The hallucinatory thoughts of the dying mind

I will be going through this very soon. Thanks for sharing

Had a really similar experience with my dad, the only difference was that he was calling for his mom (that passed away many many years before) in the language of the country he was born. It was a really touching thing that I'll never forget.

I wish my dad could have had the same experience. My parents were in denial the whole last few months, so he ended up passing away basically by himself in another state, with a relative whom he didn't like by his side. He had a similar experience of waking one last time and looking around, then passing. Such a terrible shame he didn't see any of his immediate family.

Thank you for sharing this. We should all be so lucky.

Sounds perfect, I'm so pleased you and your family were able to have this. I'm sorry for your loss, but hope this pleasant passing brought you comfort.

My father (83yo) died a year ago - just before Xmas. Most of the family got to see him the day before he died and he was in good spirits as we were all preparing for xmas together. He woke about 5am and asked my mother and brother for help getting to the toilet (which was unlike him). Once he was back in bed he rolled over, let out a sigh, and my mother thinks that is the moment he passed. 30 minutes later he was cold and couldn't be revived. I am still sad I wasn't able to say goodbye while he was conscious and always imagined we'd be talking to him in the period of his death - but equally, dying at home, in your own bed, seems so comforting and comfortable.

We don't even need to be all that close to death for this, just suffer sufficient brain damage. I have a family member that had enough mini strokes that, whenever they have something like an urinary infection, they disassociate from reality and start talking to dead people, and they understand reality as if they were children. It's how we detect infections, as the hallucinations come in pretty early. A course of antibiotics, and they are their normal elderly selves, remembering little of the previous week

>About eight hours before my father died he was having a conversation with his unseen mother, who died when he was 14.

Anecdotally, my grandad did the same thing a day before he died. Except he was talking to his best friend who's been dead a long time.

> Add on top of that neural atrophy, loss of oxygen, accumulation of senescent cells, poor clearance of waste products

I think the enjoyable thing about recreational drugs is the way they alter the normally-imperceptible boundaries between body/mind/Self. It provides an opportunity to understand what each of those things really are and what each contributes to my sense of being. I don't see these examples as all too different even if they are failure modes :)

> Our conscious mind is much more of a facade than we typically imagine.

It patently is not, but I can see how it’s easy to believe it to be so. When you juxtapose the behavior of self-conscious organisms against reactive behavior, such as that observed during sentience-level consciousness, it’s easier to tease apart properties inherent to the conscious mind. For example, an LLM is going to have a hard time adjusting its behavior in an anticipatory manner to another organism, as their capacity for self-learning is currently limited.

But even relatively simple-minded animals with relatively higher-level cognition will adjust responses not only based on prompts, but also on their own nascent understanding of what’s expected behavior given a situation by continually adapting and forecasting, which is different from simply forecasting. I got interested in LLMs because of all the hype around their capabilities, but even simpler-than-human minds are doing much more complex stuff than generating the next probable step.

> Oliver Sacks' "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat"

Amazing book. Made me entirely reconsider how I think about human behaviour and "how they got like they did".

Should be required reading for being a human living in a society.

Sacks also wrote a book called "Hallucinations," which is excellent and highly relevant to this article. If any of you have loved ones who are starting to hallucinate or experience visual artifacts of the type associated with Charles Benoit Syndrome, I highly recommend reading this.

It's interesting to reflect upon who is "I" presented with these experiences. Brain might be hallucinating in a given moment due to infection or something. But the witness "I" is ever-intact experiencing come what may.

> When people say, "Well, LLMs are just generating token N+1 from the previous N tokens, they really aren't thinking", I counter with this: we have been having this discussion -- are you at all aware of the stream of words coming out of your mouth, or are you hearing them the same time that I am?

Neither awareness of the stream of words coming out of my mouth, nor hearing them simultaneous with any audience proves or disproves LLM's generating token N+1 from previous N tokens.

I believe we both disagree with the irrelevant observation that "Well, LLMs are just generating token N+1 from the previous N tokens, they really aren't thinking"

But I also disagree with the idea that we are strictly passively aware of what we express: that would constitute a return to fundamental dualism (separation of body and mind), conventionally called dualism.

Dualism is a pragmatic approximation to make to model peoples thoughts and behaviors, but there is a reason dualism was superseded by materialism (the philosophical standpoint, not talking about materialistic ideology), consider the following thought experiment: suppose one believes in a type of fundamental dualism (not just using dualist approximations for computational efficiency considerations) where the sentient "mind" is passively experiencing what happens in the material brain, experiencing emotions, colors, tastes, smells, concepts, thoughts, ... then wouldn't it be such a coincidence that this materialistic brain happens to describe precisely what you seem to experience? a fundamental theory of dualism where the mind can not influence the real world -which includes the brain- but where the real world can influence the brain and the mind is utterly unlikely: if the mind could not affect the operation of the brain, how can the subjective experience which the mind perceives ever end up in the material brain so it can be materially pronounced etc?

