Oxygen isn’t used for dating the samples. The oxygen ratio is for temperature. The stability of this isotopes means that we can be confident they haven’t changed since being deposited. To date the cores we use layers, chemistry, and radiometric dating.

This is the correct answer. I would also like to add that O18 will precipitate out of the atmosphere faster as the temperature cools so as the temperature gradient decreases the ratio favors O16 more and more. So taking samples from all over we can get gradients for the temperature around the world at a particular timeframe.

Corals and animals with shells in the ocean make it out of calcium carbonate or silicon dioxide. The concentration of O18 to O16 in shells is dependent on the temperature of the water do to biological and chemical processes. So this is another check to corroborate ice core values.

Taiwan’s real name is “Republic of China” and China’s real name is “People’s Republic of China”. Before the Chinese Communist Revolution they were all part of one nation. Taiwan managed to not go communist and maintains that they are the real China. Communist China maintains Taiwan is part of China and won’t do business with anyone who calls Taiwan “Republic of China” and won’t recognize their sovereignty. It’s sort of (but not really) like North and South Korea.

This is a two minute explanation, the full history and intricacies are far more interesting and subtle.

A field in quantum field theory (QFT), which is what this is about, is something that has a value at each point at space time. This value can be 0 but not null. More specifically every point in space is a quantum object that is a harmonic oscillator and according to QFT this is actually what everything is. Everything is emergent from these values, for example a particular wavelength of light is a particular value of these oscillators in the electromagnetic field of oscillators and its movement through space is just this value propagating through these oscillators like a wave. Objects can have values from multiple fields. For example a neutrino interacts with the Higgs field and the weak field but not the electromagnetic field so it is famously hard to detect. It also means that light literally does not exist to it.

In my head they are kind of loosely analogous to splines where one dimensional values can control the motion or path of an object through space.

What are these oscillators and do they actually exist? We don’t know. Maybe? Probably? I believe the current consensus is they may be fundamental as in they aren’t made of anything and are irreducible but in physics every time we have thought this we were shown to be wrong. The thing is it seems to be correct, very correct. This model has made predictions that turned out to be experimental verified later.

The problem is it’s essentially a purely mathematical construct and we’re getting into the realm of philosophy asking if it’s real or not. It depends on what math actually is/describes. It might be that at the very basic level of everything all there really is is math. All we can say for sure is QFT works very well.

Correct we don’t have direct evidence from that early right after the Big Bang but we can use mathematical models we’ve developed from centuries from scientific experimentation. We then work these models back to conditions that we would expect that early in the universe. These models then make specific predictions that we can perform other experiments to see how accurate our models are. For example the standard model predicted that in conditions with very high temperatures the fundamental forces become one and at slightly lower temperatures something called quark gluon plasma would form where protons and neutrons themselves break down into almost a soup. When we were able to engineer particle accelerators to have enough energy we were able to actually produce quark gluon plasma and partially prove that at least the weak force and electromagnetic force combine into the electroweak force.

It’s all kind of like a big jigsaw puzzle. Every time we make a new discovery it’s like we add another piece telling us more and more about the nature of the whole picture. If you have 60% of the puzzle finished and you see a corn field it’s reasonable to assume the rest isn’t going to be something like an underwater scene.

We don’t know everything about what happened immediately after the Big Bang, but assuming the laws of physics weren’t simply different then it’s not going to be drastically different than what we think barring some new paradigm shifting discovery.

The inflation of the early universe is what put the material that will eventually become the stars far apart from each other. Imagine if you have an empty balloon and you put little dots on it close together. Then you inflate it, those dots will now be much further apart. Now anything that happens to those dots has to travel the distance in between.

I think the problem you may have is incomplete understanding of the time scale. Right after the Big Bang up to about 10^-36 seconds all the fundamental forces were one, after that they began to separate from each other. We think this is what caused cosmic inflation. From that time to about 10^-32 seconds cosmic inflation occurred. Nuclei would have began forming a bit later around 10^-6 seconds to 1 second after the Big Bang. By then everything was already spread out. Starts won’t form for somewhere between 100k to 100 million years later.

I think number 2 is often overlooked. The oxygen catastrophe completely changed Earth’s environment. Oxidation tends to lead to a lot of water unstable molecules. It could be that for life to originally form you need longer more stable molecules and now the environment is just not conducive to the molecules being stable enough to start new life.

I personally believe that is the case as well or at least something close to that. Philosophy circles seem to in general not like the idea that consciousness is probably an emergent property so they come up with things like dualism or claim that consciousness is fundamental. The problem is all the actual evidence we have suggests it’s emergent or at least resides physically within the brain. Also, in general emergence seems to be a normal property of reality, so why wouldn’t consciousness just be another example of this?

If this turns out to be the case an interesting consequence of this would be that if an AI gains or is conscious it would be reasonable to believe that it may be capable of experiencing qualia from sensory input. I find that possibility interesting.

You can never get to absolute zero only the ground state. Hat being said even in a perfect vacuum it will eventually radiate energy through electromagnetic waves like infrared until it gets to its ground state.

I believe it can be dangerous to base treatment of an organism on its cognitive ability alone. Say if I had greater cognitive ability than another human to the extent that the difference between me and that human was greater than the difference of that human and a flea then what justification could be given for me to not treat them as they would treat a flea? I believe my treatment of other organisms should be determined by that organism’s capacity to suffer from whatever action I am taking against it and whether that action is necessary. It’s intelligence or emotional depth shouldn’t matter ethically in my opinion. It is my belief that because humans have a tendency to treat other people and animals that are more similar to them better we also tend to frame that justification through a similar lens which is the incorrect justification.

