Stafford Beer's POSIWID needs a qualifier saying " ... what it does *for the larger system* it is part of," or something similar.
No system exists in a vacuum. They are all part of some larger system in which they play a *role*.
People in systems either find their purpose or it's imposed from above.

Protesters with signs can do little in this situation except provide a pretext for escalation, but individual, city, and state-level service providers can do a lot.
They can stop providing food, water, electricity, and other necessary services to those facilities unless they play by the rules, no? 🤷

No serious philosophical or scientific discussion about #consciousness or #cognition in general can ignore #phenomenology, because all our knowledge is gained solely through lived experience.
See in particular Aron Gurwitsch’s "Field Theory of Consciousness"👇
journals.openedition.org/hel/3541?lan...

This IS a state space representation of dynamical system. You can use it to model a single neuron a whole society.
The trick is in selecting the variables.

Also good read:
"If humanity cannot live with the dangers and responsibilities inherent in freedom, it will probably turn to authoritarianism
... a landmark work by one of the most distinguished thinkers of our time ... as timely now as when first published in 1941"
www.goodreads.com/book/show/25...

A dynamical (adaptive) system 👇 in which its current (knowledge) #state determines input perception (what information or meaning is constructed from it) and the production of an output that best suits the current situation.
The state is historically maintained through the integration of information.

And who (what) is making those rules and who (what) is making the selection?

What is selected?

Now it's time for me to be puzzled.
Care to describe the generative mechanism for how a thermostat can gain "organizmal" autonomy in a selective environment?

Autonomy means that you make your own "rules of engagement." A thermostat can't do that.

Autonomy.

Subjective to the system.

bsky.app/profile/kihb...

In Pattee's terms, "structural constraints" are determined and obeying inexorable physical laws, while "functional (control) constraints" are private, subjective and largely arbitrary, so that they have to be enforced by "the will" of the system.

Pattee should also be required reading for politicians and everyone else holding an "office."

The majority don't realize that the reason they are "in charge" is that we, as a group, agree to follow the rules.

"The Physical Basis and Origin of Hierarchical Control."
www.academia.edu/863851/Hiera...

But you need extrinsic rewards from the environment like food and recompensation for your extrinsic work to function, no? The point I was yrying to make was that artificial reinforcement learning (if it can be called that) is just relying on external validation, there is no internal "drive" to learn

Learning is primarily a work for intrinsic #rewards (what Gene Bellinger calls work for #results), an exploratory work to increase knowledge, as opposed to work for extrinsic environmental rewards that is exploting that accumulated knowledge. Not sure AI has the former kind🤔
bsky.app/profile/kihb...

The"Extended Mind" thesis claims that cognitive processes can be instantiated in resources that are distributed across the brain, the body, and the environment.
That may be so, notwithstanding the fact that a notebook can't maintain a cognitive process by itself and a body without brain has no mind.