Simulated Physical Law v. Avatar Free Will

Many here are familiar with programs that simulate physical laws. As a very simple example of what I am talking about, Conway's Game Of Life, with the grid with blank cells or full cells which die or give birth based on the population in the vicinity of each cell. That I would call a sort of simulated physical law.

Imagine that a virtual world was being simulated through a much more complex set of rules, sort of like, perhaps, some kind of VR simplified Newtonian physics simulator.

Throw into this rule based simulation some avatars, operated by humans.

Does this involve a conflict between free will and simulated mechanical determinism? If the avatars bodies are supposed to be in the simulation and a part of the simulation wouldn't they need to abide by the same rules as the rest of the simulation and thus the human operator wouldn't be able to make any choices?

Conway's Game Of Life and the like (collectively called "cellular automata" are closed systems. Any grand scale super-duper-everything simulator would need to take into account the external influence and incoroprate it into the simulation. Which, obviously, it can't.

Neat idea though.

Make the physical law simulation be indeterminate, such that the objects bound by them can respond in a variety of ways to the same set of conditions. Then the human operator can exert her free will within these choices while still having the avatar body remain subject to the physical laws. The presence of free will in the system then becomes a locus for a high concentration of low probabilty behaviors but does not break any laws.

No.

~Ulrika~

Yes, of course it does, assuming you mean there's no way to display non-lawful behavior by the avatar if it's components parts are treated in precisely the same manner as other, inanimate parts of the system and the system is completely mechanical and deterministic.

The seems obvious and beyond question to me.

This is not to say one could not write a VR program that used simulated physical law for the inanimate objects and had human controlled avatars in it, but the free-spirited avatars would be anomalies, like gods or superheroes, not bound by the same laws as the rest of the simulated universe.

OMG this explains a LOT of SL.. especially the WA

When I think of things that are exempt from normal laws and whose behavior cannot be explained in a sensible manner I guess I usually think of politicians.
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Conway's Game of Life looks like it has particles that move about in a grid, but that is an illusion. There are just cells turning on and off, human minds are desparate to perceive things in a normal manner and trick us into seeing particles that don't exist, not even virutally. The patterns that are formed, the floaters and fliers and such, that arise as an emergent property of the repeated application of the simple birth and death rules could not be used as avatars without breaking the rules.

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Second Life doesn't attempt to be a simulation in which the result is derived from the application of consistent rules. Second Life is what is known in technical language as "a big mess of different crap thrown together at random", thus nothing seems too out of place because there is no overall order to it's behavior.