Interlife

First Written    Wed Oct 23 18:22:18 2024
File Modified    Mon Oct 20 04:11:13 2025
Latest Upload    Wed Oct 29 08:20:13 2025

"Do you know why we're interviewing you?"

The interviewer sat in a plain chair, just contoured enough to not look so obviously stiff. She wore neutrals, a bit overdressed for the warm office room. The lighting was neutral too, as if to remind me that the most interesting subject in the room wasn't anything I was looking at. It was behind my eyes.

I took a seat across from her. The chair wasn't as stiff as it looked.

"It's a condition for my reintegration into the outside," I said, "An exit interview. And the least I can do for all you've done for me."

"Well, yeah. Duh," she said, "But that's not what I was asking. I need to know if you understand the nature of this interview."

"You wanted to ask me about the afterlife."

She shook her head. "Not quite. After all, your life hasn't ended. You're here, aren't you?"

"Right." I paused, to let her continue.

"Interlife. Semantics, I know. But for all intents and purposes, you were dead for over a century. And after we rebuilt your mind, you stopped being dead. So what was it like?"

I nodded, recalling what little I knew of the procedure. They had found enough brain tissue left in my hundred-and-fifty year old corpse to extrapolate the missing neuron connections. The work wasn't easy, and supercomputer time wasn't cheap, even in this day and age. Apparently a few trillionaires believed in the sanctity of human life enough to donate me a resurrection.

"So," I said, "You know how you said after you reconnected all those synapses, there still wasn't any activity?"

"Yes?" She pulled out a pen and paper, doing her best to maintain a flat expression, lest her eagerness bias my responses.

"It checks out. The whole time I was dead, was like a dreamless sleep. No existence. No consciousness."

She let her pen drop to the table.

"C'mon. Work with me, sir. There has to be something. There's always something."

I sighed, knowing I wouldn't leave this room without some form of judgement.

"There were weird thoughts, almost like hallucinations, but I don't think that was from the time when I was dead. I think it was just noise from my brain booting up again."

"Yes, dummy. That's the interlife."

I grimaced. "Could you be a little less casual with me? I thought this was a formal interview."

"I'm not a journalist," she said, "Or a doctor. I just want to know about the interlife."

"Okay. But I need to preface. Because this isn't empirical at all, but I know what I experienced, and I think I know why I experienced it that way."

She smiled, and leaned forward with her pen back in hand. I don't think she realized how much she was unnerving me with the pen. I felt like a madman being prodded into a confession booth.

"I was a programmer. Not the best one to be honest, but I knew enough about data structures to use them as metaphors. Specifically graphs, like the kind with the nodes, not the ones with bars or lines."

"So you saw node graphs?" she asked, scratching half a line in her notepad.

"Please don't prompt me, I'm trying to figure out the story myself. And I didn't 'see' anything."

"I'm sorry."

"It's fine. But yeah, programmer. And I had a passing interest in linguistics, which isn't that relevant, except it is. Because there was this time I, well."

I wasn't sure whether I wanted to proceed. I was probably about to nullify the entire experiment's results with what I was going to say next.

She placed the pen down and clasped her hands together. "Please, continue. I don't need to take notes if it makes you uncomfortable."

"Okay," I continued, "I did a bunch of hallucinogens. It was a different time. But I know from those trips I took, that it was possible to get very, very meta about everything. Including the concept of language itself. And by extension, thought. Since they're the same thing I guess. Language is just how we share thoughts. I'm sorry, I'm rambling. Does my drug history cause any problems for your data?"

"Not in the slightest."

"So," I started, "I guess I'll start talking about my interlife now."

She did little to hide her excitement as I began.

"The technician who explained the process to me said that after all my synapses were reconstructed, he just triggered a random bunch of neurons to fire. And, you're not going to believe me, but I think I perceived that."

She scribbled in her little notepad, beaming. "You felt the jumpstart? That's incredible. What did you see, or what did you feel?"

"Nothing really. I think, well, those neurons were all connected, but the meanings of what they stood for was kind of lost. Like if somebody had made a really good program to do a task, like classifying or problem solving, but no one wrote down what the inputs or outputs represented, so it was kind of useless now. But I did have one thought. It was just 'thought'. Like not the word thought, but the atomic idea of thought, if that makes sense."

The interviewer chuckled. "Fascinating. Like, 'I think, therefore I am'?"

"No," I said, smiling myself, if only in relief that she was taking me seriously, "More like 'I think, therefore I think'."

I leaned back in my chair and looked up at the ceiling. Maybe it was easier to not be looking at anything, because what I was going describe wasn't visual so much as it was some innate understanding of my own brain, if such a thing were even possible.

"I'm going to use English," I continued, "But these aren't words so much as ideas, like the raw ideas that words map to. It went something like this at first:"

thought

thought

thought thought

thought thought thought thought thought thought thought

"An eternity of thought thought thought thought. Until I realized that if there could be thought, there could be something. Like, a thought that 'things can exist'. I'm going to call this node reality. And yes, these thoughts are nodes."

"I'm going to title this part, 'Thought Lazarus'," she said, scribbling notes.

"Sure, that sounds catchy," I lied, "So anyways, there's a node that forms, or boots up between the two nodes. It's like, something like this:"

thought

reality

thought reality

thought reality

sense

"Sense," I said, "Is what I want to call the new node. Like, there were thoughts. And there was existence. And there could be thoughts about existence. Sense."

