Definition
A second- (or higher-) order attractor: a stable regime of a system’s dynamics that governs which lower-order regimes become operative. The owner, U34: “I’m not convinced that ‘second (or higher) order attractor’ isn’t a perfectly viable operational definition of ‘will’.”
Why it was replaced
It made the permissiveness objection (CLAIM-010) bite: every control system has such an attractor. The owner’s answer was to accept that (CLAIM-062); the paper’s eventual answer was to index the concept to an independently warranted agent, and to speak of the organization of efficacy rather than of an attractor (TERM-023). By A225 the attractor reading had become “one possible mathematical realization”, not the definition.