> 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.

Features don't need utility to exist. It may be a weird state precisely due to the lack of selection on what happens when death is already occurring.

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.

> Features don't need utility to exist. It may be a weird state precisely due to the lack of selection on what happens when death is already occurring.

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.

What I am reacting to is that to me it sounded like you were being tempted by explanations outside of the realm of logic and reason.

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’m not tempted by ungrounded explanations lacking logic or reason, but I am tempted to wander off the reservation. History suggests every theory used to organize our understanding of the world will fail to adequately capture something, and that better theories with more explanatory power often require entertaining things deemed outside the realm of plausible explanation. Conscious experience appears to be one of those things we haven’t managed to adequately explain.

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.

That was beautifully written.

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?

Thank you, appreciate the compliment. I actually just edited it/got a bit self conscious about the tone and added some references, in part because I think truly grokking the core of what I’m saying (which fits perfectly with what you’re saying/is a conclusion I’ve also come to) is both really profound and really easy for engineering minded people like most of this audience to dismiss if you don’t ground it properly. Was worried I was getting overly fluffy and people would then assume the evidence and strength of the argument was less grounded than it is, and pared it down before seeing your reply. Hopefully I kept enough to retain what resonated.

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.

> 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.

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.

I'm talking about the end-state of super-evolved lifeforms with runaway intelligence, like humanity. Imagine how humanity will change over the next million years. We will become like Q from Star Trek TNG - beings that are essentially godlike and that transcend the need for bodies, however tiny, and that can project themselves instantly anywhere. Beings that are immortal and beyond the need to replicate, and have somewhat inscrutable goals for involving themselves with lesser lifeforms. Therefore that is what other lifeforms evolved into on some of the other 50 sextillion habitable planets, only billions of years ago. That is the kind of life that I am saying surely now fills the universe. Whatever its nature, it is statistically certain that it exists and is omnipotent, and at the very least permits you the space to exist. I would even say it is certain to be infinitely curious and is aware of us. Perhaps such advanced life is compassionate, wants you to grow, and abhors waste and death. Perhaps it sees you like a rose in a garden. Perhaps its an agent of some deeper level of existence you aren't privy to which would explain phenomenon like commonalities in near death experiences, or children that remember their past lives.

I've met a few people with the same amazing optimism that you describe here and it always surprised me (thank you for that by the way, I understand it requires more nerve to display optimism than pessimism as the former is often associated with silliness whereas the later is more often seen as "sad but true").

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 think we're making orthogonal points.

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.

Ok, thank you for the additional explanations, it does make more sense now.

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.

This is so interesting to think about. Where do you see the extremely unlikely jump from non-intelligence to human-level intelligence that makes us a fluke? I think paleontology at least indicates that evolving monkey level intelligence is inevitable. We have (somewhat independently) evolved:

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.

Yes, devices to sense the environment and then to make some prediction about it seems quite complex to evolve by selection but to be expected given the tremendous advantage they can give. (And thank you for making the effort to illustrate the discussion with actual biology).

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 :)

>Why would a body motivated to survive at all costs waste resources creating comforting hallucinations with some kind of internal coherence during catastrophic failure?

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.

Yes. The explanation of "it's just something the brain drums up to make death more comforting" has always seemed like something people will laugh at 100 years from now.

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

A sudden or unexpected departure, under some circumstances that highlight the grief of passing, such as in a car accident on the way home from a wedding, or having just given birth, or some such circumstances.

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’ ..

Any death of a child. Astronomical loss of potential vs someone who has lived a long life.

Some cultures weigh the death of a child vs. the death of an old person in a way that makes the latter a much more severe loss, given the unique wisdom accumulated over years. I believe it is the opposite in developed countries today due to lower birth rate and the tendency to preserve inordinate amounts of information arguably making the wisdom of an old person seem mostly useless.

What's the word you call your younger self when you think you've got it figured out? Foolish seems too gentle a word. Before having my own, I would wonder why everyone spoke of losing a child as a pain beyond all others. I even had the audacity to think they were being dramatic - after all, they'd only known their child for such a short time. After having my own, I find myself breaking my own heart with the thought of loss almost like my spirit is trying to build calluses against a blow I pray never comes

I've not lost a child and I don't "intend" to, so for me there's the vast investment in bringing them in, raising them up, and to lose both the past and future at the "wrong time"...astronomically heartbreaking. Never used to cry during movies when a child is lost, now I do every time.

I think it's less loss of potential (though that is a good rationalization) and more that people who weren't sad when they thought about their kids dying didn't become ancestors to the current set of humans, via the obvious mechanism.

Of course, I’d be happy to! That would be something in contrast to all the fortunate, welcomed, gleeful, and celebrated deaths we hear about frequently in Western news and experience in our own personal lives.

Instances where people are not ready to go, sorrowful, regretful, spiteful, guilty, etc.

I don't know why I was downvoted for asking a legit question, but alright.

The answers still don't make any sense

Your question just came off as incredibly obtuse.

I literally don't understand what makes a death a "sad" death. People are acting like this should be common knowledge, but I've never heard that before. Death is death. What makes one a sad one? If there are sad ones, does that mean people are having happy deaths? What about gleeful deaths?

That has what to do with this person saying a death is sad?

Bodies and minds can be transcended beyond suffering.