Allostatic Control Systems: Goal Governance in Changing Environments

Abstract

Allostatic control systems govern not only how a system pursues a goal, but whether the goal itself remains appropriate as the environment changes. This matters whenever a controller can continue to regulate successfully against a reference that no longer serves the system. We develop this as a two-timescale problem: a fast loop regulates under the current reference, while a slow loop governs whether that reference should move. We then test one candidate mechanism in which slow-loop movement waits for mature outcome evidence. In a preregistered synthetic experiment, that mechanism increased decision cost by 1.51% relative to otherwise identical bounded adaptation. The central failure was timing: the evidence-to-effect pathway often could not make correction effective before the environment changed again. The result motivates a broader design principle: an allostatic controller must be able to revise an inappropriate goal faster than serviceability is lost by continuing to defend it. We therefore treat allostatic control systems as a general engineering problem of goal governance under changing environments, and the negative result as one step toward making that problem operational and falsifiable.