<ul><li>Retro-futurism can be summarized as the future seen from the past, though sometimes it also incorporates the notion of past seen from the future. </li><li> Sometimes, retro-futurism becomes a sort of “faux nostalgia” — a nostalgia for a future that never happened. </li><li>It is a way to envision how different world designs could look like. </li><li> It works as a retrospection for our society but also often leads to new creative ideas.</li></ul>

What is Retro-futurism? 

<ol><li>Cyberpunk</li><li>Atompunk </li><li>Alternate Histories</li><li>Steampunk</li></ol>

Types of Retro-futurism

Cyberpunk depicts a dark and dystopian retro-future with all the advanced technologies we can ever imagine. The world is controlled by evil organizations and is filled with pain, misery, and chaos. This genre is heavily explored in video games, comics, and popular movies like Blade Runner, Tron, etc.

Cyberpunk

Atompunk adds interesting elements to the retro-futuristic version of the 1950s. The industries are shown running on clean nuclear power, and the city life is faster than ever with bullet trains. Most popular depiction of atom punk is found in Fantastic Four comics, James Bond films, and cartoon shows such as Dexter’s Laboratory.

Atompunk

Alternate history explores changed versions of real historical events and reveals the connected consequences. For example, "What if Einstein is erased from history?", "How would our lives have been without the internet?"﻿﻿Books like Stephen King’s 11/22/63 and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Years of Rice are based on this intriguing idea.

Alternate History 

The 19th century marks an era that drastically transformed the human lifestyle. Steam engines ran and new industries emerged. Steampunk refers to a future that is based in 19th-century settings with grand steam-powered machines (such as steam aircraft, steam cannons, etc) at play.

Steampunk

It it said that the concept was first discussed in a late 1960s book "Retro futurism" by T.R. Hinchliffe. However, there isn't enough evidence to back this up. In the year 1983, an ad about Bloomingdale’s jewelry got published in the New York Times which said “silverized steel and sleek grey linked for a retro-futuristic look”. This was one of the earliest use of the term. Retro-futurism has been an active theme for artistic creation and products. For example, Back to the Future II, or the launch of the first iPhone in 2007, many fictional and real events depict retro-futurism.

The origin and cultural influence of retro-futurism

As an avid fan of retro-futuristic art I think it helps us to discover the limitless possibilities of what our society could be like which we could draw inspiration from. It also furthers the understanding of world we live in and helps us critic and praise it. 

sciencefiction

Science Fiction

technologyandthefuture

Technology & The Future

movies

Movies & Shows

artsandculture

Society, Arts & Culture

Retro-futurism and why it matters: a foray into alternative futures seen from the past

Srinivasan Keshav describes the three-pass approach which acts as a filtering system. It is an iterative and incremental way of reading a paper. It consists of: <ol><li>The First Pass: The bird's-eye view </li><li>The second pass: Grasp the content</li><li>The third pass: Virtually re-implement the paper</li></ol>

The Three Pass Approach 

Goal: To get the big picture of the paper Duration: Less than 10 minutes.Activity: Glancing over the following sections of paper: <ol><li>Abstract</li><li>Title</li><li>Introduction </li><li>Conclusion</li></ol>Ignore the content of section and sub-sections.

The First Pass: The bird’s-eye view

At the end of the first pass you should be able to answer:<ul><li>Category: What is the type of paper? Literature? Prototype?</li><li>Context: What other papers are related to this one? Can you connect it to something else?</li><li>Correctness: This is a validity measurement. Are the assumptions valid? Answer based on your hunch.</li><li>Contributions: Most papers have a contribution section at the beginning. Are these contributions meaningful? Are they useful? Which problems do they solve? Are these contributions novel?</li><li>Clarity: do you think that the paper is well written? Did you spot any grammar mistakes? Any typos?</li></ul>

The 5 C's 

Duration: Can take up to 1 hour. Activity:<ul><li> Read the complete paper. </li><li>Ignore details such as proofs or equations. </li><li>Take some notes at the margins of the paper and write down the key points.</li><li>Look at any type of illustration in the paper like tables and figures and see if you can spot any mistakes or discrepancies.</li></ul>At the end of the second pass it can happen that you still don’t understand what you’ve just read. Maybe this is not your field of expertise or you are lacking background information. Write down what you didn't get and fill the knowledge gap later.

The second pass: Grasp the content


Duration: Can take up to 4-5 hours if you're a beginner(you should carefully consider if this step is worth your time). Activity: <ul><li>Read the paper in its entirety and question every detail.</li><li>Make the same assumptions as the authors and re-create the work from scratch. You can virtually re-implement the steps in your head or use any tools(like flowcharts) that you may deem fit.</li></ul>At the end of this pass you should be an expert and know the paper’s strong and weak points. You can reconstruct the structure and explain to someone in simple language what the paper is all about.

