Returning to the topic after our several digressions. I just posted a reference topic quoting from Bill’s 1963 and 1973 sketches of a reorganization system.
Much remains to be done for this to be more than a sketch. In B:CP the intrinsic signals and intrinsic reference signals are avowedly “convenient fictions”, and “This reorganizing system may prove to be no more than a convenient fiction; its functions and properties may some day prove to be aspects of the same systems that become organized.”
My own suspicion is along the latter lines. My leading question is, “what’s in it for the cell?” To understand reorganization we might well learn from how organisms like slime molds, mycelia, and perhaps even complex intracorporeal systems like the gut microbiome and the nervous system organize and reorganize themselves.
Our characterization of intrinsic error is of course from our accustomed corporeal point of view: intrinsic quantities which must stay within certain bounds or corporeal life is at risk and may end.
But from the point of view of a cell or cellular community (viz. slime mold, mycelium, microbiome, etc.) the same intrinsic quantity is a perceived environmental variable, and an intrinsic quantity that is out of bounds (too great or too small) is a disturbance to a perceptual variable that may be controlled by cells either individually or collectively.
In vitro, neurons brachiate and make and break synaptic connections at random. Have experiments been done to see what quiets that random activity? What systemic properties of a stable control loop can be a cell’s controlled input, genetically predetermined in the normal structure and function of the cell? Perhaps look at the chemical environments of synapses.