For example, a human brain is composed of cells (neurons), a nation is composed of human citizens.

Suppose you make the claim:

"My subjective experience is neither that of a single neuron, surrounded by other neurons; nor that of a nation, surrounded by other nations in a geopolitic landscape; no my subjective experience is at the level of a human with its single brain"

Then I believe 99% of the population would agree with the above statement. But if simultaneously the dualist worldview were correct:

* that the material world obeys some rules of physics (known and unknown, indeterministic or not),

* that the subjective experience is a oneway projection of what happens to a limited subset of the real world,

* that these distinct "minds" passively observe what happens in the brain, and this indirectly, what happens in our sensory organs, and this indirectly what happens in the outside world;

* that these "minds" can exert no force or influence on the brain, and thus not on the muscles, and thus not on the outside world

... then it would be an extremely unlikely coincidence that human brains and bodies are expressing these facts which happen to correspond to our supposedly 100% passive observing "minds".

Statistics and likelihoods are part of mathematics, and indifferent to physical postulates. Mathematics is part of logic, indifferent to physical postulates. The passive dualist hypothesis can be rejected with arbitrarily high confidence, just ask more and more people if their subjective experience is closer to:

a) one neuron among many b) one human among many c) one nation among many

So we know that this form of dualism is subjectively falsifiable, just like others can not prove their experience matches b) more than a) and c); neither can I prove that my experience matches b) more than a) or c). But subjectively this is being proven to me all the time, I don't need to see proof of b) I experience it every day, all life long.

So IF dualism does nevertheless hold, I have proven to myself it can not be this oneway passive delocalized homunculus form of dualism.

So we have proven that IF dualism holds, that this supposed "mind" MUST be able to perturb the material body's "brain" and thence muscle, and outside world.

But at this point we are basically saying that not just the brain but the "mind" must be part of the physical universe, since it is interacting both ways with the material brain. No distinction between physical variables of the brain and physical variables are presented, apart from some insinuated specialness of "mind" quantities (variables in physics) and "non-mind" quantities (say a neuronal spike), without any definition how to even recognize the difference.

If the "mind" quantities can influence the "non-mind" quantities and vice versa, then we should be able to device measurement apparatuses to measure not just the "non-mind" quantities in the brain (like EEG signals, etc), but also the "mind" quantities (to which the "non-mind" signals like EEG supposedly merely spuriously correlate). Without any specification of their supposed specialness compared to the usual explainable-by-boring-physics-probabilities, the goalposts can always be moved: perhaps its little angels feeling the neuronal spikes and those same little angels slightly delaying or enhancing/quenching probabilities of those neuronal spikes: foreseeably every newly discovered deviation of Nth order approximation, together with its corresponding Neuther theorem quasiparticle, yadda yadda yadda, will be initially hailed as vindication of dualism ("so there is possibly a separate Mind!"), and subsequently invalidated after arduous reconsiderations by the materialists and reductionists, and the deviations will turn out to be explained by considering the N+1th order approximations of the rules of physics...

So we discover that this second type of dualism (with both way interaction) is unfalsifiable, and only superfluous, and hence not the domain of science, but mysticism. Might as well say that invisible angels are pushing the Moon in an orbit around the earth, and pushing the Earth in an orbit around the sun, etc... until one is basically saying the invisible angels are executing physics (probabilistic or not) to the T, time and time again. So basically the angels contribute nothing to the predictions of physics.

So dualism was rejected in favor of materialism, even precisely because everybody answers b); not despite it!

My great-grandma talked to several children that she miscarried when young.

> as you transition to death those barriers are less necessary as the body diverts increasingly scarce resources to surviving just a few moments longer.

The more I think about survival based evolutionary explanations for NDEs, the less sense they make.

Obviously evolution is true, and there's an obvious relationship between the physical degradation of the body and the brain and hallucinations. I'm not trying to make a cheap appeal to mysticism and deny these things, but NDEs are profoundly weird and difficult to explain when you think about them from that angle.

Why would a body motivated to survive at all costs waste resources creating comforting hallucinations with some kind of internal coherence during catastrophic failure? Wouldn't a more logical and theoretically sound failure mode for a body trying to survive at all costs be some kind of increasingly incoherent descent into something like TV static as resources get diverted from sense making to repairing systems critical to survival? Or just pure unconscious blackness as with general anesthesia? If consciousness is purely computational, then any coherent internal experience implies the brain is spending biological resources maintaining the physical integrity of something, despite being increasingly severed from the sense input it needs to actually navigate the world to survive. And if the body is going through the trouble of maintaining some level of internal consciousness as it nears death, why wouldn't it simply create a hellish ever increasing amount of fear and pain until the moment of complete physical death to create the strongest possible motivation to avoid ever repeating the experience?