The Third Pass:  Virtually re-implement the paper

Doing a literature survey is a bit different than reading a single paper. <ol><li>First pass: In the first pass you have to collect potentially useful papers. Find 3 to 5 recent papers. You can now continue with the usual first pass procedure. You can also skim through the references to see if the papers have any citations in common. Common citations are good candidates to include in your survey.</li><li>Second pass: Vist the author's websites and see if you can find any recent work. Download the commonly cited papers. </li><li>Third pass: Try to visit the websites of the top conferences or journals.</li></ol>

Doing A Literature Survey 

Use this only if you have to read the entire paper. <ul><li>Make little boxes: Surround equations, figures and tables with boxes. Do this during the first-pass. It will help to quantify how many details in terms of math equations you can expect. </li><li>Highlighters: Highlighters are a great tool to mark sections in your paper and give them distinctive meanings.</li><li>Mindmaps: There are no strict rules in creating mind maps. This may help you to get the big picture more visually and will refresh your memory about a paper after some time has passed.</li></ul>

Optional extensions(Part 1)

<ul><li>Pomodoro Sessions: If you feel intimidated by the paper and lack motivation, you can use the pomodoro technique. Start a 25 minute timer without any expectations and read the paper. </li><li>Feynman technique: Choose a concept you want to learn; pretend you're teaching it to someone with no prior knowledge; review your explanation and identify weak points; simplify your explanation. </li></ul>

Optional Extensions(Part 2)

Learn how to read scientific research papers in an effective way following the three-pass approach which is rarely taught at Universities.

writing

Reading & Writing

communication

Communication

scienceandnature

Science & Nature

How To Read Scientific Papers

In the Big 5 Model of personality traits, being a neurotic not only disposes you to anxiety and other negative emotions, but to spending lots of time ruminating about all those feelings. Negative feelings will lead a nuerotic person to either internalize, withdrawing into their insecurities and ruminations, or externalize, getting angry, irritable, or impulsive. In order to deal with this, they'll attempt to suppress negative feelings and risk developing disordered behaviors, which, essentially, are people’s ill-fated attempts to feel better.

What is Neuroticism? 

"Negative emotion" makes it sound like it's something you need to get rid of. Dalai Lama conceptualizes it as: Rather than calling sadness or anger a negative emotion, call it what it rightly is — a difficult emotion.

1. Reframe “negative” to “difficult.”

If you’re unwilling to experience difficult emotions, then you’re going to preclude yourself from things like relationships, fitness or career. To combat this, you need to develop a discipline of risk-taking, forcing yourself to do things you wouldn’t do and make that a regular part of your life. The point isn’t to cure neuroticism but to counterbalance it. The opposite of anxiety is exploration.

2. Seek Adventure 

Internally, having a fine-grained understanding of your emotional states can be liberating. When people can describe their emotional states with complexity they experience all sorts benefits, like less <a href="http://pss.sagepub.com/content/21/9/1341.short">alcoholism</a> or <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22023359">aggression</a> and more <a href="http://www.affective-science.org/pubs/2001/01MaprelationDiffReg.pdf">“emotion regulation,”</a> or being able to keep your psychological footing when things get bumpy.

3. Get more granular.

The actual act of putting those states into words grants relief. Expressively writing for 20 minutes a day for three days has shown to help people become less depressed, less anxious, and take fewer visits to the doctor.

4. Put It Into Words 

Don’t believe everything you think. Dispositional mindfulness — or the quality of generally being aware of what you’re thinking and feeling — has been shown to lessen the depressive effects of neuroticism. Meditation also allows you to nonjudgmentally attend to your own emotions, even if they don’t make you comfortable.

5. Hold your thoughts with a looser grip

In the Buddhist tradition this is called self compassion. With self-compassionyou’re holding your own hand, befriending the emotion, make empathy intrapersonal.In a formal practice it would go like this: Spend five or seven minutes in body-based mindfulness, which sets the table and gets you out of your head, then summon an emotion that you’re having difficulty with — heartache, anxiety about work, regret about the thing you did last weekend — and wish yourself well. The four slogans used in Tibetan meditation are: May I be happy, May I be safe, May I be at ease, May I be healthy.

6. Befriend yourself

Or: How to adapt to your own personality.

Understand yourself and those around you.

psychology

Psychology

How to (Kind of) Master Your Neuroticism

Nihil means “nothing.” -ism means “ideology.” But this seems to be self-refuting. To say that this means that someone “believes in nothing” is not really helpful, as believing in something suggests there is something to be believed in, but if that something is nothing, then there is not something to be believed in. Therefore, it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking “Everything is nihilism!” which of course leads to thinking “Nothing is nihilism!”

