The idea of control system shouldn’t be excluded, but it’s far from answering the question. Even if the answer does look like “it’s a control system”, we still don’t know HOW minds (e.g. human minds) are control systems—we’d want to be able to look at a mind and then say “oh, see, it’s a control system, here’s the action-selector and here’s the reference value and here’s the comparator” and so on. And we would still want to understand whence comes the reference point, and whence comes the language in which the reference point is stated. Though I’m skeptical that a satisfying answer could look like that.
Perhaps I should have given more of the background. Hang on, I did. The theory is not that the mind “is a control system”, but that it and the body are made of control systems, very large numbers of them, arranged in a particular hierarchical way, the output of higher-level systems providing the references for those in the layer below. At the foot of the hierarchy is muscular control and biochemical control loops. The lower levels of this are standard physiology and biochemistry. The upper levels are more speculative, and there is as yet not even conjectures about the morphogenesis of the whole hierarchy, i.e. how it is built during development. (For that matter, not much is known about physical morphogenesis either.)
The idea of control system shouldn’t be excluded, but it’s far from answering the question. Even if the answer does look like “it’s a control system”, we still don’t know HOW minds (e.g. human minds) are control systems—we’d want to be able to look at a mind and then say “oh, see, it’s a control system, here’s the action-selector and here’s the reference value and here’s the comparator” and so on. And we would still want to understand whence comes the reference point, and whence comes the language in which the reference point is stated. Though I’m skeptical that a satisfying answer could look like that.
Perhaps I should have given more of the background. Hang on, I did. The theory is not that the mind “is a control system”, but that it and the body are made of control systems, very large numbers of them, arranged in a particular hierarchical way, the output of higher-level systems providing the references for those in the layer below. At the foot of the hierarchy is muscular control and biochemical control loops. The lower levels of this are standard physiology and biochemistry. The upper levels are more speculative, and there is as yet not even conjectures about the morphogenesis of the whole hierarchy, i.e. how it is built during development. (For that matter, not much is known about physical morphogenesis either.)
So there it is: consider it, or not.