The interviewer didn't interrupt me this time. I could sense she was enthralled with my story, so I continued.

"Sense was different than thought. It came with something else. A question. Sense existed, so what could I sense? Well, I guess now your earlier comment was correct."

She raised an eyebrow. "The Descartes quote?"

"Yeah. I sense that there's something that thinks. I'm thinking. So there is, well, me. Let's call that node 'self'."

"So we go from a dead mind, to recognizing the self in four steps."

"Yeah, it's crazy, I know."

"It's wonderful."

I smiled, and continued.

"I started working through more combinations. Not all of them generated nodes, but they all generated questions. And sometimes questions generated nodes. Like:"

thought

self

thought self

thought self

"Who was I? What kind of being, what kind of thing was my mind?"

self

reality

self reality

self reality

"Where was I? How did my self fit into reality? Was I in reality right now?"

"That last question, it lingered. It lingered long enough for the nodes to start to react to it. I don't know how. I don't know what a question even is. Is there even a structure in the brain that represents a question?"

She looked to one side, as if recalling some rote memorization of the brain's inner workings, or at least what we knew of it thus far.

"Not a structure, no. But a question, like any other higher level abstraction, could just be a pattern. A pattern represented by neurons and their connections. Or in your case, nodes."

I figured as much. But something about the questions felt grander than just patterns. Then again, I was a reanimated madman who had been no stranger to messing with his own mind.

"So, continuing on, that question. It got me fixated on sense. Where was I? There was only one way to find out. By trying to sense. And this part's less clear to me, because I don't know how I made this jump. Maybe there's some instinctual hardware in the human brain that's biased to connecting sense, the idea, to actual senses. But either way, I started to feel."

"What did you feel?" she asked, starting to chime in again unprompted.

I didn't mind. I had trouble wrapping my head around this next part myself, so a little nudge couldn't hurt.

"I could feel my own heartbeat. I could sense it. I could sense that sometimes it was beating, and sometimes it wasn't. I could feel that this one, singular part of reality I could sense, wasn't static. It changed states. I questioned it. The question wrapped itself around my nodes, and woke up another new one: time".

"So one signal, a single sense from the outside world. Or, the inside world, since it's your own heart, but I digress. That was enough to come up with the entire concept of time."

"I guess so. Maybe it's one of those things that's intuitive for us. I mean, could you imagine a living animal mind, in this world, with no concept of time? It would be so confused."

The interviewer laughed, and jotted down more notes. "And here I thought the universe was unfathomably complex. Five nodes, five steps from mindless to understanding time. Einstein and Hawking must have been slacking on the job."

"Einstein and Hawking never got a chance to wake from death," I countered, "They spent their lives learning. But what I was doing was something different. Re-learning? No, that sounds like something you do after skipping through a college class and retaking it next semester."

"How about re-becoming?"

"I like that better. And I think you'll like this next chain of events too:"

time

time

reality

time reality

time reality

change

"Reality could change. Reality changes over time."

change

change

self

change self

change self

self change

"I'm sorry," she interrupted, "You changed the order. Does it matter? Are the node relationships not commutative?"

"I don't know. I feel like they are. But maybe for some of the circuitry that listens to the nodes, that listens to the questions, order does matter. I didn't form a new node until I ordered them this way."

self

change

self change

self change

self change

motion

"Ah," she said, "I know what happens next."

"Yeah. I moved my pinky. And then, from what the techs told me, I was looking around the room at things within 48 hours. And pouring myself a cup of coffee while having a conversation with the nurses less than a week later. I was a model patient."

She closed her notebook and clasped her hands. "You were a model interviewee too."

I smiled and turned, inadvertently cracking my back as I prepared to stand. "So is that it? Any more questions? I guess you didn't really ask much, I just talked."

"The fact that you're here and able to talk is a miracle in and of itself. But I do have one question."

"Yeah?"

"What do you think consciousness is?"

I let out a long breath, careful not to let it come as an audible sigh. I had felt this question was coming, but it was a good question. After all, it was one I asked myself.

"Well, remember, this is a programmer you're talking to. But I think minds are just networks, patterns of nodes, meant to find, well, other patterns. In themselves. In the world. And what's another way to describe the search for patterns? Asking questions. Questions asked are patterns we're trying to confirm or discard."

"So, consciousness?"

"I think think consciousness is questions. I think we are the questions. All of it, theory of mind, ideas, biases, knowledge, hopes and dreams. They're all just questions, trying to to find the pattern in everything. That's what I think consciousness is. One big search for a pattern that may or may not exist. But it's a journey, and that journey is a question so vast, you may as well call it a mind."

I wasn't sure if mind was the right word. Sentience? Soul? It had room to be workshopped. The interviewer wrote a final few lines in her notepad. I could tell she liked my answer.

"What a beautiful idea. I wasn't expecting so much insight into the interlife, let alone poetry. Just know, the recovery of your mind paid for itself several times over with that idea alone. It's a new one, at least to me."

"Thanks?" I wasn't sure what to make of her response, but I extended my hand to shake hers.

"Thanks. You're all clear to do what you will with your new life, sir. Thank you. And you're welcome."

"You're welcome?" I asked.

She winked. "For your resurrection. It wasn't cheap."