Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by dkural 1580 days ago
One my fears is that as I am dying my brain will get stuck in a subjective time loop, in essence, the last 30 seconds will subjectively stretch out to a thousand years... but with only a handful of repeating feelings and sensations. What if due to other physical discomfort, your memories replayed are those of regret or other unpleasant sensations? (similar to a "bad trip").
3 comments

Not too likely. Did you ever experience a moment subjectivity stretched a thousand years? If no, why do you think there is a special mechanics for the event of system shutdown?

If anything, any sensation or thought requires energy. Experiencing 1000x or 100000x more sensations in the same space of time takes 1000x/100000x amount of energy, and it's not like your dying organism has hidden last reservoir of energy to power your brain activity.

Did I comfort you?

That reminds me of a old comment on Reddit.

The poster wrote that he got assaulted by a football player, fell on the ground, and somehow hurt his head.

Then he met a girl, they got married after two years and then had a child. Another two years later they had another child. He also had a great job, and bought a house, where he lived with his wife and family for like 10 years.

One day he was sitting on the couch, looked at a lamp, and noticed that the lamp did not look right. The perspective was off. He stared at the lamp for three days. Then he realized that is not a real lamp. Nothing was real.

Then he woke up, still laying on the ground where he had hurt his head 15 minutes ago.

I think the distinction is the subjective perception that time has stretched out a thousand years. It's not that time has literally dilated, just that our "normal" perception of time has changed. Perceived time dilation occurs under certain drugs (to include those endogenous to the human body) and the OP thought has been something that has occurred to me (and others) as well. IIRC, the movie American Beauty suggests it in the last scenes.
Subjective perception still requires energy to percept. Thus, to perceive time dilation your brain needs more energy to process it, but there is no a source of such energy.
Fair enough, I see what you're getting at. But I think there is an important distinction: it's not the claim that actual perception goes on forever, but the subjective experience dilates to seem like it. It's quite a bit like the other discussion between the "easy" and "hard" problem of consciousness. You're speaking to the "easy" problem (how neurology correlates to subjective experience), where the "hard" problem is the measurement of how the actual experience feels to the observer.

There is still energy at the moment of death (e.g., your ATP doesn't instantaneously disappear), meaning for a few brief instances, there is still energy to perceive and during these instances, the subjective experience of time may differ from normal day-to-day experience. It's not to say perception actually goes on forever, but the subjective experience of time feels like it does (or, at least changes our normal perception of time).

Don’t worry, even if there is a period of bad trip it will be dwarfed by the subjectively infinite relaxation into oblivion
Except you will never know because you are not the observer of this oblivion unlike that of a bad trip.
You are until you aren’t
I have always wondered if our last DMT moments were perceived as timeless. People imagine darkness but seem to forget that our minds reconstruct all of reality in real time. So you could conceivably live another life in your last moments.