BUDDHIST PHENOMENOLOGY AND THE PROBLEM OF ESSENCE

In this paper, I intend to make a case for Buddhist phenomenology. By Buddhist phenomenology, I mean a phenomenological interpretation of Yogācāra’s doctrine of consciousness. Yet, this interpretation will be vulnerable if I do not justify the way in which the anti-essentialistic Buddhist philosophy can countenance the Husserlian essence. I dub this problem of compatibility between Buddhist and phenomenology the ‘problem of essence’. Nevertheless, I argue that this problem will not jeopardize Buddhist phenomenology because: 1) Yogācārins, especially late Yogācārins represented by Xuanzang do not articulate emptiness as a negation but as an affirmation of the existent; 2) Husserl’s phenomenological essence is not a substance that Yogācārins reject but the ideal sense (Sinn) that Yogācārins also stress. After resolving the problem of essence, I formulate Buddhist phenomenology as follows: on the epistemological level, it describes intentional acts of consciousness; on the meta-epistemological level, it entails transcendental idealism

The FRB 121102 Host Is Atypical among Nearby Fast Radio Bursts

We search for host galaxy candidates of nearby fast radio bursts (FRBs), FRB 180729.J1316+55, FRB 171020, FRB 171213, FRB 180810.J1159+83, and FRB 180814.J0422+73 (the second repeating FRB). We compare the absolute magnitudes and the expected host dispersion measure DMhost of these candidates with that of the first repeating FRB, FRB 121102, as well as those of long gamma-ray bursts (LGRBs) and superluminous supernovae (SLSNe), the proposed progenitor systems of FRB 121102. We find that while the FRB 121102 host is consistent with those of LGRBs and SLSNe, the nearby FRB host candidates, at least for FRB 180729.J1316+55, FRB 171020, and FRB 180814.J0422+73, either have a smaller DMhost or are fainter than FRB 121102 host, as well as the hosts of LGRBs and SLSNe. In order to avoid the uncertainty in estimating DMhost due to the line-of-sight effect, we propose a galaxy-group-based method to estimate the electron density in the intergalactic regions, and hence, DMIGM. The result strengthens our conclusion. We conclude that the host galaxy of FRB 121102 is atypical, and LGRBs and SLSNe are likely not the progenitor systems of at least most nearby FRB sources. The recently reported two FRB hosts differ from the host of FRB 121102 and also the host candidates suggested in this paper. This is consistent with the conclusion of our paper and suggests that the FRB hosts are very diverse

Feature Selective Networks for Object Detection

Objects for detection usually have distinct characteristics in different sub-regions and different aspect ratios. However, in prevalent two-stage object detection methods, Region-of-Interest (RoI) features are extracted by RoI pooling with little emphasis on these translation-variant feature components. We present feature selective networks to reform the feature representations of RoIs by exploiting their disparities among sub-regions and aspect ratios. Our network produces the sub-region attention bank and aspect ratio attention bank for the whole image. The RoI-based sub-region attention map and aspect ratio attention map are selectively pooled from the banks, and then used to refine the original RoI features for RoI classification. Equipped with a light-weight detection subnetwork, our network gets a consistent boost in detection performance based on general ConvNet backbones (ResNet-101, GoogLeNet and VGG-16). Without bells and whistles, our detectors equipped with ResNet-101 achieve more than 3% mAP improvement compared to counterparts on PASCAL VOC 2007, PASCAL VOC 2012 and MS COCO datasets

P03. Role of Prefrontal Cortical Dopamine Transmission in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Opiate Addiction Vulnerability

Background PTSD and opiate addiction share strong co-morbidity and the inability to suppress obtrusive memory recall related to either stressful or rewarding experiences may be an underlying neuropsychological feature triggering PTSD and/or addiction. Our previous research has shown that dopamine (DA) transmission in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) strongly modulates emotional memory formation: activation of the DA D4 receptor (D4R) strongly potentiates the emotional salience of normally non-salient fear memories whereas DA D1 receptor (D1R) activation blocks the behavioural recall of fear memory. Thus, while intra-PFC D4 transmission strongly controls the acquisition of emotional memory, D1 transmission is selectively involved in the recall phase of emotional memory processing. Therefore, we are aiming to test the role of PFC dopamine transmission in emotional memory regulation and opiate sensitivity. Methods Using a pre-clinical model of PTSD in rats, we examined if recall of associative fear memory would increase subjects’ sensitivity and vulnerability to morphine addiction. We also examined if blocking traumatic memory recall with PFC D1R stimulation may block this effect and if artificially creating a fear memory with PFC D4R stimulation would increase morphine reward sensitivity. Using an olfactory fear conditioning paradigm, we conditioned salient or non-salient associative fear memories by delivering supra-threshold (0.8 mA) vs. sub-threshold (0.4 mA) foot shock conditioning cues, and tested if recalling these memories increased sensitivity to morphine’s rewarding properties, measured in a conditioned place preference (CPP) paradigm. We then examined the effects of intra-PFC DA D1R/D4R activation on expression and acquisition phases of associative fear memories and the subsequent influence on morphine reward sensitivity. Results Rats receiving supra-threshold fear conditioning showed strong associative fear memories and strongly potentiated morphine reward sensitivity. PFC activation of D1 receptor transmission with SKF 81297 (10-100 ng), dose-dependently blocked the recall of fear memory and similarly blocked the potentiation of morphine reward CPP through a cyclic AMP-dependent molecular pathway. In contrast, PFC D4 activation with PD-168077 (50 ng) during memory acquisition, created false fear memories in rats receiving sub-threshold foot shock. Remarkably, D4-mediated potentiation of normally non-salient fear memories also caused a dramatic potentiation in morphine reward sensitivity. Conclusion & Interdisciplinary Reflection Our findings have important implications for the role of the PFC DA receptor transmission in PTSD-related traumatic memory acquisition and recall and suggest that dysregulation of PFC DA transmission may underlie co-morbidity between PTSD and opiate addiction