Charles Liu

As you know, they're even expressed in fiction, like Dan Brown's novel, Angels and Demons.

There supposedly was an experiment where they had somebody who was about to die and weighed him, and then he died, and they weighed him again, and it's a little lighter.

You know, some sort of physical thing, like a soul.

You've got to try.

That's right.

So there have been continuous experiments to try to understand what it is that makes something alive versus not alive, right?

Because a living person and a dead person, seconds apart, for example, right?

One moment, they're talking, they're breathing, they're whatever, they're holding your hand.

Next moment, they're not.

And we can't get into their brain to figure out how that works.

And another thing about The Walking Dead was that everybody was infected, whether they were dead or alive.

The moment you died, you became a zombie.

So what's the point of even trying to stay alive when you know you're going to become a zombie anyway?

But that's sort of the existential question of what makes a monster and what makes a human, right?

If you've died, you automatically become a monster?

Or do you become inanimate?

Are you different from a rock or a steak?

Yeah, yeah.

And of course, you can do something like what happened in World War Z, where the author said, we actually don't know why these zombies violate the laws of physics so completely.

And yet they do.