Appreciate you analysis, and your definitions here most of all, Greg.

To me, self-regulation in complex systems lives above singular human agents and their behaviors. Blame and fault are stripped away as deciding factors in determining rules and limits.

The natural mechanisms of a self-regulating system are discovered through trial and error, experimentation, and virtuous feedback loops. The loops and the initial boundaries can be set and iterated through architecture which promotes transparency of effect and constant adaptation prompts. Choice and consensus of principles becomes a primary operating process.

A self-regulating system, like a human body full of bacteria or an ant colony full of role-assigned ants, learns and responds with clear communication to affecting variable — or else it fails and succumbs rapidly to entropy.