The hallucinatory thoughts of the dying mind
thereader.mitpress.mit.edu
thereader.mitpress.mit.edu
He was an avid fisherman and his last words were, distinctly, “Big fish.”
Yet, he was mostly unconscious for his last day. I spent time talking with him as he slept, massaging his hands and feet. Later we had a party for him and played music. Around 10 at night he began to die (the breathing changes). At the very end he opened his eyes, looked at my mother, sister and me, and passed.
It was a beautiful death.
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.
I asked him "Who are you talking to?" and got a rather rude response, not like him, "My mother" in a tone you give a five year old "go away kid you are bothering me".
The International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS) is worth checking out if you have interest. I've never had a NDE, however I've spent a lot of time in their library in Durham North Carolina.
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.
It sounds very similar to your experience, they'd just randomly come and disappear after a while.
Acutely altered mental status (without specific findings suggestive of a stroke) is, first and foremost, assumed to be a metabolic issue. I've been a practicing doctor for twenty years and it wasn't a new thought at the time. I don't know why nobody suggested it to you. It's been basic understanding for, well, ages.
I got interested in consciousness 35 years ago or so when I read Oliver Sacks' "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat". Although the various people depicted in the stories had some physical deficit due to a trauma of some kind, it vividly demonstrated how we rationalize our way through the world more than we reason our way through it. Our conscious mind is much more of a facade than we typically imagine.
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?
Yes, sometimes we have deliberate thought where we rehearse different lines of reasoning before uttering something, but 98% of the time we are spewing just like LLMs do. And when we do engage in deliberate thought, each of those trial sentences again just appears without consideration; we are simply post-hoc picking the one that feels best.
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 :)
Many people make the "opportunity to understand" claim, but I'm yet to hear anything meaningful coming out. Are you familiar with this joke: A guy decides to do drugs and keeps a notepad nearby to write down any profound revelations he has while high. The next morning he checks the notepad and finds he only wrote one thing: "The water is wet."
There is a scientist that studies color. She knows everything about it that can be possibly known. She knows the colors of everyday objects, she knows how colors work, how light's wavelength affects its transmission, etc etc. She is also fully colorblind (achromatopsia).
One day, she finally can see colors somehow. She isn't colorblind anymore.
The question is: now she can finally see the stuff she knew only intellectually, did she learn anything new?
But the insinuation that drugs have similar effect is easily disproved by continued inability of the junkie to write down any new information.
Again, nobody dared to answer GGP question about examples of any revelations.
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!
> then wouldn't it be such a coincidence that this materialistic brain happens to describe precisely what you seem to experience?
> 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".
I fail to see what's unlikely about the viewpoint that the mind is passively watching the movie that our body is the main character of; Or why such a one-way relationship would contradict the mind being real and "physical". Physics is full of one way functions. It is not the first time that I totally fail to comprehend one side of this very debate, and it feels like I'm missing an essential insight.
I understand that in dualism the "mind" (the conscious experience) does not bring anything to the physical world and look therefore utterly useless, which is not satisfactory but does not prove or disprove anything (that's what I understand to be "the hard problem of science"), like the angels pushing the celestial bodies according to the laws of physics. I would gladly rule out the possibility of such useless conscious experience like I rule out the theory of the little angels, if not for the personal experience I have of it :)
So, to follow along that analogy, it seems to me that yes indeed the moon obeys the law of physics but still somehow some little angels that I can see pretend that they push it around. And your argument sounds like "there must be an influence from these angels to the laws of physics because otherwise it's too unlikely that those angels would be seen", which sounds suspicious to me given how the laws of physics stands very well on their own.
I don't know if I've made the discussion clearer or more opaque. Would you be able to rephrase your explanation differently?
https://michaelbach.de/ot/sze-silhouette/index.html
The silhoute may be perceived as rotating clockwise or counterclockwise.
There is not in fact enough information to determine which direction objectively.
Now suppose 2 types of experiments:
A) someone wears spy glasses and observes this effect, and is tasked to regularly speak out what direction (s)he perceives the figurine to spin. The spy glasses records what the subject sees, but also these remarks.
B) you observe this animation yourself, not wearing spy glasses, and you yourself speak out loud what direction you see the figurine spin, including occasional flips (which occur more frequently on faster / smaller variants of such animations)...
... now ...
