The NPC Theory

I've plugged my friend Eric aka Phlegmatic's blog The 4th Humour before for its lurid and fantastically detailed dream diary. In general, his blog has a very high SNR of creative content and what I like to think of as "geek" philosophy - which is no less robust and rigorous as Matthew Yglesias' more traditional brand.

Now, however, Eric has finally decided to commit his "NPC Theory" to writing - which essentially states that most of the people you meet are "non-player characters" (NPC's) - programmed automatons with a finite set of responses to stimuli from the context of your perspective. This is subtler than the brute-force "free will is illusion" concept because the same person may be an NPC to you but a PC to me.

I like making the analogy to the Blogsphere - how many blogs are essentially recycled content from the A-list linkers? and how many are massive tomes iof fresh and original content? Looking at my own blogroll, I realise that I've heavily filtered it to emphasise those bloggers who are PCs from my perspective.

Anyway - do check out Eric's blog, the two entries on NPC Theory thus far are the Introduction and the Modified Turing Test for Character. I'm waiting for more!