Some think they are stupid but we know they had 1700 cubic centimeters of brain volume compared to 1200 cubic centimeters for an anatomically modern human.
It is possible that they were not that stupid and they were simply outbred by humans.
They also lived in an ice covered world full of lethal megafauna instead of a post ice age world with fertile lands ready for agriculture and smaller animals.
There are various human groups that settled areas and didn’t make much technological progress for a long time, thousands to tens of thousands of years.
Not in the current version, here the drivers are implemented in C/C++ in the circle bare-metal library [1].
In general, I think Smalltalk is not that well suited as a systems programming language since garbage collection might mess with your timing and you would also need to find a way to handle asynchronous events (such as interrupts).
Nevertheless, Smalltalk has been used for low-level control of robots, e.g. in NXTalk [2] for the Mindstorms NXT ARM7 platform. However, the VM also relied on C code (the LegOS project) for driver code.
There is an almost all-Smalltalk bare metal system for X86, CogNOS. It runs on top of NopSys, about 3500 lines of C and 600 lines of assembler for booting, accessing device registers, and responding to interrupts. But the file system etc. are in Smalltalk.
Do you know anything about the status of this project? I started following it on Github a couple of years ago when it appeared but it does not seem like anyone is working on it
There've been shortages in the sense that stores can't keep their shelves stocked as fast as people buy. The only thing I know of that's just disappeared entirely from stores is yeast, and that's still available on Amazon with some shipping delay.
Conway distinguishes Free Will from randomness by showing that randomness is just a special case of determinism. The random numbers could have been written down before the big bang and looked up when needed, which is still predetermined.
What makes Free Will free is that it's the selection of some future state independently from the information in a particle's past light cone. Only the particle determines that part of its state. One implication is that our brains, being composed of particles, derive their free will from the sum of the particles' free will. This doesn't imply that particles are conscious or aware, it only means that certain degrees of freedom evolve according to computations performed by the particles independently.
In one of the lectures Conway goes in depth into the philosophy of free will, which he believed in at a time when it was (and still is) almost universally unfashionable.
> Conway distinguishes Free Will from randomness by showing that randomness is just a special case of determinism. The random numbers could have been written down before the big bang and looked up when needed, which is still predetermined. What makes Free Will free is that it's the selection of some future state independently from the information in a particle's past light cone. Only the particle determines that part of its state.
That's a distinction without a difference - how would you tell whether the particle is magically looking up its results in the universe's big book of random numbers or deciding for itself? It's true that quantum-mechanical randomness is localised, in a provable sense, but there's no contradiction between that and what "randomness" is usually understood to mean.
> One implication is that our brains, being composed of particles, derive their free will from the sum of the particles' free will.
> That's a distinction without a difference - how would you tell whether the particle is magically looking up its results in the universe's big book of random numbers or deciding for itself? It's true that quantum-mechanical randomness is localised, in a provable sense, but there's no contradiction between that and what "randomness" is usually understood to mean.
one of the points the theorem makes is that you can't get the behaviour of fundamental particles by injecting randomness into an otherwise determinstic system. Free Will is different from randomness.
> one of the points the theorem makes is that you can't get the behaviour of fundamental particles by injecting randomness into an otherwise determinstic system. Free Will is different from randomness.
What is the distinction you're drawing, concretely? There simply isn't one unless you're using some very non-standard definition of randomness.
> What is the distinction you're drawing, concretely? There simply isn't one unless you're using some very non-standard definition of randomness.
AFAIUI by noting that the dice could have been thrown ahead of time and then looked up, we can treat it as a function of time and then it becomes as though another part of the information in the past light cone which doesn't explain the behaviour of particles, as exemplified by FIN, MIN & TWIN
Right, so if you had a fixed dice roll in the past and translated that into the measurement results on each axis in a static way, that wouldn't work. You have to make a fresh random dice roll after the experimenter chooses which axis to measure - or you have to translate the past dice role into the result for the axis in a way that depends on which other axes the experimenter chose to measure.