What Is Nihilism? 

If optimism is hopefulness, then pessimism is hopelessness. Pessimism is dark and depressing. But it is not nihilism.To be with a pessimist is to know that you are with a pessimist. But you can be with a nihilist and have no idea. Indeed you could yourself be a nihilist and have no idea. Such a lack of awareness is the point of nihilism, as nihilism is all about hiding from despair rather than dwelling on it.In fact, optimism is more similar to nihilism. If optimism leads us to wait for something good to happen then optimism leads us to do nothing.

Nihilism versus Pessimism

Today, a cynic is someone who looks down on society and sees it as fake, because the cynic sees the people who make up society as fake. He believes that morality is a mere pretense and people act on their own self-interest even when they seem to be helping other people. Cynicism, like pessimism, is about negativity. While pessimism is about despair, cynicism is about disdain. Cynics are not nihilists because cynics embrace rather than evade mendacity.

Nihilism Vs Cynicism 

The idealists constructs an alternate reality, a reality of ideas. As the idealist focuses more and more on how reality ought to be, the idealist becomes less and less concerned with how reality is. The utopian views of the idealist may be more compelling than the dystopian views of the cynic, but dystopian views are at least focused on this world, whereas utopian views are, by definition, focused on a world that does not exist. It is for this reason that to use other-worldly idealism to refute this-worldly cynicism is to engage in nihilism.

Nihilism Is Closer To Idealism Than Cynicism 

To be apathetic is to be without feeling, to be without desire. To be apathetic is to be seen as not caring about anything. The apathetic individual feels nothing. But it is not nihilism. Apathy can be an attitude (“I don’t care about that”) or a character trait (“I don’t care about anything”). However, in either case the apathetic individual is expressing a personal feeling and is not making a claim about how everyone should/shouldn't feel.But the nihilist has feelings. It’s just that what the nihilist has feelings for is itself nothing. This is why a Nihilists cannot have apathy.

Nihilism Vs Apathy 

Pity is nihilistic insofar as it allows us to evade reality, by allowing us to feel that we are better than we are and better than those in need. The morality of pity drives us to feel pity and to feel good for feeling pity. Having such feelings is worse than feeling nothing. If we feel good when we feel pity, then we are motivated only to help the individuals we feel pity for rather than to help end the systemic injustices that create such pitiful situations in the first place.

The Morality of Pity  

In order to preserve nihilism as a meaningful concept, it's necessary to distinguish it from pessimism, cynicism, and apathy.

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

What Nihilism Is Not

<ul><li>Innovation is nearly always a gradual thing. Eureka moments are rare and possibly non-existent. </li><li>It is because of human nature and the intellectual property system that innovation is often described as heroic breakthroughs. It is all too easy and tempting for whoever makes a breakthrough to magnify its importance, forget about rivals and predecessors, and ignore successors who make the breakthrough into a practical proposition. </li><li>Nationalism makes the problem worse. The importing of a new idea gets confused with the inventing of a new idea. </li></ul>

1. Innovation Essentials: Innovation is Gradual 

<ul><li>Innovation is the turning of an idea or invention into a workable, affordable device that actually delivers benefits to people. </li><li>Innovation is often serendipitous: Serendipity is an accidental discovery that is beneficial in some way. It is a well-known attribute of innovation. Post-it notes, genetic fingerprinting, and Kevlar(used in bulletproof jackets) are some examples of serendipitous innovations.</li></ul>

1.1 Innovation V/S Invention, And Serendipity 

<ul><li>Every idea is a combination of other ideas. Innovation happens when ideas have sex. It occurs where people meet and exchange goods, services and thoughts. The inventors of motor cars did not have to invent wheels or steel. </li><li>Most inventors find that they need to keep "just trying" things. Tolerance of error is therefore critical. An element of playfulness helps, too. Innovators who just like playing around are more likely to find something unexpected. </li><li>Innovation always requires collaboration and sharing. Even the simplest object is beyond the capacity of any one human being to understand. </li></ul>

1.2 Innovation Relies On Recombination, Chance And Collaboration

<ul>
<li>Amara's law states that people tend to overestimate the impact of new technology in the short run and underestimate it in the long run. Gene editing, GPS and AI are some examples where Amara's hype cycle is observed. It could also be playing a role in the story of crypto.</li>
<li>The bigger the cities get, the more productive and efficient they become, in terms of their use of energy to create improbability. It is always possible to raise living standards further by lowering the amount of a resource that is used to produce a given output. Growth is therefore indefinitely "sustainable".</li>
</ul>

1.3 Innovation's Hype Cycle, And Increasing Efficiency

<ul><li>The invention of the light bulb was independently achieved by 21 people. There may be conscious competition between these but it was impossible for light bulbs not to be invented in the 1870s. 2 paradoxes arise:</li></ul><ol><li>The individual seems dispensable. If Edison wasn't born, the world still would have light bulbs. But this is precisely what makes such achievements remarkable: any of the billions of rivals could have won, but only some emerged.</li><li>This makes innovation look predictable, yet it isn't. It is obvious that search engines would be the biggest fruit of the internet. But no one saw it coming.</li></ol>

1.4 Innovation is Inevitable

Liberty is the parent of science and of virtue, and a nation will be great in both in proportion as it is free.

