---
title: "Functional Closure"
description: "Minimum Viable Interiority's transposition of Mossio and Moreno's organizational closure (a living system collectively maintaining the constraints that keep it going) from biology to agent design,…"
type: "glossary-term"
canonical_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/terms/functional-closure"
md_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/md/terms/functional-closure"
last_updated: "2026-09-06"
site: "Antikythera Wiki"
---

# Functional Closure

> A working definition written for this wiki from the reading notes; not Antikythera's own wording. From Antikythera Wiki (https://antikythera.wiki/terms/functional-closure), an independent guide to Antikythera's published work.

Minimum Viable Interiority's transposition of Mossio and Moreno's *organizational closure* (a living system collectively maintaining the constraints that keep it going) from biology to agent design, and from physical/biological to "psychological self-maintenance." A functionally closed layer is one whose dynamics are "causally explainable only by the events observed within its respective domain" — a constitutive rather than etiological explanation. Models on one layer *intra-act*; closed systems *inter-act*. Stacking closures (each pandemonium nested inside the next, each layer irreducible to the one below) is what is claimed to produce interiority: opacity to outside observers and to the agent's own introspection. Watch the drift from biological self-maintenance toward software-style information hiding.

## Appears in

- [Minimum Viable Interiority](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/coginfra/minimum-viable-interiority) (2025-05-10)
- [Modes of Cognition](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/modesofcognition) (2025-05-10)

_Glossary generated 2026-09-06._