver in the automatic state is
one whose ‘inner eye’ is shut: who is not currently aware of what is going
on in his own mind. (1981a: 14)
The example has been gladly taken up by
other theorists, including Lycan (1987, 1996), Güzeldere (1995), Carruthers
(2000), and Levine (2001).
So the idea
is that, whilst on autopilot, the driver lacks awareness of his perceptions
(of the road, and so on); he does not have any higher-order ‘perceptions’
of his first-order perceptions. And when the driver ‘comes to’, he gains
higher-order perceptions and thus his perceptions become conscious. The
example appears to illustrate the HOP theory very nicely. It seems to exhibit
the contrast between conscious and unconscious perceptions, and how a HOP
theory can neatly accommodate that contrast. However, we believe that the
example does not, after all, usefully illustrate the HOP theory.
Armstrong says
that the difference between the driver’s autopilot state and the normal
state is that the driver is not having HOPs, while normal (non-autopilot)
people are having HOPs. It does indeed seem likely that the driver, whilst
on autopilot, lacks HOPs of his first-order perceptions, and is not aware
of those perceptions. But that hardly shows that having HOPs is required
for not being on autopilot. For the driver to come to, it doesn’t
seem necessary that he suddenly acquire HOPs. What seems to change in the
driver when he comes to is not a sudden awareness of his perceptions (i.e.,
not a sudden acquisition of HOPs), but rather some change in his awareness
of, or attention to, the road and other elements of the environment.
In which case, the presence or absence of HOPs does not seem to mark the
difference between non-autopilot driving and autopilot driving – and so
the example does not usefully illustrate the HOP theory.<1>
After all,
what happens when the driver comes to? Does he say, ‘Good Lord, I’m now
aware of being in such-and-such sensory states’? Surely not; he says, ‘Good
Lord, I’m on Rte. 153 and I must have come through three traffic lights.’
It is the road he realizes he has not been attending to, not his own perceptual
states. (As we’ve said, it’s probably true that whilst on autopilot, he
has not been attending to those either, but that is not what strikes him
when he comes to.)
In order to
account for the phenomena of automatism or autopiloting and ‘coming to’,
more distinctions must be made. There are two things missing from the autopilot
driver: HOPs, and a normal degree of attention to the road.<2>
Thus, we also distinguish normal attention to the road from merely (or
minimally) perceiving the road, because the driver does perceive the road
but does not have a normal level of attention to the road-features perceived,
or possibly to any external-world features at all. A more alert driver
could have a normal level of attention to the road without having HOPs,
and the more alert driver could be thus more alert without being aware
of any of his own mental states. In which case we need not allude to HOP
in order to explain autopiloting.
So: we agree
that the autopilot driver does not completely lack awareness of the road
(he does perceive the road features, or he would crash), though it is fair
to say that he has only a low degree or minimal type of awareness of it.
But clearly he does lack something. And an obvious candidate for what he
lacks is awareness of seeing the road; that is, a lack of awareness
of his own mental states. Armstrong may have been assuming that the lack
must be a total lack of some awareness. But such an assumption would be
groundless. As we’ve said, we think the phenomena are better explained
by the driver’s lack of normal attention to the road. And we have been
given no reason to think that the driver’s awareness of his own mental
states when he comes to differs at all from when he is on autopilot.
Perhaps Armstrong
would resist the foregoing analysis, by appeal to his notion of ‘reflex’
consciousness, which he compares to ‘reflex seeing’. Reflex seeing is the
inattentive seeing that occurs most of the time (‘[t]he eyes have a watching
brief at all times that we are awake and have our eyes open’, Armstrong
1981b: 63). But some of the time, seeing is not merely reflex; we can engage
in scrutinizing or attentive seeing. We are not aware of reflex seeing;
we may or may not be aware of scrutinizing. Similarly, according to Armstrong,
‘inner sense’ can be either reflex or scrutinizing. It is scrutinizing
when, for example, we indulge in some serious ‘observation’ of our own
bodily sensations or our current emotional state. In contrast, reflex introspection
is ‘normally always present while we are awake, but... is lost by the...
driver’ (1981b: 63). Like reflex seeing, reflex introspection is not itself
‘perceived’.
So, in order
to resist our analysis of the autopilot phenomena in terms of attention
instead of HOPs, Armstrong might say that what happens to the driver when
he comes to is that he re-acquires merely reflex consciousness of his mental
states. This would explain why the truck driver does not exclaim, ‘Good
Lord, I’m now aware of being in such-and-such sensory states’. The driver
does indeed begin ‘perceiving’ his perceptions again, but he does not introspect
that activity itself and so that is not what he would report. On this view,
non-autopilot mentation is always conscious, though it need be so only
to the reflex degree. (In Armstrong and Malcolm 1984 Armstrong says, ‘Normally,
introspective consciousness is of a pretty relaxed sort. The inner mental
eye takes in the mental scene, but without making any big deal of it’ (120).)
But now the
claim becomes a substantive and controversial thesis. On the basis of what
argument does Armstrong maintain that non-autopilot activity must be constituted
by awareness (even if only ‘reflex’) of one’s own mental states? He gives
none. So even if one enthusiastically accepts a HOP theory, one may well
balk at Armstrong’s claim that what is distinctive of non-autopilot activity
is having HOPs. (In contrast to Armstrong’s view of the ubiquity of conscious
mental states, Lycan 1999 has contended that, in the present sense of ‘conscious’,
we do not have very many conscious mental states at any given time.)
We have argued
that non-autopilothood does not require HOPs. Conversely, it also seems
to us that autopiloting does not require lack of HOPs, even though a driver
on autopilot would usually lack HOPs. To show that, we need a counterexample
in which the driver is on autopilot despite having HOPs of his perceptions
of the road. Though that idea sounds slightly weird, we believe we do have
such a counterexample: The driver is a bit of a philosopher and has been
reading Descartes. He knows about the Gestalt shift whereby one stops looking
right through one’s perceptual experiences (without even realizing one
is having perceptual experiences) and snaps into the Cartesian movie theater,
looking at one’s Russellian sense-data and wondering whether there is any
external world at all. Musing, the driver does actually snap into Cartesian
solipsist mode, brackets the external world, and examines the character
of his perceptual experiences as such. He ceases to pay normal attention
to the road. He is now on autopilot. But he is having HOPs directed upon
his visual experiences (that are in fact of the road).
Thus the autopilot
driver may or may not have HOPs of his perceptions, and a normal, non-autopilot
driver may or may not have HOPs. And so the contrast between being on autopilot
and not being on autopilot is not explained by the absence or presence
of HOPs. And as such, the truck driver example fails to exhibit an advantage
of the HOP theory. Indeed, contra Armstrong and those who have followed
him, it is hard to see what the driver example has to do with HOP at all.
So we maintain
that, despite his pedigree, the long-distance truck driver should be abandoned
by HOP theorists.
The University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3125, USA
ujanel@email.unc.edu
zena@unc.edu
Footnotes
1. Güven Güzeldere
(1995) makes a related point about the truck driver example, but as a criticism
of HOP theories; he does not draw our conclusion (which is no such criticism).
2. Here the two of us tend
to disagree with each other. WGL believes the driver is paying no
attention to the road, while ZR holds that the driver is paying only
scant attention to it. But since that issue is entirely empirical,
neither of us makes her/his bet with much confidence. We shall hereafter
speak neutrally of the driver's failing to pay "normal attention."
References
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University Press.
Armstrong, D.M. 1981b. What is consciousness?
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Armstrong, D.M., and N. Malcolm 1984.
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