I agree with 99% of what you said. It’s just at the last part my justification would be if the flea is capable of experiencing suffering equal to the dog is what would give me moral considerations for its treatment.

We observed that everything is moving away from everything else (large scale) so the theory is everything was one in the same place. The discovery of the CMB and the fact that everything is “younger” the farther we look out supports this. Since the expansion would have been everywhere there would have been no center of it, or rather every point is the center of it.

A poor analogy would be if you take a picture on you phone and blow it up where did the center of the expansion begin? It wasn’t in the center or a corner, it happened everywhere at once. So imagine that but start with a point.

The thing is we don’t have to store the spent fuel, it can be put through breeder reactors over and over again to re-enrich it and use it again until the spent fuel is effectively inert. It’s just we so terrified of someone making a dirty bomb.

I guess I’m confused by what you mean by experience. Do you mean something like sensations? Something like the ability to experience the sensation of the color red or emotional sensations like love as opposed to just detecting light and recognizing it as red light and emulating the appropriate responses that would correspond to the expression of love?

With your example of the man translating words, I’m not 100% sure that is not an accurate analogy of how humans process information. I know it’s supposed to be an example to contrast human knowledge with machine knowledge, but it seems pretty damn close to how humans process stuff. There are cases where people have had brain injuries where they essentially lose access to parts of their brain that process language. They will straight up lose the ability to understand, speak, read, and write a language they were previously fluent in, the information just isn’t there anymore. It would be akin to the man losing access to his database. So then the question becomes does a human even “know” a language or do they just have what is essentially a relational database to reference?

Regardless though, none of this matters in whether we should use AI for crime. Both of our arguments essentially make the same case albeit from different directions, AI can easily give false interpretations of data and should not be solely used to determine policing policy.

So if I am understanding you’re argument, and correct me if I am wrong, the critical difference between a human and a computer is that a computer isn’t capable of sentience and by extension sapience or even more generalized consciousness?

If that is the argument then my take is I’m not sure we can say that yet. We don’t have a great understanding of consciousness yet to be able to say that it is impossible for none organic things to possess. All we know for sure is that it seems that the consciousness can be suppressed or damaged from changing or stopped biological processes within the brain. I am not aware of a reason a machine, in principle, could not simulate those processes to same effect (consciousness).

Anyway, it seems to me that your main problem with using AI for policing is that it would be mechanically precise in its application without understanding the intricacies of why crime may be happening here? For example maybe it will come to the conclusion that African American communities are crime centers without understanding that the reason they are crime centers is because they tend to be poverty stricken which is the real cause. So it’s input may end up being almost a self fulfilling prophecy?

In my experience children tend to be little psychopaths. Right and wrong (morality) likely evolved along with humans as they developed societies. Societies give a significant boost to the survival and propagation of members within the society. So societies with moral systems that are conducive to larger and more efficient societies tend to propagate better as well. These moral systems then get passed on as the society propagates and any society that has morals not conducive to societies tend to die off.

Why do you believe an AI would definitely be incapable of empathy? Not all humans are even capable of empathy and empathy can even be lost by damage to the frontal lobe. For some of those that have lost it never returns and for others they are able to relearn to express it. If it was relearned does it mean they are just emulating it and not actually experiencing it? How would that be different than an AI?

When humans get intuition, a feeling, or a hunch it isn’t out of nowhere, they typically have some kind of history or experience with the subject. For example when a detective has a hunch about a suspect lying it could be from previous experience or even a bias from a correlation with behavior of previous lying subjects that other detectives haven’t really noticed. How fundamentally is this any different when an AI makes an odd correlation between data using statistics? You could argue that what an AI is doing when correlating data like this it is creating a hunch and when a human has a hunch they are just making a conclusion using correlated data.

Note I am not advocating using AI in policing, I believe that is a terrible idea that can and will be very easily abused.

I believe you’re talking about “Behind the Curve”. There’s a part in it where Patricia Steele who is a flat earth YouTuber is talking about how there’s all these conspiracy theories about her that aren’t true and she’s like “They don’t even know me”. Then she openly ponders that maybe her belief in the flat earth is the same. Alluding that maybe her belief is the same as theirs in the sense that it exists because of lack of understanding in the subject. Then she just backtracks and says naw I’m right. I was so excited watching that for a minute. It was seeing someone on the verge of understanding they didn’t have before and you could see her making the connections on her face. So close yet so far.

It’s essentially sentience vs sapience. The beavers are sentient because they can sense and perceive their environment. This information input then over time leads to the damn building behavior because it creates a selection pressure where beavers who build dams survive and reproduce more.

In a lot of ways you could look at our own sapience as the same as beaver dam building behavior. Pattern recognition likely allowed us to develop sapience by giving us the ability to make predictions about the future based of previous information. Overtime this could have allowed us to be able to create models of or environment that do not correspond with our current environment (imagination). At some point in the process sapience arose. This, for obvious reasons, turned out to be an extraordinarily advantages trait for almost any environment. So our ancestors with these traits survived more easily and passed those traits on.

As some people will likely attest, we sometimes blindly think about things for no reason. Thinking is our dam building behavior in a way.

Whatever dark matter is, if it truly exists, appears to not interact with the electromagnetic field at all. This means that to light, dark matter doesn’t exist. So it would cause no change to any light passing through it. Dark matter does interact gravitationally so with enough of it one one place it can change the path of light causing a gravitationally lensing effect.

Fun fact, since it doesn’t interact with the EM field dark matter also can’t clump like normal matter does because you need those charge interactions to dissipate energy to slow down enough to clump. So dark matter just sort of oscillates back and forth through the center of gravity like a pendulum. This is why it always looks the same regardless of galaxy and why it’s always bigger than the galaxy.