Literature and media commonly portray the idea of animated human or human-like bodies. They are often the main antagonists. ‘Bad guys’ who, upon being destroyed, turn out to have actually been nothing more than hollow shells. Many questions arise from this: Is the void to be interpreted as inherently bad? Are we to fear hollowed-out space in general? Is this a case of philosophical trypophobia? These ideas are discussed ad nauseam in (more or less boring) academic papers.

To me, a far more relevant question is: What is the source of energy that animates these seemingly empty bodies? Usually, the idea is used by authors as some sort of metaphor for shallowness and emptiness, or a general lack of substance, and it can be considered unfortunate that the technicalities of a non-metaphorical, physical implementation have scarcely been explored. The common attraction towards the idea of “inner meaning” that humans are widely regarded as being supposed to crave leads many into emphasizing how a person dedicated entirely to materially-oriented tasks (e.g. financial gains), and likewise tasks associated with hedonic tendencies (e.g. satisfying pleasures which become routine and obsessive to the point of extreme peculiarity) might find themselves in a psychological state of imbalance, where will and enthusiasm (which is seen as an engine driving the person forwards) is a brain muscle falling out of use, whose juice eventually gets utterly depleted, which tends to have somewhat destructive effects on their overall mental state, which in turn affects their physical well-being. A hollowed out being(-in-the-world).

Never has it been reported, however, for a person, as a result of any psychological condition, be it even the most severe case of dysthymia, to develop a physical condition rendering them progressively hollow in a literal/physical sense, akin to Swiss cheese, poorly baked bread, or Kinder eggs with the unfortunate construction defect of lacking any inner surprise. The human body is known to be capable of extremely unusual and extraordinary feats, so one could wonder what percentage of it could be filled with a hole, while still retaining at least somewhat functional characteristics.

One clearly distinctive feature should be considered the capacity of sustaining life, otherwise the task of hollowing someone out would become trivial; even the surface area of intestines alone is estimated to amount to about 30 squared meters, which by itself would account to a sphere with a radius of √π(30 / 4) ≈ 1.545 meters, or a diameter of about 3.09 meters, which is already a larger number than the height of the tallest known person (who was not physically hollow), the American Robert Wadlow, clocking at 2.72 meters. We can infer that a cleverly distributed bubble-like body whose liveliness isn’t imperative could reach impressive, even perhaps astronomic, proportions.

Keeping the body alive in the expansion process, which incidentally is also a stunt strove for by numerous individuals, would complicate the task; however, due to ethical concerns, one can imagine research on this topic could only arise from parts of the world whose mere mention often falls unpleasant to the ears of the posh layer of society.

Another question that arises would be, what could the inner space be filled with? Common answers would be air, void, or the ground state of energy in which the universe may sooner or later collapse in a process known as false vacuum decay, which makes air suddenly sound utterly uninteresting. If air is considered empty, any other chemical compound or element could be considered empty, with or without an underlying structure, which may be less complex, like in the case of water, or somewhat more complex, as in the case of brains emitting silly ideas.

Common sense would imply nobody in a previously stable mental state would willingly undergo any such expansion or hollowing, be it physical or metaphorical; however, receiving mild convenience in return can often be a compelling bargain. As an example, people sometimes state “they have nothing to hide” in the context of massive shameless surveillance; however, exposed entrails are known to be often fatal. As proven by alleged individuals willingly ingesting flatworms for the benefit of weight loss, it wouldn’t be inconceivable for a similar program to be successful by promising the loss of one’s mass (along with everything else’s) through somehow causing false vacuum decay inside one’s body.

Sustaining the controversial concept of life in a shell form can be somewhat more practically achievable by leaning into the artificial, silicon-based simulacra. This would imply engineering the shell in such a way that any functionality required for motion and other life-like behaviours is embedded into one or several perceptually thin layers. Considering modern technology is teeming with nanometer-sized semiconductor chips in microprocessors (technically nanoprocessors), the processing side would likely be less of an issue than the body’s robotics and kinetics. Naturally, such a task’s difficulty grows inversely proportional to the shell’s thickness. 

Perhaps in a more or less distant future, it would be entirely conceivable to concoct a true body without organs (BwO), an animated apparatus whose physical interior is just as hollow and insubstantial as the (dated and debunked notion of a) soul.