Why integration alone is insufficient

As the investigation progressed, it became increasingly clear that informational integration, taken in isolation, fails to account for the phenomena under observation.

Highly integrated systems can display rich, stable, and adaptive behaviour without exhibiting any indication of self-tracking or reflexive dynamics. In such cases, coherence remains externally driven or statically maintained, rather than internally constrained.

This suggests that integration may be a necessary condition for complex behaviour, but not a sufficient condition for reflexivity. What appears to be missing is a form of causal closure in which the system’s global state exerts influence on its own internal modelling processes, and vice versa.

This realization marks a narrowing of the explanatory space: any adequate account must distinguish between integration as complexity and integration as reflexive coherence.