Hacker News Reader

> There were other incidences like he would go through his wardrobe at like 2am in the morning.

Huh, odd. When I was single-digit years old I used to get sleepwalking night terrors. I don't remember the details about most of them, but this sounds exactly like something I could do then.

My brain would fixate on a deep feeling that something has gone terribly wrong, and only I could fix it by performing something nonsensical, like figuring out how many of my bed would be needed to cover the surface of the earth, and I would start to move it around my room and see if I could tile it neatly with itself in some arrangement (because here is as good a place as any to start counting.)

Aside from these weird ideas I was mostly lucid, though. My mother worried I'd fall down the stairs but I never had reason to suspect I'd have trouble navigating the stairs. My literal perspective was sometimes distorted (things seemed to get smaller faster than a regular perspective transform) but I was careful to account for that.

I've got something similar, though I've so far not left my bed due to it. I'll half-wake up in the middle of the night and have some random task around my bed that absolutely must be done. I'll usually wake up the next morning remembering everything with perfect clarity but deep confusion as to wtf I was thinking.

e.g. I've woken up with a need to remove by bedside lamp from the wall, which I managed to do without damaging anything. Still no clue why the heck I felt the need to do that but I remember doing it perfectly.

Knowing a close friend who lost his father to this, where his father spent many years in care and was always talking crazy.

He told me that in the week of his fathers death they were able to talk with each other as adults for the first time in many years. It was surreal because he had long thought the man was lost.

I believe the potential cause is an inflammatory response to an unknown agent (bacteria, virus or even our own cells). I wonder if terminal lucidity occurs as the immune system shuts down resulting in temporary reduction in brain inflammation.

I often feel as though the ideas of “logic” or “rationality” are means to irrational ends. Or, if we ask ourselves “why” to our desires a couple times, we don’t necessarily have a rational motivation to have relationships, stay healthy, or try new things; we simply intrinsically want them.

Given that, I often wonder if the behaviours in those moments are because the irrational desires have become very different for some of us. I think it might explain why people will seem so methodical or sure about carrying those ideas out.

> What's interesting, and actually quite well documented, is something called "terminal lucidity". This is when as someone actually gains mental clarity for a period of time some time before their death. The specific time periods vary with the sufferer. This is baffling medically, of course, because if a person's mental function is gone due to brain decay, then how can they get it back? And why does it foreshadow death?

Huh. This is interesting. In multiple intelligent agent designs I know how to create this improved lucidity would come as a consequence of estimation of values not needing to be short-circuited due to intractability. One design has this happen because the limit of the monte carlo rollouts converges to the accurate result due to reduced computation time. The other design has this happen because it stops taking the limit with respect to a value near but below one such that the limit of future expectation gets discounted to nothing. A final design, which is far less optimistic with respect to recovery from this, just has literal cached values for end of life scenarios.

It would foreshadow death because the world modeling suggests that death is happening and is still functional. It would produce lucidity because the erroneous heuristic functions wouldn't be relied upon as heavily as the world model's actual results. Or in the final case... it would have been precomputed before reaching that scenario and didn't decay but it was cache lookups.

Do you happen to know if putting the non-lucid people in life threatening and novel such that they would not have anticipated them situations - for example, standing near the edge of a cliff on a windy day - tend to increase lucidity?

Now that I'm thinking about this I notice that free soloists have been claiming that they gain increased lucidity during their climbs. So my model that predicts non-lucidity gaining lucidity actually successfully predicts an improved lucidity in free soloists too, which is not something I realized before I started thinking about this.

I am not a neuroscientist so I don't know how biologically plausible this is as an explanation goes.