Comments by "Andrew Bowen" (@andrewbowen2837) on "Whatifalthist" channel.

  1. As a critique, this seems like a shallow and naive coverage of the topic. It is taken from a very biased Western viewpoint, one of angst and Christianity. Plus, it seems like your source material, or at least the books you showed in the video, are all popular science books (or equivalent), stuff made for mass consumption and overly simplified, like something one would find on a Walmart book shelf. If you want a totalizing viewpoint of death, it requires branching out, digging deeper into other ideas and cultures, casting aside our own ontological and phenomenological assumptions. It needs to be an anthropological examination. Anthropology is the only discipline that can shed light on the total human experience; it provides the material, ideological, performative, biological, and linguistic conceptions of everything. It is a very time consuming venture, but well worth it for anyone who truly seeks to know about the human experience
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  2. I've seen dogs who were well aware of their fate as they approached it. As dogs reach their finality, they will go hide somewhere and perish alone. It's very sad to think about
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  3. Your first problem is confounding empiricism with truth
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  4. There are so many factors that influence aging, there's no way we'll figure it out in our lifetimes
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  5. We don't lack virtue, it's that we have changed what the word virtue means, and now it is something altogether lower and different from ages past. It's just one of the consequences of democracy
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  6. This is an intriguing perspective, but I can't help but to think that you portray ethnocentrism
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  7. That's the basis of it, but people can act on their own based on learning and exposure
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  8. I fear death. All I have known is my experiences and my consciousness. I cannot fathom what it would be like to not have those things, to not wake up one day to the sunshine, and that is a terrifying thought. Before anyone rails against me, yes I have had near death experiences, and yes I have been suicidal, both at very young ages. But since then, I have not grown comfortable with the idea of nothingness, but I have grown to try to distance myself from it, recognizing that I was a fool for desiring it, that there is so much worth experiencing and overcoming. WW1 didn't turn people into brave chads; it made them hopeless, valueless. They're called the Lost Generation for a reason. Why on earth you would willingly desire to put yourself through that, making yourself unable to enjoy the little pleasures and good things about living and being itself, is beyond me. Greatness and heroism are achieved through strife, and for that, you must first live, and you must first have something worth sacrificing. Your concern in this video is about something to die for, when perhaps you should examine what is worth living for. If this is truly our one and only chance to experience, don't cast it away willy nilly in pursuit of vain ideas of heroism. Of all the people who have died in battle, how many do we actually remember? Do you think those 18 year olds went out there without any fear whatsoever, or were their fears hidden and forgotten about in favor of a good story? Make your mark by influencing others; leave a lasting legacy to them not in how you die, but in how you lived.
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  9. As a response to myself, the idea of legacy itself is a Western development. There are many ways in which people seek to achieve immortality, eternity, permanence. The easiest, and one most people do, is to simply have children, to pass on your genes in a further push for eternity. Additionally, there is the creation of art, where fame can leave one's name around for eternity. Science seeks to find a very literal form of it through immortality, not too different from alchemists and the philosopher's stone. Then there are other cultures who view everything as a wheel, repeating forever, where we are to be reborn again and again, or take part in an eternal recurrence. Perhaps there is even an afterlife that our souls can live in forever, be it heaven, a spirit realm, Hades, etc. However, these things did not always exist. In ancient Mesopotamian views (including early biblical peoples), death was the end; that was it, you would turn back into dust, or sleep in the dark house of clay and dust, forever. There was no concept of legacy, permanence. You would have to turn back to ancient Greece and Egypt to find the origins of these ideas of immortality. They have stuck with us ever since, as "survivals" (in the words of Edward Burnett Tylor). It has become essentialized into our very worldview, part of our doxa. But if you really want the total view of death, you have to be aware of these things, the history of how we conceived of it. Otherwise it just sounds like an angry conservative rant about reminiscing on the good old days
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