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My father, at one point, imagined himself on a Greek island. “Ouzo!” He’d offer from his hospital bed.
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.
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.
About eight hours before my father died he was having a conversation with his unseen mother, who died when he was 14.
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.
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.
Even in the best of cases, our perceptions and interpretations of those perceptions are often dramatically flawed. Add on top of that neural atrophy, loss of oxygen, accumulation of senescent cells, poor clearance of waste products ... and what comes out is often going to be gibberish, as the remaining working parts of the mind attempts to construct a coherent narrative from the broken fragments of sensory input and failing memories.
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.
> 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 mom passed recently. She battled Alzheimer's for 15 years, then passed five days after breaking her hip, even though she was singing and goofing around the day of the break. She was only 77.
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.
My great-grandma talked to several children that she miscarried when young.
I don’t want to trivialize the positive aspects this can have on someone who otherwise might have a sad or challenging death, and to that extent perhaps it’s just an evolved mechanism to make us accept death more gracefully.
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.
> 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"
> "Do not contradict, explain away, belittle or argue about what the person claims to have seen or heard," reads a short text that a hospice provides about the dying process. "Just because you cannot see or hear it does not mean it is not real to your loved one. Affirm his or her experience. They are normal and common."
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 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.
I had a NDE two years ago. I had a lucid experience, saw someone (looking like a pastor) telling me "Do not be afraid, the same way you had to be born to experience this world, we need to die to experience the other world", I then woke up. I am not religious. It did leave a strong impression on me and think about it often.
Wow just wow ! Your comment has given me a new perspective on fear of death. Are you able to share what caused NDE ?
Just before my mom died recently, she told me that my dad (died in 1997) had finally come to take her home. I am OK with that.
When my sister was dying of cancer, she reached a point where she wasn’t speaking.
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.”
Peter Fenwick died in November 2024. The NY Times obituary last month described him as "a neuropsychiatrist who studied near-death experiences." I took note of his book, which I hope to read: The Truth in the Light: An Investigation of Over 300 Near-Death Experiences.
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...
I often notice these demented moments before I fall asleep. Completely nonsensical thoughts like the argument from bear bicyclist study when you need to turnkey.
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
"Terminal lucidity" is common and seems to undermine the notion that the physiology of the dying brain necessarily implies impaired function.
In some traditions it's not a hallucination taking place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bardo
I recommend this article on the kinds of things people actually say on their deathbeds:
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!”
Delirium, so called the organic psychosis, is the common end result of every diffuse brain dysfunction, so it be chemical toxicity, inflammation, trauma or most commonly senility-dementia. It's caused because of a chemical disturbance of the brain-'soup'. Any psychotic symptom can be manifested, not only visual hallucinations. Antipsychotic therapy has massively varied results
Semi-related: not delirium, but if you haven't come across it, check out the "Everywhere at the end of time" series of albums. The music is written to track the timeline of dementia progressing [1].
My dad had a fall and suffered a pretty bad brain injury a few years ago. He has since fully recovered aside from more frequent short-term memory loss, but during his multi-week hospital stay, many aspects of his personality, maturity, and abilities changed, almost to the point of extreme dementia.
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.
During final days before my grand mother's death, she was able to recall her childhood memories, asking her sons to bring her brother. Before that, she had some kind of memory loss. Anyway, here, we need some sort of neurological explanation: Childhood memories stay in the lower part of the brain, as I read it somewhere (probably Oliver Sacks'); the neurological basis of many memory loss is on top layers of brain, that's why sometimes people recall vividly of their childhood memories, even playing piano despite with dementia.
Many researchers consider death bed visioning (when the dying sees a loved one in their waning moments) as not a hallucination, definitionally speaking.
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.
I wish there was a place I could share the experience of my father's death. This doesn't seem to be it, though I appreciate everyone's story.
Is there such a place?
The hypothesis that consciousness arises from the brain has been proven unlikely (if not outright wrong) a long time ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVsBFOB7H44. So maybe not go with the delirium hypothesis so easily.
My wife and I experienced this when my father died. We visited him hours before his death. He looked up at my wife, smiled and said "Mother, you came!" For the next while she sat beside him, rubbed his brow and engaged in small talk as his mother. When he fell asleep we left. He died during the night...
Reminds me of the death-rattles from the Stormlight Archive series.
My wife can be psychotic at times (in the medical meaning) and trying to argue against the delusions is useless, you just have to reflect and redirect.
Wish it wasn't happening to Apartheid Clyde
Oh man Brainstorm had a trippy scene about this