It is believed that the main source of innovation has been the government support of research, and that government should therefore adopt an industrial policy of directed innovation. This is a myth.While it is not impossible that governments can aim for, create and perfect an innovation, it doesn't happen very often. Far more inventions and discoveries emerge by serendipity and the exchange of ideas.

2. Economics of Innovation: Innovation Is A Bottum-Up Phenomenon

<ul><li>There is a widely held belief that science leads to technology, which leads to innovation. While this can happen sometimes, it is just as often the case that invention is the parent of science: techniques and processes that work are developed, but the understanding of them comes later. </li><li>Examples: Steam engines led to the understanding of thermodynamics, powered flight of aerodynamics, and animal breeding of genetics. </li></ul>

2.1 Innovation And Science 

<ul><li>Big companies are bad at innovating because they are too bureaucratic, have too big a vested interest in the status quo and stop paying attention to the interests, actual and potential, of their customers. </li><li>Thus for innovation to flourish it is vital to have an economy that encourages or at least allows outsiders, challengers and disruptors to get a foothold. </li></ul>

2.2 Big Companies Are Bad At Innovation

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and a learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.

<ul><li>The justification for intellectual property- patents and copyright is that it is necessary to encourage investment and innovation. The trouble is, the evidence clearly shows that while intellectual property helps a little, it also hinders and the net effect is to discourage innovation. </li><li>A further problem is that patents undoubtedly raise the cost of goods. This slows down the development and spread of innovation. </li><li>Finally, patents tend to favour inventions rather than innovations: upstream discoveries of principles, rather than a downstream adaptation of devices to the market. </li></ul>

3. Resistance To Innovation: Intellectual Property 

When a new invention is first propounded in the beginning every man objects and the poor inventor runs the gauntloop of all petulant wits.

<ul><li>The main ingredient that leads to innovation is freedom. Freedom to exchange, experiment, imagine, invest and fail. Freedom for the consumers to reward the innovations they like. Not freedom in the lawless sense, just the general idea that if something is not specifically prohibited, then the assumption should be that it must be allowed.</li><li>Freedom is why innovation cannot be easily planned because neither human wishes nor the means of their satisfaction are easy to anticipate. This is why nobody really knows how to cause innovation because no one can make people want something.</li></ul>

4. How Innovation Works 

<ul><li>The ability of Western economies to generate innovation has become weaker. Incomes appear to be stagnating and opportunities for social mobility drying up. The cause is not too much innovation, but too little. The West may still do new things in science and arts but is slowing down in innovating products. </li><li>China's innovation engine,however, has fired up. Their speed could be explained by work. Willingness to put in the hours, to experiment and play. But they have authoritarian restraints, which hinder innovation. Perhaps India or Brazil will pick up the challenge and keep innovation happening. </li></ul>

4.1 An Innovation Famine

We wanted flying cars; instead we got 140 characters.

'Ridley is spot-on when it comes to the vital ingredients for success' Sir James Dyson Building on his bestseller The Rational Optimist, Matt Ridley chronicles the history of innovation, and how we need to change our thinking on the subject. Innovation is the main event of the modern age, the reason we experience both dramatic improvements in our living standards and unsettling changes in our society. It is innovation that will shape the twenty-first century. Yet innovation remains a mysterious process, poorly understood by policy makers and businessmen alike. Matt Ridley argues that we need to see innovation as an incremental, bottom-up, fortuitous process that happens as a direct result of the human habit of exchange, rather than an orderly, top-down process developing according to a plan. Innovation is crucially different from invention, because it is the turning of inventions into things of practical and affordable use to people. It speeds up in some sectors and slows down in others. It is always a collective, collaborative phenomenon, involving trial and error, not a matter of lonely genius. It still cannot be modelled properly by economists, but it can easily be discouraged by politicians. Far from there being too much innovation, we may be on the brink of an innovation famine. Ridley derives these and other lessons from the lively stories of scores of innovations - from steam engines to search engines - how they started and why they succeeded or failed.

