“A first important implication of organizational closure is that it provides a criterion to determine in a non-arbitrary way what ‘the goals’ of the system are. The goal states of self maintaining systems are not such simply because they are characteristic or interesting
capacities (as the systemic accounts suggest), or because the systems compensate for deviations from them (as classical cybernetic accounts claim). More fundamentally, in an organizationally closed system the goal states are the stability points (or set of points) through which the system can exist (Barandiaran and Moreno [2008]).