I recently read this post—while I think extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, it got me thinking beyond the human soul.
What makes something feel alive?
The answer is uncertainty the more you think about it.
Why are people scared of small bugs? Some find them disgusting and this is a (good) biological response. But the majority of people who are scared of bugs are scared because they are unpredictable. You don’t know where or how the bug will move, and that’s what makes it scary. You have some sense, but there is still uncertainty.
On the flip side, I’ve never met anyone who are scared of small rocks, there is no inherent uncertainty with them; they are predictable.
This applies to us humans in scale as well.
If you think about what makes a human feel like a {zombie, NPC, robot, etc.}, the common factor between these are that they feel predictable to a certain degree.
If an NPC starts to deviate from how they usually (should) behave, you would consider them more alive
What makes something feel alive is a spectrum, a truly chaotic system does not feel alive either.
You can’t sense any patterns or familiarity, it is beyond our (current) comprehension.
The sense of something feeling alive is a byproduct of a certain amount of uncertainty in the system.