books

Books

'Ridley is spot-on when it comes to the vital ingredients for success' Sir James Dyson Building on his bestseller The Rational Optimist, Matt Ridley chronicles the history of innovation, and how we need to change our thinking on the subject. Innovation is the main event of the modern age, the reason we experience both dramatic improvements in our living standards and unsettling changes in our society. It is innovation that will shape the twenty-first century. Yet innovation remains a mysterious process, poorly understood by policy makers and businessmen alike. Matt Ridley argues that we need to see innovation as an incremental, bottom-up, fortuitous process that happens as a direct result of the human habit of exchange, rather than an orderly, top-down process developing according to a plan. Innovation is crucially different from invention, because it is the turning of inventions into things of practical and affordable use to people. It speeds up in some sectors and slows down in others. It is always a collective, collaborative phenomenon, involving trial and error, not a matter of lonely genius. It still cannot be modelled properly by economists, but it can easily be discouraged by politicians. Far from there being too much innovation, we may be on the brink of an innovation famine. Ridley derives these and other lessons from the lively stories of scores of innovations - from steam engines to search engines - how they started and why they succeeded or failed.

Matt Ridley

How Innovation Works

How Innovation Works: Serendipity, Energy and the Saving of Time

Restlessness seems like a contemporary phenomenon but it's been the object of philosophical speculation for centuries. Restlessness seems to affect students the most. Students are full of activity yet devoid of purpose.  The problem is that we don't know how to choose. We don't know how to distinguish among the choices that are presented to us. Restlessness is also worsened due to external forces like politics. In a capitalist society, everyone wants a little bit of our attention. But in the end, we're not left with much attention for ourselves. This makes us more restless.

Restlessness 

French philosophy on restlessness being with Michelle De Montaigne. He wrote 3 volumes of semi-autobiographical essays. He's an acute observer of the human soul. He writes about all the particular details of his life. This capacity for close psychological self-study formed a generation of French readers. All the authors that followed Montaigne had the ability to creep inside your head and see things you didn't know were there.

French Enlightenment

Montaigne's idea is to enjoy all the good things of life without taking any of them seriously. He gardens but he doesn't care if it's imperfect. He has a family but doesn't expect too much from them. This allows us to be a little bit more sane and happier.Montaigne argues that imagination distinguishes us from other living beings. But the human imagination constantly leads us astray and is a thing we should be wary of. Humans tend to imagine more exalted forms of life that are not capable for us to achieve. This makes us miserable because we forget about living the life that we actually have.

Michelle de Montaigne 

Pascal wants us to see that we are both greater and more miserable than what Montaigne observed. Pascal would agree with Socrates who believed that human beings are always wanting more and reaching beyond themselves and cannot constraint this desire. What we can do is direct it. Pascal argued that we're always distracted because of our aimlessness. Our need to constantly amuse ourselves shows that even in our enjoyment we are not really content. In contemporary life, this is why we always complain about distractions like our phones but are never able to put them down.

Blaise Pascal 

“All of men's miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.”

Alexis de Tocqueville realizes that there are markers of immanent success and happiness in Western society and the pressure to seek it is all around us. There's a rat race for stuff and status. This makes us quite unhappy. Our desires for pleasure becomes like a command. And when our pursuits and hobbies that are supposed to make us happy by our society's standards don't lead to happiness it makes us puzzled and embarrassed of our emptiness. This pursuit of happiness affects us both in our personal lives and our social and political lives.

Alexis de Tocqueville

Pascal thinks that human beings are naturally unhappy. He suggests that unhappiness is the norm. This aspect of pascal's thought could be liberating. A lot of young people are unhappy and they feel like unhappiness is a failure of normalcy. This is really constricting for their lives. Modern restlessness is the restlessness of the soul which is constantly trying and failing to make itself happy immanently. This is where liberal education should play a role. Colleges and universities need to do a better job at teaching students how to think about their purpose.

Accepting Unhappiness 

Feeling a little distracted lately? Most of us are, and not just lately. We tend to view withering attention spans and the compulsion to seek change for its own sake as curses of the social media era, but restless dissatisfaction has been the subject of philosophical inquiry for centuries.

philosophy

Philosophy

Philosopher's Zone - Restlessness

The period from the 14th century to the 17th century in Europe is popularly called Renaissance, and it marked a rebirth or revival of classical learning and wisdom. The wave of renaissance touched upon many areas of European civilization, particularly the areas of art, religion, literature, and politics. Renaissance marked an increased awareness of nature, a revival in learning which was all present in the medieval period but became prominent in the 15th and 16th century. Renaissance art was all about the representation of an individual view of a man.