Suppose you are watching a recording of someone else's A) variant, effectively you may be seen as a passive spectator of a prerecording of this other person. While watching this spy glass prerecording you would have your own interpretation (clockwise or not) and occasional flips of direction, at the same time you would be hearing this other person's interpretation, and you might agree with this other person half the time and not for half the other, the timing of the flips wouldn't correspond etc. Even guessing a coin toss will be correct half the time.
However if you yourself perform B) and speak for yourself, the statistics change, and the rotation direction your supposed 100% passive "mind" perceives corresponds with what your material body is speaking out loud all the time.
How do you explain that discrepancy in statistics? How was your brain and body able to systematically express what your supposedly 100% passive "mind" homunculus observed?
Hence you have "proven" your "passive mind spectator" to actually be active, and thus necessarily BE MEASURABLE. You come to the conclusion you are a materialist after all, even though the dualist simplifaction of the world is useful and pragmatic, you have shown it to be fundamentally wrong.
I wrote "proven" in quotes because you can't prove to a third person this correspondence between (counter)clockwise perception and verbalization.
But you have certainly proven this to yourself.
I don't see the point of the "spy glasses" since the animation we see with or without the glasses is exactly the same - supposedly the glasses do not alter the vision so the flips experienced by the observer would be the same with or without the glasses.
> Suppose you are watching a recording of someone else's A) variant, effectively you may be seen as a passive spectator of a prerecording of this other person
I assume you mean I'm watching at the recording made by the glasses, so that I see kind of "through the eyes" of the previous observer.
I do not fully understand why you had to resort to a visual illusion. If the participant is just asked to say a random number between 1 and 10 every minute, and I'm listening to the recording of the experiment while at the same time being subjected to it myself, I will also utter the same number once every 10 minutes in average. And of course, in the "B" version of that variant of the experiment based on random numbers, I would "agree" with me all the time because there is nothing else to compare to.
I don't see the connection with the question of
> How do you explain that discrepancy in statistics?
This sounds silly. I explain the different result from the fact that it's a different experiment. In the first case I'm comparing my own "random flips" to someone elses, and in the second I'm doing no such comparison.
> How was your brain and body able to systematically express what your supposedly 100% passive "mind" homunculus observed?
My passive "homunculus" does not observe the movie of the rotating figure, and does no say anything about how it experiences the movie. It merely observes my brain interpretation of the rotating figure, while it listens to my brain uttering in which direction the figure is rotating. It is "out of the loop".
(for the purpose of this discussion, the brain is just part of the body, right?)
Using the same experiment, let me try to demonstrate that the experiencing subject can only be passive.
I do not know how you stand on the "neural networks do/do not experience self consciousness" debate, and it does not matter. For this though experiment all I need is that you agree that it is possible in theory to build a large neural network that experiences _no_ consciousness whatsoever. Just a stupid machine made of cogs and gears if you prefer that to a weight matrix, but enough of them that it has the capacity to be given a set of pictures as input and, if that set of pictures represent a movie of some rotating object, it would flash a green light if the object is rotating clockwise, and a red one if it's rotating counter-clockwise.
Of course, if subjected to the optical illusion of the rotating ballerina, the machine would be confused and, sometime flashes red and sometimes green.
Now, in principle, we can improve this machine to make it more "brain-like" by enlarging the simulation (or adding more cogs), until eventually we can simulate the exact body (including the brain) of the human being participating in your experiment well enough that we can predict in which direction he will see the figure rotating and when he will experience flips, because the machine will see the exact same thing in the same way and, reproducing the same brain circuitry than the human subject, will be confused in exactly the same way at the same moment.
So, we can predict what the subject will "experience" with a machine that does not experience anything. Therefore, the fact that the human subject experiences anything at all is totally irrelevant to what he will say the rotation is (like the angels "pushing" the moon are irrelevant to explain the motion of the moon).
And actually, similar experiences are being done at least since the 90s ; not with a large brain simulation but just by measuring the brain activity of the subject and being able to predict what he is going to say before he actually has a conscious experience of it. Three papers from a quick internet search:
- https://www.nature.com/articles/news.2008.751
- https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1212218110
- https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-39813-y
Don't you think that all this point strongly toward a "one way function"?
My claim isn't that the current LLMs are thinking; my claim is that much of what comes out of our mouths aren't any more sophisticated.
