[ExI] A short movie I created (with the help of AI)

[Jason Resch]

On Thu, Oct 22, 2026, 11:00 AM <spike at rainier66.com> wrote:

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> *From:* extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> *On Behalf
> Of *Jason Resch via extropy-chat
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> *>…**I also interpreted the scene discontinuity as brilliantly
> intentional.  When the young woman and old man switch sides of the hotel
> counter, it emphasizes the point he was making: he and she were two
> distinct incarnations of the same meta-being.  Very trippy in a cool way.*
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> >…Yes I also felt it added to the theme. It wasn't originally intentional,
> but leaving it in and not trying to fight it was.
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> >…It leads me to interpret the film as Nora wrestling with her own
> unconscious thoughts, being an actuary with a brilliant statistical mind,
> she is trying to make sense out of overcoming the fantastic odds required
> to be born as the person one side of her believes herself to be.
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> Jason
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> Nora is a most compelling character.  Age her 30 years, she would be very
> attractive.
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> Imagine being an actuary, where you get really good at statistics.  It’s
> your career, your life, your outlook.  Everything reduces to numbers.
> However… probability theory is filled with unresolvable paradox.
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> Your video has a coin toss analogy.  A coin comes up tails.  Before you
> tossed the coin, what was the probability?  50% they all said in perfect
> unison.  But… from the point of view of us, after the coin lands, it has a
> 0% chance of heads, because there you see what happened, tails.
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There there are various philosophies of probability:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/probability-interpret/#MaiInt

As beings with finite perspectives, I think probability and randomness
emerge as fundamental limits of knowledge concerning ones environment,
instantiation, and location, which are impossible to perfectly overcome.

To give a flavor: no matter how well you might understand yourself, and
your own physical universe, that could always itself be a computer
simulation in which something you didn't anticipate to happen does happen,
because the simulators chose to intervene, or because the simulation had a
bit of code that was never before exercised and only triggered after that
time/situation.

Then there is of course the fundamental randomness that appears to
observers who exist in multiple places at once after diverging from a
common point. If you fork() the simulation hosting the person and give to
each resulting sub-process something different, even if this is
deterministic from the external view, it seems random and unpredictable to
those within the simulation that branches to reach two possibilities.

I think the reason philosophers, mathematicians, and statisticians have
struggled to define probability is because it's origins ultimately trace to
deeper problems of ontology (what sort of reality are we in) and
observation (what qualifies as a  conscious observer). Wmif we had settled
widely accepted answers to these questions, I don't think the foundation of
probability would be contentious.


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> Sure, I know the philosophers try to explain around that, but notice how
> they rely on probability models to establish the validity of probability
> models.  It always devolves into self-referencing paradox.
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> Regarding the notion of our being one of 200 million possible distinct
> people who could have been conceived rather than ourself, this is a vast
> understatement, upon which I will comment in a subsequent post.
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I look forward to this.

Jason
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