Renaissance 

Artist: Leonardo Da VinciCreated in: 1503Located in: Louvre, ParisThis painting is one of the most famous and recognized paintings in history. There have been many discussions on the enigmatic smiles of the Mona Lisa, on whether she is really smiling or not.The major feature of this painting is that even when you change the angle of the view, the eyes of the Mona Lisa seems to always follow you. The painting is done in oil on wood and is presently under the ownership of the Government of France.

1. Mona Lisa 

Artist: Sandro Botticelli (original name: Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi)Completed in: 1482Primavera means spring in Italian. This painting is also known as the 'Allegory of Spring'. It is one of the prime examples of Renaissance art. There are various interpretations of this painting. Some say it is a mythical allegory while some say it is about the change of season into spring. This painting is popular because of the use of colour and the different explanations attached to it. Primavera is believed to be the most controversial painting in the world.

2. Primavera

Artist: Michelangelo BuonarrotiCreated in: 1512 The creation of Adam is the painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Even though this is one of the most replicated paintings of all time, it is only second in popularity to Mona Lisa. The painting has become a symbol of humanity as the image depicts the hand of both God and Adam on the verge of touching.

3. The Creation of Adam

Artist: Leonardo Da VinciCompleted in: 1498The image shows Jesus with his disciples for his last supper. The painting is noted for its clever use of colour, light, and anatomy. The painting is also a subject of many discussions and conjectures. Many have proposed that the disciple sitting to the right of Jesus is Mary Magdalene and many have also wondered the significance or meaning of the V shape between Jesus and the person on the right.

4. The Last Supper

Artist: RaphaelCompleted in: 1511This painting stands one among the four main frescos on the walls of the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican. The four frescos symbolize Philosophy, Poetry, Theology, and Law. This painting symbolizes philosophy and is a representation of the finest period of Greek Philosophy as one can find Aristotle and Plato in the centre of the painting. This painting has perfectly captured the classical spirit of the Renaissance.

5. The School of Athens

Artist: Giotto di BondoneCompleted in: 1306Located in: The Scrovegni ChapelThis painting depicts the moment of betrayal of Jesus by Judas Iscariot who identifies Jesus to the Roman soldiers by kissing him. Many critics believe that Giotto is a genius and no artist has been able to surpass his work. His mastery is evident in the way he captured the expression of Jesus and Judas at that scene of betrayal.

6. The Kiss of Judas

Artist: Michelangelo BuonarrotCompleted in: 1541 Located in: Sistine Chapel in Vatican CityThe painting is about the second coming of Jesus, the day when God shall judge all humanity. Jesus is painted in the center surrounded by saints. The top portion of the painting shows the resurrection of the dead to heaven and the bottom portion shows the descent of sinners into hell. The use of colors and excellent brushwork make this painting of the most revered painting in the world

7. The Last Judgment

Artist: Raffaello SanzioCompleted in: 1512 Located in: Emäldegalerie Alte Meister in DresdenThe painting shows Mother Mary holding baby Jesus in her hands with Saint Barbara and Saint Sixtus on both her sides and two cherubs beneath her. This is one of the most famous works of Raphael and an important painting of the Renaissance.

8. Sistine Madonna

Artist: Tiziano VecellioCompleted in: 1518 Located in: Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei FrariThis painting was done by the artist in his early years and he has used vivid colors in this painting. Assumption of the Virgin is a painting about the rise of Mother Mary into heaven. Mother Mary is painted in a red dress who is raised to heaven to where God is gazing down in Mary while apostles bid her farewell from the ground.

9. Assumption of the Virgin

Artist: Sandro BotticelliCompleted in: 1485 The painting shows Goddess Venus arriving on the island of Cyprus. She is depicted as a pure and mature woman standing on a seashell. Botticelli had given much attention to every detail of Venus. This painting was done in a period where nudity was a subject in paintings and thus makes this one an important painting of the Renaissance.

10. The Birth of Venus

The period from 14th century to 17th century, called Renaissance, marked a rebirth or revival of classical learning and wisdom. The wave of Renaissance touched upon many areas, particularly art, religion, literature, and politics. Article by PARBLO Best Digital Art Blog, graphic tablets, affordable art drawing monitors

10 Most Famous Paintings of The Renaissance

The belief that nothing is morally right or wrong(moral nihilism), and the belief that morals are culture-specific(cultural relativism) seems to be in retreat everywhere. There are 2 motivations for this - <ol><li>Moral dogmatism(negative motivation)- those who wish to dogmatically assert their own values without worrying that they may not be as universal as one might suppose.</li><li>Positive motivation: Not believing in any universal values which should be propagated and defended. Allan Bloom worried that this trend would lead us to lose our "selves" or identity across society.</li></ol>

Cultural Relativism And Moral Nihilism 

David Hume observed that we can never move readily from scientifically understanding facts about the world to determining what values people should hold to. It became clear that just knowing objective facts about human nature and desires couldn’t necessarily lead us to a clear set of ethical values. This problem was picked up and reformulated by Immanuel Kant

David Hume

Immanuel Kant said that a human being’s innate practical reason gives rise to a universal set of “moral laws” which any rational person knows they must follow.  But even if we know the universal laws, why should we feel compelled to follow them? Kant’s answer was that we must postulate a belief in God and the immortality of the soul and that we simply must push the doubts of pure reason aside to make way for faith. This is the meta-ethical problem.