The one statement I made that wasn't just about me was "billions subscribe to dualism" -- which doesn't speak for any specific person. Do you disagree that dualism is still very much alive?
This widespread notion that whatever affects the material world is itself material fails to understand what both materialism and dualism means.
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.
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.
A month prior to this, she had begun to sometimes stay in her bed often half the day, lying awake looking up at the ceiling with the most joyous look of peace in her eyes, as if seeing something or someone very special, often whispering as if in dialogue. This went on for hours sometimes.
I was incredibly moved at the time, but there were otherwise no indicators she was near death, so I filed it away as some new development in the progression of her disease.
I now take great comfort knowing this is not uncommon among people who are soon to die, especially since she was unable to communicate the day she died.
But if you’ve ever stayed awake for many days or had other hallucinogenic experiences, you’ll know how powerfully thoughts can manifest. And how deep our memory actually goes. Clearly it’s inappropriate to vividly see your memories during waking life, but as you transition to death those barriers are less necessary as the body diverts increasingly scarce resources to surviving just a few moments longer.
Instances where people are not ready to go, sorrowful, regretful, spiteful, guilty, etc.
I think I can imagine there being ‘non-sad’ deaths, though - such as in the case of dying close to 100 years old, surrounded by ones loved ones, family, friends, with time to say goodbye. So, basically any circumstance which does not allow for the ideal departure, could be classed as a ‘sad death’ ..
The answers still don't make any sense
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.
There are an estimated 50 sextillion (5*10^22) habitable earth-like planets in the observable universe. On average they're 1.8 billion years older than Earth. Think about the implications of this for a minute. We don't see green space men, but that's not how we would expect life forms billions of years more advanced than us to appear. The entire universe must be suffused with intelligence, and if that's so, doesn't that suggest there is more to life than what you see on the surface? I find this conclusion inescapable when considering the size and age of the universe. There is more to life than meets the eye. How could it be otherwise?
There’s something about acknowledging the extent of the unknown that’s extremely humbling, awe inspiring, and difficult to adequately articulate, and it’s something I think is important to spend extra effort communicating.
From the history of life on Earth, we should expect extraterrestrial life forms to appear as a self replicating molecular device way simpler than this accidental peculiar ape with a large brain that we usually associate with the notion of intelligence.
This kind of reasoning feels like bad extrapolation : you consider humans 100k years ago and humans now, and you extrapolate ; sure enough, it looks like we are in a journey to become some abstract intelligence filling the universe.
But if you take more samples in the so much longer history of life on earth, you will see that among all life forms that appeared and disappeared, human-like intelligence emerged only once, by accident. And it seems to me that the chaotic evolution of human civilization strongly suggest that it will also disappear accidentally.
Natural selection does not select for that kind of intelligence. Awareness of the environment, yes ; good predictor of the near future changes of this environment, yes. But the creation of larger and larger organisms like a civilization that would evade Earth? I see no reason for that in theory and no evidence in practice.
I agree that life is very unlikely on any given earth-like planet. And most life out there is probably of the unicellular sort.
I also don't think its guaranteed that humanity will last beyond the point we can 3D print an antimatter supersoaker.
I am just saying that out of 50 sextillion chances, I bet enough planets evolved human level intelligence that at least one made it to the singularity. And given that most rolls of the dice happened billions of years ago, whatever the singularity turns into exists already, and has for billions of years.
I don't think this is optimistic in the slightest, I think its a very sober reading of the probabilities. I would actually say that thinking we're unique is the optimistic point of view.
But I think that what I'm saying feels optimistic because its contrarian, and its contrarian because our intuitions just aren't calibrated to reason through this sort of thing. A lot of it is because of our fiction. We imagine green space men because that's what actors dressed up in suits can portray. We imagine aliens like ourselves, don't find that, and conclude there aren't any of any sort. We imagine other civilizations out there to be contemporaneous with ourselves and on the same timeline because that's all we've ever seen. And we can't grapple with numbers like 50 sextillion because we're evolved to count bananas. But if you think about the odds we're the only intelligent life that evolved and just reason through it using numbers, how can you think we're alone? There are only 100ish atomic elements that matter. They're all pretty common. Our star is very average. The Earth is a pretty pedestrian rocky planet. The Milky Way is pretty average. Life emerged relatively quickly after the planet cooled (on an astronomical imescale). The fact that we look out into space and don't see anything means diddly squat because we can only observe 5 earth-like planets/moons out of 50 sextillion. But we feel alone and unique because we're evolved to assume that all we see is all there is.
