Candrakīrti on Deflated Episodic Memory: Response to Endel Tulving's Challenge

ABSTRACTIn my response to Ganeri's [2018] paper, I take Buddhagosha's deflationary account of episodic memory one step further through the analysis of the Madhyamaka philosopher Candrakīrti who, like Buddhagosha, explicitly defends episodic memory as a recollection of the objects experienced in the past, rather than subjective experience. However, unlike Buddhagosha, Candrakīrti deflates episodic memory by showing the incoherence of the Sautrāntika-Yogācāra's thesis that episodic memory requires the admission of reflexive awareness. Also unlike Buddhagosha, Candrakīrti shows the incoherence of the Mimāṁsāka-Naiyāyika's self-implication requirement thesis, therefore directly countering Tulving's challenge to the Buddhist philosophers, by arguing that episodic memory is capable of mental time travel without any reference to the operation of enduring self. I will thus suggest that Candrakīrti may have even greater success in deflating the self-implication requirement of episodic memory

Hypercytokinemia: Increased or decreased innate immunity?

The adipose tissue is an active endocrine organ which secretes proinflammatory cytokines and chemokines resulting into raised serum levels. Hypercytokinemia has been interpreted as raised level of innate immunity and its evolution is interpreted as a response to increased chances of infection under starvation conditions in which the thrifty phenotype evolved. If starvation and infection challenges co-occurred during hunter gatherer life, thrifty genotype and infection resistant genotype may have co-evolved. An inherent weakness of this explanation is that in obesity or insulin resistance there is no evidence of increased resistance to infections. The raised levels of inflammatory cytokines have not been demonstrated to combat infections or enhance wound healing. We suggest that the raised chemokine levels actually decrease peripheral innate immunity. The normal movement of monocyte-macrophages and neutrophils from blood vessels to injured tissue is under a chemokine gradient. A gradient results from the difference between the basal levels of chemokines and those secreted by the injured tissue. Increase in the basal level is expected to weaken the gradient thereby decreasing extravasation and infiltration. Using diffusion kinetics we show that a small rise in basal levels can cause substantial reduction in cell infiltration. This interpretation is consistent with the behavioural switch hypothesis proposed by Watve and Yajnik which suggests that obesity and insulin resistance mark a transition from “soldier” to “diplomat” lifestyle. Hypercytokinemia may have evolved as a mechanism of disinvestment in peripheral innate immunity since the diplomat lifestyle is less injury prone. We evaluate the two alternative hypotheses by available evidence

Fixed Point Results in Soft Fuzzy Metric Spaces

The primary objective of the paper is to present the Banach contraction theorem in soft fuzzy metric spaces while taking into consideration a restriction on the soft fuzzy metric between the soft points of the absolute soft set. A new altering distance function, namely the Ψ -contraction function, is introduced on soft fuzzy metric spaces, and some fixed point results are proven by considering soft mappings that comprise Ψ -contraction with the continuity of soft t-norm. In addition to that, some illustrations are supplied for the support of the established soft fuzzy Banach contraction theorem and fixed point results over Ψ -contraction mappings. The obtained results generalize and extend some well-known results present in the literature on fixed point theory