my language progression on something, becoming increasingly general: goals/value function -> decision policy (not all functions need to be optimizing towards a terminal value) -> output policy (not all systems need to be agents) -> policy (in the space of all possible systems, there exist some whose architectures do not converge to output layer)

(note: this language isn't meant to imply that systems behavior must be describable with some simple function, in the limit the descriptive function and the neural network are the same)