I do not think we are unique but I believe we "human like intelligences" are a very unlikely product of as many tiny random adaptations as to make the number of rocky planets in the observable universe look like a small number.
This is how I look at it: the Earth is an ecosystem with millions of species that's been evolving together for billions of years, adapting to each others changes as much as to the change in climate etc. The combinatoric is huge, but some environmental pressure make that process invent over and over similar solutions to the same class of issues. Some traits are totally random and I believe will exist only once in the whole history of the universe, and some traits are heavily constrained by environment/chemistry and are invented over and over by evolution, on Earth and elsewhere. Is intelligence of the former or later class of traits?
Some organ to predict the future is certainly part of the heavily constrained invention. But I can't convince myself that a human like intelligence able to escape Earth, both in imagination and in practice, is anything more than a fluke. I just don't see how to logically connect super-intelligence with how evolution works.
On a higher level, your idea also evokes a whole set of similar ideas that are all based on multiplying tiny chances of high intelligence with sextillions of planets, such as "life is a simulation" or "matrix like brain in a jar". My intuition tells me that we can't extrapolate that far without the unknown dominating everything.
crows and parrots dolphins elephants chimps and orangutans octopi
Just looking more into this because is this discussion is fascinating:
- Life transitioned from uni to multicellular multiple times. Animals and land plants both evolved from single celled lineages independently. Fungi like Ascomycota and Basidiomycota went multicellular independently. Even green, red and brown algae went multicellular independently.
- Ctenophores (comb jellies) might have evolved nerves independently. Some sponges and placozoans have cells that perform coordinated, nerve‐like functions. These use a different genetic and cellular toolkit that synapses and seem to be an independent evolution.
- Octopi evolved brains independently of us. Our last common ancestor just had a primitive nerve net.
So at least the path from unicellular life to monkey/octopus level intelligence doesn't seem like a fluke at all to me. It seems like even on the same planet the major transitions occur repeatedly and independently.
The jump from monkey to human happened so fast that indicates to me its not vanishingly unlikely. (Monkeys as smart as chimps are thought to have evolved 15-20M years ago). You might say octopi and birds are older and haven't evolved but they didn't have hands to take advantage of their intelligence and create a positive feedback loop.
I'm trying to imagine where evolution and super-intelligence seem irreconcilable. Maybe it's the jump from monkeys to the Homo genus, where brain size first started to run away? I think its clear how increasing brain size can confer an advantage there once the stage is properly set. Chimps already had complex social dynamics and rudimentary tool use. We even see initial phases of modestly increasing brain size with the Australopiths that preceded Homo. However our hominid lineage is the only one that did have an increasing brain size.
Is it the progression from early Homo to us? That seems like a natural and inevitable progression once the process started.
That's the evolution of the level of intelligence required to escape our environment that seems to miss the driver. I just can't see the evolutionary advantage. I would be the last person to underestimate animal intelligence, but none of the exemples, known and unknown, of brains that evolved on earth, have shown anything close to that.
I do acknowledge the fact that more individual as well as social intelligence is generaly good from a survival standpoint, but the gap in intelligence between lighting a fire or shaping a rock into a blade (both good for survival) into developing a theory of black holes or solving P=NP (both useless for survival) seems just too wide to be closed just by the hypothetical natural inertia in the brain growth process.
But maybe this is like emergence of intelligence in large neural network? That at some point, the more economical way for a neural network to be able to predict the correct output for a large set of input is to internalise some general knowledge and understanding of the laws governing the inputs? In other words, maybe the elements of reasoning and memory required to light a fire and carve rocks and understand seasons and prey behavior etc, are more easily synthesized into a brain that can, using the same elements of logic, develop a theory of black holes?
Maybe, but that take care only of the "individual" intelligence ; we still need to find a reason why social intelligence would go from "be smart enough to steal some bananas and therefore appear stronger and therefore can climb on more female at the end of the day" to "act and behave cooperatively toward a future common good". Is your solution to this the creation of super-organisms? If so, I'm no expert but I can think of as many exemples in nature of "super organisms" that became dumber (insect colonies) than more intelligent (multi-cellular) as a result.
I believe the root of my scepticism is actually my psssimistic views on social intelligence, the value of cooperation, that I doubt the central role of reason in most technical inovations, the role of faithful communication in the evolution of language, etc.
