I'd argue you both could be right. Your comment could lead to a definition of intelligence. Organisms capable of causally influencing deterministic systems to t

I'd argue you both could be right. Your comment could lead to a definition of intelligence. Organisms capable of causally influencing deterministic systems to their advantage can be marked as intelligent. The complexity of which would determine the degree of intelligence. Your point is great in that it pinpoints also the notions of agency scopes. In all the causal DAGs it feels like there are implicit regions: ones where we can influence or not, intervene or not, observe or not, where one is responsible for or not. An intelligent agent is one capable of modelling a system, influence it, and bias it. Such that it can reach and exploit an existing corner case of it. I talk about a corner case because of entropy and murphy's law. For a given energy, there are way many more unadvantageous states than advantageous one. And the intelligence of a system is the complexity required to wield the entropy reduction of an energy source.