Wherein I Establish That I am an Eclectic Reader

I got a lot of reading done during my travels last week. I reread Daniel Dennett’s “Consciousness Explained” and found that it made much more sense the second time around. I had read several other books about consciousness since I first picked up Dennett’s book on the subject. Dennett likens consciousness to a virtual machine running on our brains. He does a pretty thorough job of discrediting the notion of a homunculus in our heads that directs everything and constitutes the center of consciousness.

An interesting aspect of Dennett’s argument is his recognition that there is no reason for us to believe that our intuition about our minds and how they work approximates reality. Why would evolution have endowed us with access to how our brains work beyond what is needed to function in the world? Accordingly, Dennett reckons that counter-intuitiveness should not disqualify a theory of the mind from consideration even though we think we know how our minds operate through introspection.

I have long believed that consciousness or sentience is overrated. It seems to me that most of what my brain does is unconscious, and what conscious activity there is appears to be mainly taken up with rationalization of what my unconscious mind has already decided. My consciousness is engaged in telling itself stories about what Vache Folle is up to. Occasionally, I have to attend to something novel with all my faculties, but I frankly do my best work when I get into a flow and let consciousness dissolve.

I also read Wm Dever’s “Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From?” Here is a link to an unfavorable review: http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0LAL/is_3_33/ai_107759382. I disagree with the reviewer. I thought Dever’s arguments for a local Canaanite origin of the Israelites were compelling. He summarizes the archaeological record in a way that lay readers will find accessible.

I have often heard it said that archaeology consistently supports the Biblical narrative, and I never had much interest in Middle Eastern archaeology to check this out for myself, so I was surprised to learn that this claim is outrageously false. Archaeology has not been kind to a literal interpretation of the Old Testament as history. In fact, there is nothing to support either the story of the Exodus or the story of the Conquest of Canaan. These seem to be something that the Israelite historians of several centuries later read back into history as part of their production of a national consciousness and claims to an exceptional place in the world and in history (my interpretation, not Dever’s). I never really took this part of the Old Testament as truth. In fact, the supposedly genocidal Israelis were an embarrassment , so I am not disturbed by this at all.

My only gripe with the work is Dever’s insistence on referring to postmodernist scholars as “nihilists” for their skepticism about the record and about the whole historical enterprise. Dever declines to attribute motives to the authors of the Bible and prefers to assume that they believed the history as they wrote it to be true, but this position is just as conjectural as that of the postmodernists he criticizes.