On another hand, you are the one who have to live with the Fermi paradox :)
For example, maybe NDE is the conscious mind's experience of certain functional aspects of the mind turning off. The conscious mind already integrates a dynamic set of functional mind aspects into something coherent feeling its entire existence, and so if some of those start turning off and a smaller subset is integrated, the fact that something seemingly coherent is still experienced does not necessarily need a special explanation. Perhaps subset integration developed to support brain damaged states, which do have selective pressure on them.
Totally agree.
But if you can't use selection pressure to directly explain NDEs the same way you can with "fight, flight, freeze", fear of the dark, sexual attraction to signs of physical health, etc, and you need to use other things we don't really understand (like how that "coherent feeling" gets created) to connect NDEs with selection pressures, selection pressures aren't really helping to explain things.
It's also not like explanations for NDEs based on some combination of information processing, known cognitive functions and selection pressures have to be 100% "wrong" for there to be better explanations. Cliche example, but the ptolemaic model of the universe actually predicted the observable orbits of the planets pretty well and explained the lack of observable motion of constellations without needing to appeal to seemingly absurd "special explanations" like stars being an enormously huge distance away and "unseen phenomenon" like stellar parallax that was unobservable to ancient astronomers.
All of the basic ingredients in the ptolemaic model like orbits, planets, and geometry were still relevant in the heliocentric model, even though their arrangement was radically different. That could easily be the same for the relevance of information processing, known cognitive functions and selective pressure in relation to a seemingly absurd "special explanation" that ends up proven correct by some as of yet unseen equivalent to a breakthrough observation of stellar parallax.
I am saying - well, I can readily think of a second order explanation that is logic/reason/“materialist” compatible, so I wouldn’t find it a proportionate response to wander off the reservation on this basis of this topic.
I can also think of many first and second order explanations for NDEs that don’t require any change in explanatory paradigm, but the fact that all physical phenomenon are based on observations of our conscious experience of the physical world makes any purely experiential phenomenon like NDEs a different class of phenomenon than physically measurable phenomenon.
I am a religious person, but for someone in such a situation, a naturalistic explanation may be that, if what will increase their chance of survival from "effectively zero" to "slightly more" is the attention & care of others around them, such "narrative" hallucinations may make it more likely that they receive that care.
Not all hospice or elder-care providers recommend affirming hallucinations.
Here's a quote from a nursing home guide that explores the ethical considerations of this practice:
> Lying to someone with dementia, often termed “therapeutic lying,” poses a nuanced ethical dilemma. While entering a person’s altered reality can indeed reduce their immediate distress, it’s important to acknowledge that lying is still lying.
> Over time, this practice may lead to confusion, especially in moments of clarity, and strain the trust and relationship between the patient and caregiver.
> This complexity has led caregivers and professionals to explore alternative communication strategies that honor the truth while providing comfort and reducing agitation. Two such approaches are reflection and redirection. Reflection involves acknowledging the person’s feelings and statements without directly affirming the distorted reality or lying. Redirection gently shifts the conversation or activity towards something positive and engaging without directly contradicting the person’s beliefs.
The second example is for "...someone with dementia"
So not exactly last words, but I remember holding her hand and she would give me two squeezes. I would like to think it was her ‘saying’ “Love you” or “Thank you” perhaps?
I’d give her 3 back to say, “Love you too.”
In addition to his obituary, the Times published readers sharing their near-death experiences.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/17/science/near-death-experi...
Put a piece of paper under the hand with a pencil, write down thoughts until you're gone, read in the morning - profit
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.
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.
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.
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.
But in reality, it is always a hallucination taking place, because the supernatural isn't real.
This is about as banal and useless a claim as one can imagine. The model of science is an interpretation of data based on observation and experimentation, with objectively verifiable results. The model of religion is literally just vibes. The rain happens because the man in the sky is angry.
If you want to regress further into the solipsist trap and retort that no one can prove objective reality even exists then fine. At some point, to have a conversation, conversants must accept even simply for the sake of argument some minimal set of common axioms. Reality exists. Objective reality exists. Objective reality operates according to understandable rules. Science creates models which more correctly describe the nature of reality than religion.
If you can't even get that far then I don't know what to tell you. Go talk to the machine elves living in your walls or something.
> Reality exists. Objective reality exists.
