The Enlightenment Archive represents a curated collection of links and documents intended to enlighten and illuminate the reader’s understanding. The core idea is to act as a repository of knowledge designed to “cure our ignorance” by providing intellectual “paths to perspective” and offering a “wellspring of understanding” that fosters clarity and dispels confusion. It serves as a symbolic library or resource meant to actively “kindle the mind” of the individual.
Beyond the Cognitive Map: From Place Cells to Episodic Memory – From David Redish
The book, Beyond the Cognitive Map: From Place Cells to Episodic Memory by A. David Redish, published in 1999, synthesizes a comprehensive computational theory of rodent navigation to understand the more general function of the hippocampus in episodic memory. It argues that the hippocampus is not solely a “cognitive map” for space, but rather a system that performs two primary, computational roles: self-localization—reinstantiating an animal’s context (or spatial map) after a significant break in experience—and route replay—storing and replaying recently traveled paths (sequences) during sleep to facilitate the consolidation of memory into other brain areas.
Alan Watts’s “A Psychedelic Experience – Fact or Fantasy?”
Alan Watts’s essay, “A Psychedelic Experience – Fact or Fantasy?” (published in the collection LSD, The Consciousness-Expanding Drug in 1964 ), argues that the unusual states of consciousness induced by psychedelic drugs like LSD and mescaline—often dismissed as “hallucinations” or “psychoses” by a prejudiced psychiatric establishment —are valid, though intensified, ways of experiencing the world. Watts suggests that the psychedelic sensation of “unity with the cosmos” and the dissolution of the “ego boundary” (the self confined to the skin) is consistent with the modern scientific description of the organism/environment as a unified field or transaction. The experience functions as an urgently needed “trigger” to overcome an ingrained sense of separateness, shifting attention from a focused “spotlight” that divides the world into “bits” to a “floodlight” that exposes relationships, unity, and the immense, gratuitous beauty of the everyday world.
Alvin Goldman – Readings in Philosophy and Cognitive Science
This excellent book gives an overview of current events in cognitive science that are relevant for philosophers. It sometimes goes into considerable technical detail – but the details are always the important ones – important for philosophy that is. If you are interested in the Philosophy of mind, this is a definite recommendation.
An Invitation to Cognitive Science – 2nd Edition,
The excerpt from An Invitation to Cognitive Science – 2nd Edition, edited by Lila R. Gleitman and Mark Liberman and published in 1995, features a chapter titled “Some Philosophy of Language” by James Higginbotham. The chapter, presented as a dialogue between a Syntactician (SYN), a Semanticist (SEM), a Logician (LOG), and a Philosopher (PHIL), focuses on a challenging linguistic construction: the naked infinitive complement (e.g., Mary saw John leave). The core discussion centers on the hypothesis that this structure, unique to verbs of perception and causation, refers not to a proposition (a statement that can be true or false, like that John left), but to a situation or event—a “perceptual object”—which explains its unique syntactic behavior, such as the absence of a passive form and its semantic properties, including the certainty of the complement’s truth and the preservation of substitutivity of identity.