Agency as Control-System Organization, Not Homunculus

An agent is not a homunculus but an organism with a specific control-system organization: it has a goal state it wants in the environment, perceives the environment to check whether it matches the goal, and acts to make it match—the same circular/cybernetic causality as a thermostat or bodily homeostasis—so behavior should be understood as goal-directed control rather than stimulus-response, just as 20th-century biology replaced vitalism not with a vital substance but with a different organization of ordinary matter.