Remember, the only information about that reality is supplied via/by our mind. Our mind also suggests choices about what to measure, what experiments to hold, and more generally what sort of maps to create. It is all subjective from the ground up.
> Science creates models which more correctly describe the nature of reality than religion.
Science makes testable predictions and creates models which help make further testable predictions. Those models do not “describe the nature of reality”. If you think natural sciences make statements of absolute truth, you are mistaking science for religion.
Dogmatically defining metaphysical claims as "not real" because they are unfalsifiable is no more rational than dogmatically accepting them—the only purely rational approach is to say "we don't know and cannot know" and then move on.
But being Catholic I was also going to a big fancy theater once a week where there was cosplay and fairy tales and lots of singing and a snack. All your friends hung out for coffee and donuts. And really that was my surface-level experience of the Christian faith, because Star Wars was more real to kids like us, than the Old Testament (at least most of the NT folks had been photographed and copied...)
But upon returning I considered how this is a way of life for millions-billions, great intellects, vast civilizations, isn't there more than fairy tales? And it really took dedication and concentrated effort and perseverance just to open up to those possibilities of a spiritual realm. But once you grasp that there's something to it all, and a breadth and depth that's unfathomable, and things might get rocky or difficult, decision point time: follow him to the Cross, or turn away and you'll never know?
Moreover, it became apparent but surprising to me that my reality was unlike others' reality, and I simply have no way of being inside the other's experience of their reality. There's no film or video game or book that can convey to you how people really live, love, and die. We just set out on life's journey and hack through the jungle, making friends along the way.
So ... only what is physical is real? Like only matter and energy? Then there's no such thing as significance or value, only different combinations of matter and energy. Any opinion or argument, held however strongly, is only a set of chemical reactions, nothing more?
If you're on a hike and you see blueprints for a working automobile, you don't assume it assembled itself by mere chance. There's a language of a working design and you assume some minds created it.
But at the same time you interact with humans who have a working blueprint expressed in a 4-letter language and suddenly deny there is any mind behind any design?
I have spent many years pondering it myself, as I'm sure most of us have. I've even spent some time pondering it while not under the influence of mind altering substances (again, not unique, just wanted to throw that out there).
"The question" is, by design or by accident, unanswerable. At least not with any technology that we have yet contemplated.
Honestly, I could probably write for hours about the many possibilities I have pondered, and some of them are quite interesting (and some are just stupid), but I don't want to ramble and HN is not the place for it.
However, there is a good one that gives me some comfort from time to time. So I will at least share that particular thought:
Assume there was an entity with the characteristics one would normally ascribe to a god: the power of creation, omnipotence, all-knowing intelligence, and being eternal yet simultaneously timeless.
At the moment such a being were to come into existence, certainly in an instant, it would experience the "ultimate realization": it would be forever alone.
In my feeble human mind, that is indeed a twisted fate for such a powerful being. Something straight out of the Twilight Zone.
So then I pondered what I would do in that scenario. And the answer seemed fairly obvious: Everything, with a capital "E".
If it could be done, created, built, lived, experienced, dreamed, loved, hated, you name it.
Where would I do it? Everywhere.
For how long? As long as it took. Even if it required doing it all just a bit different 1000^1000^1000^10000000000 times over.
Why? Because then I would have memories. I would have friends.
Having no limitation of knowledge or thought, he could think about himself. His thoughts would not be deficient in any detail, and thus would be an exact representation of himself. [1]
He could delight in that representation with his whole being, and that would be yet another full representation of himself. And thus he would not be alone or sad.
And he could have the propensity of emanating his delightfulness, expressing it outwards like light out of a star. And that emanation could be expressed as the creation of everything else. [2]
[1] https://ccel.org/ccel/edwards/trinity/trinity.i.html?queryID...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Mach#Philosophy_of_scien...
As a child it was understood to me that certain drugs (only the illegal ones) precipitated hallucinations and this was quite undesirable.
After a lifetime of listening to disembodied music on radio, shows on TV, and sailing through Cyberspace, how can we not question reality as moderated through pixels or remote broadcasts... even just your printed paperbacks?
Religions speak of voices/visions all the time and perhaps it's perceived as bunk when an oracle, a psychic, a shaman or a seer receives messages. But generally Western Medicine is concerned with dull-witted people hallucinating detrimental and dangerous things for them. Not people who are guided by encouraging voices or just hearing music in their head at a snap of fingers. One time after college, my mom just goes "don't you think listening to all that awful music is hurting you?" and I was like "welp, vicious cycle."
