Free will and the NPC test

Source: How to Check if You’re an NPC, Blank Rascal, 12:26, uploaded 2025-08-01.

The video treats the “NPC” as a comic test for agency: are my actions choices, or am I replaying habits, preferences, and scripts that make me easy to predict? Its proposed test is intentionally useless. The uselessness is meant to separate an act of will from an act that can be explained by appetite, reward, identity, or social approval.

Football on the screen

The opening skit begins with two housemates trying to decide what to do. One is content to waste his life; the other joins him because he has no better proposal. They play football through a video game. The dissatisfied player scores twenty goals but comes away with the sense that he did not really do anything. He would rather have played badly in actual mud and rain, because effort, danger, and failure would at least have belonged to him.

He announces that he will make better choices and reclaim risk, joy, and pain. His housemate declines because he is comfortable with his habits and says, almost accidentally, that “free will is not for me.” This triggers the real question. Predicting that someone will order their usual meat pizza does not prove that they lack agency, but it shows how much of a person can be modeled from habit. The joke escalates into the accusation that the predictable housemate might be an NPC.

In a game, a non-player character is not controlled by a human in real time. Its available speech and action were written in advance to furnish the player’s world. Real life provides no developer documentation, so the metaphor cannot establish who is conscious. It can only turn the question inward: how much of my conduct is a live response, and how much is a script I mistake for myself?

Three positions

• Libertarianism: at least some choices are not determined by prior causes. The video calls this “liberalism,” but philosophical discussions usually use libertarianism.
• Determinism: every action belongs to a causal chain extending beyond the person.
• Compatibilism: an action can count as free when it follows the person’s own reasons and desires, even if those reasons have causes.

The narrator mocks compatibilism as a merger of incompatible positions, then immediately adopts a comic version of it. He calls this “rascalibilism”: different people may exercise different degrees of agency. The label is a joke, but the hierarchy matters to the later argument. Freedom becomes a capacity that can be exercised, neglected, or strengthened rather than an identical metaphysical property handed to everyone.

Why randomness fails

The first obvious attempt is radical unpredictability. Someone could abandon a family, become a party clown in Senegal, or perform whatever strange action seems least compatible with the expected future. The problem is that an unexpected decision can still have causes. Watching a video about defying fate becomes one more cause in the chain.

An AI could generate random instructions, but the person would eventually refuse. Eating another person’s vomit or fighting a lion exposes a boundary that the random process cannot cross. The refusal restores preference and self-preservation as the real decision-makers.

Dice and coins move the difficulty back one step. The person chooses to surrender decisions to chance and chooses what each result means. More seriously, a life contains too many interacting possibilities to reduce to repeated rolls. Chaos is not a sustainable form of agency. Randomness can make conduct hard to predict without making it free.

Narrative and persona

The video then shifts from metaphysical proof to practical self-knowledge. Nobody knows their future, regardless of whether that future is predetermined. A life still has a narrative. A person develops tastes, aversions, habits, roles, and a stable story about what they would or would not do.

That story is useful, but it can become a local script. “I do not dance,” “I always order this,” “I could never speak onstage,” and “I am simply this kind of person” turn repeated behavior into identity. An action that opposes the persona can reveal that the identity was maintained rather than necessary.

The blank action

The narrator proposes a “blank action” with three rules:

1. It must decisively conflict with the person’s established persona.
2. It must not harm anyone, although mild inconvenience or embarrassment is allowed.
3. It must be completely pointless.

The video supplies deliberately grotesque and impractical examples: eating only one’s least favorite food for a month, buying new shoes and defecating in them, covering a postbox in whimsical fish stickers, wearing a nineteenth-century brigadier’s hat to the cinema, drawing a beautiful portrait of one’s grandmother and eating it, or putting salt in tea. The examples are comic escalation, not recommendations. The narrator explicitly tells viewers to invent their own harmless act instead of copying the list or using “seize the day” as permission to behave destructively.

The pointlessness removes the normal reward. A difficult action done for money, admiration, fitness, rebellion, or a new identity can be explained through the goal. A blank action offers no such account beyond the attempt to contradict one’s own script.

It still proves nothing about metaphysical freedom. The wish to test free will, the chosen test, and the satisfaction of completing it can all belong to the same causal history. What the exercise can test is narrower: whether a person can tolerate effort, embarrassment, and inconsistency long enough to revise a self-description.

Self-overcoming

The ending recruits Nietzsche loosely. The narrator presents will to power and self-overcoming as an alternative to both absolute libertarian freedom and passive determinism. Some people exercise more control over their inherited drives and external influences because they learn to master themselves. The Übermensch becomes the comic opposite of the NPC: a person who does not merely enact the available role.

This is not a careful account of Nietzsche, and the video knows it is ending with motivational provocation. Its better insight is smaller. “You are free to do whatever you want” immediately produces a harder problem: deciding what to want. Agency involves examining the preferences that normally answer that question automatically.

Caveat

Calling other people NPCs turns a question about one’s own agency into a denial of other minds. The metaphor is only useful when aimed inward. Applied to strangers, it becomes an excuse to flatten people whose interior lives are inaccessible.

The serious test is therefore not random behavior or public spectacle. It is to notice a script, identify what maintains it, and find out whether it can be revised without harming someone else.

Further reading / references

• Friedrich Nietzsche’s self-overcoming and Übermensch are invoked near the end, although the video uses them loosely rather than as a formal account of free will.