[Y]ou have to draw a boundary around the "optimizing agent", and look at the difference between the tendencies of the environment without the optimizer, and the tendencies of the environment with the optimizer.

And there's your "opinion or interpretation" --- not just in how you draw the boundary (which didn't exist in the original ontology), but in your choice of the theory that you use to evaluate your counterfactuals.

Of course, such theories can be better or worse, but only with respect to some prior system of evaluation.