82. Agency, counterfactual control, and self-maintenance

The preceding parts define when a distributed structure is coherent, operationally sufficient, causally efficacious, relationally irreducible, persistent, reconstructible, and endogenously formed. None of those properties by itself establishes agency. Agency adds a controlled relation among a represented objective, a set of feasible actions, counterfactual consequences, and a policy that uses those quantities to alter the future. Self-maintenance adds a further loop in which damage to the workspace becomes an input to actions that preserve or restore the workspace certificate.