Melanie Anne Phillips

Courtesy of my breakfast

One of my pet peeves and personal frustrations is how great ideas - truly revolutionary paradigm shifts - are often lost in the bundled clothing of a larger concept, hypothesis or theory. A case in point:  In the Dramatica theory of story which I co-created, there are probably several hundred such ground-breaking concepts, but they are all embedded in the overall theory like raisins in rice pudding. One of these, as an example, is that the Main Character in a story does not have to be a Protagonist.  Main Character is the one the story revolves around passionately, specifically in regard to that character's point of view on some moral issue (in most uses).  What happens to them, their growth and whether or not they eventually change their world view or point of view is the essence of the Main Character.  The Protagonist, on the other hand, is a functional character in the drama - far more plot-oriented, and does not (as part of their function) have to change or e...

Found this on Flickr:

Some twenty years ago, upon realizing that the structure of stories was actually a model of the mind itself, Chris and I began to wonder if that model could serve as a blueprint and instructions for creating a truly artificial mind. Today, with the debut of IBM’s Watson and its attendant interest and enthusiasm, it seems the perfect time to revisit those considerations and the conclusions at which we arrived. What follows is a complete description of Dramatica’s plan for building a thinking and feeling machine that is not only aware, but self-aware as well and how that model is only partially realized by Watson. To begin with, minds are not exclusively engines of logic.   Rather, they are generators of passion as well.   Awareness requires only logic.   Self-awareness requires emotion as well. Logic is based on discrete points connected by causal relationships.   Emotion is a continually evolving condition that ebbs and flows.   In more technical terms, thi...