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Now extend that idea to the torturer being cancer cells. You will suffer extreme agony until you die. There will be no reprieve outside a partial numbing of the pain from high morphine doses that keep you mostly out of consciousness.
Or have I misunderstood your other comments and you covered this scenario when discussing the terminally ill?
I did consider things like that to be under the case of terminal illness yes. I do understand that circumstances, especially around such disease, can bring about extreme suffering, and that the way brains process pain can override a person's normal feelings on the matter and make them seek death to end it. Its just that, I think that an end of existence (which, not being someone that believes in afterlives, is what I believe death is) is the worst possible state, worse than any amount of suffering (even an infinite amount of such, not that a human can actually process an infinite negative stimuli). As such, I view it is as more ethical to extend life for as long as possible than allow it to end early.
I acknowledge that a person in great pain will likely disagree, even myself if my life brings me to that, but I dont take this as actual evidence that the pain is worse, because pain shuts down a person's regular thinking and can in high enough amounts override that persons values and ability to think clearly about them. In other words, I think that a person, any person, even myself, that is in sufficient pain will consider that pain worse than death, because pain is almost like a sort of mind control in that it forces you to think that way, but I think that person, even myself in that hypothetical, would be wrong about that. In the same way that if some cruel inventor devised a machine that manipulated a person's mind and forced them to have suicidal thoughts, I would think it wrong to let the victim act on them.
I understand your position now. You can probably have it in your Advanced Directive to deny you life-ending care should that be an option where you live. Hopefully you won't get to make that determination for someone else.
If a person is in such immense pain that they would rather be dead and there is no reasonable expectation from an objective standpoint that their situation will change (e.g. they have metastatic cancer in multiple organs), then they will never return to the state of mind that they want to live. Denying death at that point is sadistic.