Immanuel Kant And The Meta-Ethical Problem

Sidgwick argued that it is happiness that we should take as the motivation for being good. So if happiness was what was intrinsically good, we must, at times, even put our own desires aside to maximize the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. But what might motivate individual people to do this? Why not do evil if this makes us happy, if we can get away with it, and happiness is all the matters to us intrinsically?Hence, there would always be a dualism in ethical reasoning between our interest in our own satisfaction and our interest in being impartially good.

Henry Sidgwick and the Profoundest Problem in Ethics

This claim argues that we have no ethical obligation to act well beyond what makes us personally happy or satisfied. This seems extremely close to making ethics purely subjective. Philosophers, like Nietzsche, argue that a person truly concerned with their ‘self’ will not pursue vulgar and menial pleasures. Instead, they will strive towards aesthetic greatness and overcoming their more mundane interests. However, this has an unstable foundation and could be misinterpreted(like the Nazis did by connecting the pursuit of aesthetic greatness with cruelty).

The Self and Self-Interest is What Matters

This claim(adopted by authors like Sam Harris) argues that we should use the tools of modern science to assess what human beings want and what their characteristics are, for instance, by looking at evolutionary biology or psychology and develop an ethical framework in accordance with human nature, which most people would accept. The flaws with this claim are-<ol><li>It evades Hume's argument that we cannot know what values we should accept. </li><li>Human beings may not be ‘naturally’ inspired to impartially doing what is good as genetic research indicates that humans are prone to being selfish and irrational.</li></ol>

Naturalism and Human Nature

The final claim is that the values that ‘matter’ in some sense exist independently of us. In this view, ethical values are rather like a mathematical formula. Human beings bring them into existence through developing logical ways of thinking about important issues. This is as far away from subjectivist or cultural relativism and nihilism as a secular person can get. However, it is also problematic because it is very abstract and metaphysically loaded.The most passionate defender of such independent values was the late Derek Parfit.

The Independent Existence of Value

Why Should We Be Good? - Quillette

When given nothing else to do, the brain defaults to thinking about the person it’s embedded in. The brain areas related to processing emotions, recalling memory, and thinking about what’s to come become quietly active.This is “<a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/98/2/676.abstract">the default mode of brain function</a>,” and the constellation of brain areas that carry it out are the default mode network, or DMN. People who daydream more tend to have a more active DMN; relatedly, dreaming itself appears to be an amplified version of mind-wandering.

What Does Brain Do At "Rest"?

In Buddhist traditions, this chattering described by neuroscientists as the default mode is a dragon to be tamed, if not slain. The crux of the Buddhist argument is that if you don’t establish some relationship with your DMN, some mindfulness of its activity, you’ll be yanked around by the swirling eddies of emotion, reaction, and rumination.

What Does Buddhism Say?

The default mode has a "prospective bias". Depending on the person, their history, and their biological dispositions, that prospection could tilt toward <a href="https://www.thecut.com/2016/11/how-to-deal-with-negative-emotions.html">worrying </a>or <a href="https://www.thecut.com/2016/12/is-hope-good-for-you.html">hoping</a>. There are 3 different types of day dreaming: <ol><li>Positive constructive daydreaming: lots of playful, wishful imagery and plan-making thoughts.</li><li>Dysphoric daydreaming: lots of anguish and obsessive fantasies. </li><li>Poor attentional control: hard to concentrate on anything</li></ol>Research indicates that <a href="http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/1568957">a disturbed DMN</a> is a mechanism in <a href="http://reliawire.com/depressive-rumination-default-mode-network/">depression</a>. Our greatest source of suffering isn’t the default mode but when we get stuck in the default mode.

What Does The Science Say?

The wandering nature of the DMN can be harnessed for creative thinking. In a 2015 study, participants were asked to do creative thinking tasks. Results showed that creative thinking requires a combination of focusing internal attention and controlling spontaneous thinking. It underscores the fact that not all minds that wander are lost.

DMN's Contribution In Creative Thinking

Suffering arises when people concretize the fleeting swirls of thought, especially around conceptions of self. Default-mode content involves an image of self, one that’s easy to become attached to. These self conceptions carry lots of emotional weight. We think that the image of the self is something real and not just an mental image. However, the self isn’t one thing, it’s an evolving construct of many different processes.  According to Buddhist traditions, when we take it to be real when it isn’t then that causes suffering.