Many people who experience NDEs and survive report craving a repeat of the experience and losing their fear of death. That's profoundly counterproductive from a survival standpoint. There's an argument about group related benefits and a need to offset communal panic due to our knowledge of our own mortality that's easier to ground in a purely survival based explanation, and while that definitely fits better, I increasingly get the sense we're trying to overfit evolutionary explanations that assume a purely survival oriented computational theory of consciousness to things we don't actually understand nearly as well as we think we do, and that the fear of not knowing can just as easily be used to argue motivated reasoning for appealing to things we basically understand like computation and biology as the fear of death can be used to argue motivated reasoning for appealing to things we don't.

The history of all human knowledge is defined by an increasing ability to transcend and expand our theories to incorporate ever more detailed knowledge about previously unseen things. First we were convinced the world was made of unseen animal spirits, then we were convinced it was made of unseen combinations of the four elements in a world governed by a pantheon of superhuman deities, then we were convinced it was made of a hierarchy of unseen forces interacting with seen forces through God given, rationally discoverable natural law, and now we are convinced it is made of purely physical rules which may or may not be fully comprehensible given what we can observe, and those seen and unseen purely physical forces created complex biological systems that can model the world through different types of computation, some of which we understand, and some of which we don’t.

I think it's extremely unlikely that we've figured out the final and most comprehensive framework for understanding reality, and I think there’s a lot about conscious experience and our ability to meaningfully perceive and categorize things that are still deeply mysterious/poorly understood.

EDIT: Didn’t like my previous wording of this/changed it, and still don’t feel like I’m doing justice to what I’m trying to get across. Iain McGilchrist’s “The Matter with Things”, John Vervaeke talks about “Relevance Realization”, Freeman Dyson’s lectures/books about the importance of “heretical views” for the expansion of knowledge, Donald Hoffman’s work claiming evolved models of reality in every kind of environment never create accurate maps, and just observing how difficult the alignment/verification problem is in AI are all pointing in this same direction, and make a more compelling case for what I’m trying to say than I can.

Please describe what makes one's death a "sad death"

The first example says it's "...about the dying process"

The second example is for "...someone with dementia"

While this nursing home guide is interesting, it's important to acknowledge that it sounds like ChatGPT.

Wow just wow ! Your comment has given me a new perspective on fear of death. Are you able to share what caused NDE ?

Salvador Dali would hold an object like a spoon in his hand while sitting in front of his canvas and fall asleep. This would cause him to drop the spoon waking him back up and then he would draw what he saw.

Hypnagogia is the name of this state between sleep and wakefulness - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnagogia

In my youth I'd keep friends on the phone entirely too long, and sometimes fall asleep while talking. (How my friends tolerated me I'll never know...)

Occasionally I'd realize I was saying something ridiculous and catch myself. Most times, though, they'd ask me for clarification about whatever crazy-sounding thing I said and I'd snap back to wakefulness (briefly). I wish I had recordings of some of those things I said. They left my mind almost immediately (to the point that I couldn't respond to questions asked directly after whatever I'd said). It would be entertaining to know what I was saying. (I didn't ask friends at the time and, at >30 years ago, I doubt any of them remember.)

I read to my daughter before bed. She drifts off sometimes when I'm reading "boring" stuff (at her request) and says fun things. I keep notes and ask her about it later. I enjoy the window into her mind.

Sleep writing is funny

Put a piece of paper under the hand with a pencil, write down thoughts until you're gone, read in the morning - profit

at the beginning of the night i regularly have this strain of thought: "oh shit i'm still not sleeping? but i was just planning a vacation on the moon, i must be sleeping"

I think these thoughts are happening all the time we just don't normally notice them. During the transition to sleep, some parts of our thinking mind start shutting off and the filter cracks and that's what we notice sometimes, if we remember.

I've always had difficulty falling asleep and I often notice when I enter this state and I get excited because it means I'm about to fall asleep. I'm excited because the frustration of still being awake is over.

Also, sometimes when I wake up I have a few minutes where nonsense ideas seem perfectly reasonable. Or it will feel like a complete loss of inhabitation.

My great grandmother, who was 83 or 84 at the time, had had a brain tumor (which was removed once it got to between golf ball and baseball size) and was pretty far along into Alzheimer's as she got got close to her death.

For the last several months, she wasn't able to feed or clothe herself, and she was basically immobile.

The day she died, she got up, went to her room, made her bed (unthinkable in the state she was in), put on her "Sunday's best" and laid down peacefully in the middle of her bed and passed.

Her daughter (my grandmother), was floored. She just said she must have just known it was her time, and that she had a few minutes of lucidity before dying.

Whether there's any truth to that I'm not qualified to answer, but if you had seen the state she was in for quite some time prior to that day, her actions would certainly have been surprising to say the least.

Terminal lucidity as well as activity may happen when the brain/body realizes it is really losing it, and mounting any and all last reserves of energy, instead of conserving energy for a long healing process. So it's consistent with compromised physiology, when activation can overcome whatever is otherwise stupefying or immobilizing.

Something similar happens in some recoveries which then fade. People will come out of a coma briefly and seem fine, and then go back, never to return.

Very difficult to study.

Also this is quite distinct from what you might have meant: for elderly who have accepted their death, they may experience peace with anything in their experience.