I assert that this is not terribly surprising, and Conway is actually just doing a sleight of hand around the definition of "random". We would normally expect a truly random event to be (by definition) uncorrelated with anything else, in this case including counterfactual versions of itself - the random measurement you get from a given axis must not be correlated with the measurement you would have got if you'd measured a different combination of axes. That's maybe a little odd, but I don't think it contradicts people's normal notion of "randomness", particularly in a QM context. It's like how in early online poker games people would cheat by figuring out the "random seed" and know all the cards - because that's not real randomness.
and I reply that I just record the "fresh" random roll ahead of time and you look that up. Doesn't make any difference. I think you're confusing random with pseudorandom.
> and I reply that I just record the "fresh" random roll ahead of time and you look that up. Doesn't make any difference.
Well, per everything that Conway's said, it does make a difference - if the experimenter is somehow able to choose which axes to measure after all dice rolls have been fixed, and the mapping of dice roll to measurement result is fixed (and does not depend on which axes the experimenter measures), then that creates a contradiction.
To my mind that's normal quantum behaviour - we see the same thing in the double slit experiment or Bell's inequalities (which this is just a variation on). Quantum behaviour cannot be explained by rolling dice ahead of time, because random results in different possible universes/branches must be uncorrelated with each other, even though we tend to assume that only one of those branches "actually happens". And this result is a cool demonstration of that. But there's no contradiction between that and most people's normal notion of "randomness", IMO.
aren't you mixing models of reality here ? You're describing a universe in which there's free will and determinism, somehow combined with many-worlds. It's hard to follow such hypercounterfactual logic
Well, the theorem pretty fundamentally relies on some kind of counterfactual reasoning - many-worlds is my preferred model, but you can use whichever you like. Ignoring the twin/spatially separated part[1], the meat of the theorem is that there is no possible fixed combination of spin along different axes that has the property that we always observe experimentally (that if we simultaneously measure along three axes at right angles to each other, we'll see two of one type of result and one of the other). So if the results we were going to observe were somehow fixed ahead of time, then there must be a contradiction: for some particular counterfactual combination of axes that we could have picked to measure, we would not have seen the two-and-one pattern that we always see.
The most frustrating part is that this is a cool, exciting result; while it doesn't really prove anything that we didn't already know from the Bell inequalities, the fact that everything's discrete makes for a much clearer contradiction. It shows that quantum-mechanical randomness is very fundamental and genuine: it's not just reading dice rolls off some list that was decided ahead of time, unless we want to commit to the idea that the whole universe works that way. But talking about "free will" just obscures and confuses everything.
[1] IMO that part doesn't add anything new or relevant to the result; it's just stapling the existing EPR paradox onto this new paradox.
I hate to criticise him under these circumstances, and I'm going to leave out the more personal side of things, but: The impression I got was that he was playing up the "free will" angle to appeal to a popular audience, at the expense of the physics. Most academics with a book to sell do that to a certain extent, but I felt that he went past what's reasonable. I won't speculate as to whether that was insincerity as such or belief in his own hype.
He devoted a whole lecture to explaining his belief in free will, going in depth into the philosphical history of the concept and his personal reasons which come across as entirely genuine. He also speculates as to how he thinks the limited free will of particles could result in our free will. It's six lectures and a lot of hard work with highly respected physicists by a mathematician who's old, accomplished and distinguished.
Fair enough. I honestly find that a lot sadder than the idea that he knew what he was doing and was sexing it up a bit. Reminds me of Penrose going off the rails.
If my brother stole from me, I'd steal it back. If that failed, I could always kill him. Why couldn't the colonized do the same?
The Europeans succeeded in their colonization efforts because they were more technologically advanced than anyone they were colonizing. It is not a case of twin brothers. It is the case of an older brother stealing from his baby brother.
I've completely given up on giving advice and persuading people because it doesn't work and often people do the opposite. People are going to do what they want anyway. Doesn't stop me having my opinions though.
I think the Nephilim, given the way they were described as tall "sons of God" who were "heros" and "warriors of renown" were an African people