DMN And the Image of the Self 

In <a href="https://www.thecut.com/2016/11/how-to-deal-with-negative-emotions.html">cognitive behavioral therapy</a>, that process of divesting realness from your mental chatter is called “<a href="https://bmcpsychology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40359-016-0115-6">decentering</a>,” or thinking less that your thoughts are the truth about what’s happening and viewing them as an observer. The <a href="https://www.thecut.com/2017/01/yoga-lsd-meditation-ego-dissolution.html">therapeutic interventions offered</a> by psychedelics like psilocybin and LSD — which, at least in one trial, helped longtime smokers quit at a rate three times that of the best pharma drugs — seem to have a similar, though more sudden, effect.

Mental Chatter Is Not Real

The trouble that your DMS gets into seems to depend on how automatic your patterns of thought are. The key is cognitive flexibility: being able to more freely choose your mental habits, and have greater agency in your cognitive phenomena. CBT and even <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.03553">hypnosis</a> could tame an unruly DMN.Meditation also <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811917300502?np=y">reduces activity</a> in the DMN. It reforms the DMN so that the resting state becomes more like the meditative state, producing “a more present-centred default mode.” By investing more attention in the sensory world than in your narrative overlaying it, you might identify the former to be what’s true.

Cognitive Flexibility 

"Meditation practice is necessary generally because our thinking pattern, our conceptualized way of conducting our life in the world, is either too manipulative, imposing itself upon the world, or else runs completely wild and uncontrolled. Therefore, our meditation practice must begin with ego’s outermost layer, the discursive thoughts which continually run through our minds, our mental gossip."

Mental meanderings are “the baseline state of you as a cognitive system” — is that a good thing?

Is the Default Mode of the Brain to Suffer?

In 1967, Jacques Derrida introduced a new method to philosophy, which he called deconstruction. Put simply, this is the idea that if something is constructed it can be de-constructed. That applies to objects in the world, such as chairs, cars and houses, but it also applies to the concepts we use, such as truth, justice and God. These ‘things’, which we tend to assume are natural, are in fact culturally constructed. Importantly, deconstruction is not destruction. The concept or object is still there at the end.

Deconstruction

<ul><li>Get comfortable- you’re planning to overthrow every preconceived idea. Start by closing the door. </li><li>Find something to deconstruct. Anything text can be deconstructed: poems, shopping list, podcast, this essay. </li><li>Get deconstructing. Think about why these texts are regarded this way, why is this the common belief. How ‘true’ is this assessment? Whose interest might it suit? For Derrida, there is no true assessment of a text. And the idea that one assessment is dominant can tell us more about the conditions around the text than the text itself. </li></ul>

Steps to Deconstruct the World(Part 1) 

<ul><li>Look for contradictions. Look where the spirit of the text is actually different, or opposed to, what’s actually going on. Hollywood movies are great for this.</li><li>Read against the grain. Take a text, find what it seems to advocate, and look in the opposite direction. This doesn’t eliminate the text or the thinking, but it problematises them, it finds the limits. This reading against the grain can also be more subtle than just looking for the opposite. For example, you could ask, "what role does race play in the Marvel movies?", or "what are the economics of the Bible?"</li></ul>

Steps to Deconstruct the World(Part 2)

<ul><li>Don’t listen to what the author says. Finally, thinking like Derrida means trusting one’s own analysis of a text – even, or perhaps especially, if it contradicts the authors’ idea of what they’re doing. For Derrida, the author’s interpretation of her or his text is no more valid than the reader’s.</li></ul>

Steps To Deconstruct the World(Part 3)

Some critics have accused Derridean thinking of allowing for any interpretation or, worse still, of saying any interpretation is equally valid. The first is perhaps true, the second is not. Derrida was always clear that there were more effective and less effective ways of reading a text. But ultimately, any philosophical idea pushed to its extreme allows for nonsense.Derrida called for a very close reading of the text at hand and, as with anything, the closer you look at something, the more fissures you see.

Criticism of Derridean Thinking

Derridean thinking has influenced various works in multiple domains like literature, film and music. Derrida’s work spawned a whole genre in music called ‘hauntology’ which is a philosophical investigation of what there isn't. While all these works openly deconstruct themselves, for Derrida, all works do this. No work can be pure – and present – in itself. Deconstruction is always happening in any work of art, and by looking very closely we can see not only how it’s happening, but also how the creator has pretended that it isn’t.

Why it Matters? 

Don’t believe everything you hear, read and watch. To puncture received ideas about culture, start thinking like Jacques Derrida

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