For myself, I don't remember/experience dreaming and my visual "powers" are limited to watching the world go by, but my inner voices are myriad and a rich tapestry. Unfortunately they're overwhelmingly bad and evil and pessimistic, [they had eventually come to parity with the way people treated me in meatspace,]
so I went through a series of physicians and medications as they attempted to exorcise those daemons by means of human chemistry experiment. Strangely I rarely had the experience as auditory or any sort of "sound in my head" so it's difficult to explain how they're there, and it was harder for me to accept that they were, and my intellect questioned the proposition that a pill could be a voice-killer like heroin is a pain-killer?
And just like antimicrobials or pesticides, it's not easy to find drugs that quell only the bad voices, lol.
Really cannot recommend watching it enough, and narrated by Leonard Cohen, for a treat (...maybe).
Whether or not someone believes this to be real or a hallucination, it is still a human experience, and should at least be treated with respect. I think it's perfectly fine to not believe that it is something higher than brain function, but in Buddhism there is the concept of non-duality.
https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2019/01/how-do-pe...
It usually doesn't make any kind of discernable sense.
Probably the saddest example:
>They quote a 17-year-old, dying of cancer, distraught because she can’t find the map. “If I could find the map, I could go home! Where’s the map? I want to go home!”
Easy suggestibility is common. You hold a blank paper in front of someone in delirium and ask them to read what it says and they start reading like there was something there.
But it's not just full-on delirium; as others have noted, in the elderly even infections can trigger wishful escapades (even as the elderly fail to mount much fever).
And the question remains: how to help the person (delirious or not), particularly when drugs are not effective (and you don't want to drug them into a stupor). It seems unhelpful to agitate them by arguing with them, even if the reality principle is normally the saner option. Do you "go with it"?
My take is that it does help to respond so they know you're there, and really helps to rub feet or back, because body sensation is grounding. But mostly notice how driven you feel to help, or to get involved with managing other helpers, and be very patient with that. Telling the family it's enough for them to be there is often the best thing.
''I have a tumour that's growing in my brain stem and it's pressing on collections of neurons that make me feel elated. I'm lucky. Half an inch over and maybe I'd be depressed about it all. But actually I feel fine. And when I die, when it kills me, those same neurons are gonna fail. And in failing, they're gonna put on my own private light show and I'm gonna fade into the light until I'm all gone and everything's just whiteness and silence.''I copied that passage down years ago because I hope some day if I need help remaining stoic it will be there if I am aware. If not, they can find it in my collected notes.
It goes well with the late film reviewer Roger Ebert's piece, ''I do not fear death'':
More relevant to this story, one incident I remember clearly was that he started talking about taking care of "him" and changing his diaper. Finally we got around to the fact that he was talking about his first nephew, who was born when my dad was quite young in the 1950s. My dad helped my aunt and grandma take care of him and it was his first exposure to caring for a child. All of those people are 30+ years out of existence now, so it was quite a flashback.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/12/magazine/deathbed-visions...
Doesn't mean they're necessarily saying it's real (or not real for that matter), just that it doesn't fall under the strict definition of a hallucination.
Is there such a place?
My father passed away in 2023. Our last discussion was in the parking lot of his apartment, discussing whether or not the milk in my car might spoil if I leave it there while I come up to visit for a bit. Later, he died walking his dog with my mom, though the ER "resuscitated" him.
What I feel the worst about is the time between his heart attack and death, 4 days later.
In that time the doctors reanimated him, like a zombie. They were able to elicit physical reactions by yelling his name, and poking him, I guess to make my mother feel better that he might still be there. Eventually, I noticed blood in his urine bag, ad the nurse looked at me weird when I noticed, and that night he died from a massive aneurysm.
I missed his passing because my phone was on silent mode so I missed everyone's calls. I was watching the finale of Succession, and pressed "volume up" until it was max, but some time in the last few years Android decided that action shouldn't increase ringer volume.
I am sad to have not been there. He now has a tree in my back yard, and I think about him often. He was a gregarious, brave, unabashed person who found the most joy in being a playground monitor.. and I'm lucky to have known him. But there's never enough time or enough reasons to make time, and no closure to be had in his death.