The claim
There are two presuppositions.
- TERM-023 is agent-indexed. Its definition says “it is a role in an agent already warranted as one”. CLAIM-080 makes the supposition explicit: “the account asks how a given agent’s practical efficacy is organized, not what makes something an agent”. The paper chose this because every attempt to derive the agent (TERM-044) produced the permissiveness objection (CLAIM-010; QUESTION-009’s history).
- The formal agent test also starts from a given system. Orseau, McGill & Legg (LIT-911) compute the probability that a system is an agent rather than a device. But they “assume a clearly identified system that takes a sequence of inputs and returns a sequence of outputs”.
So the owner’s thesis needs a will-organization in order to find an agent, and a will-organization is defined only once the agent is found. The agent test needs the system’s boundary in order to compare descriptions, and the boundary is what the factorization was to supply.
Why it is still open
The reply in CLAIM-174 is that the test is run on candidate factors, whose boundaries come from the threshold criterion (CLAIM-157), not from agency. A candidate is admitted when describing it as governing its own regimes is the best description at that level. The circle then becomes a fixed-point condition. That condition is consistent, but it may have more than one solution: several factorizations, each self-consistent. Whether that is the level-relativity the thesis predicts, or an indeterminacy it cannot tolerate, is not settled.