To me, the low-carbohydrate approach to the obesity problem has been a real eye-opener. I recommend the book from Gary Taubes, "Good calories, bad calories".

Reading that book i got clear that medical authorities have a very hard time updating their beliefs in the light of evidence, and prefer to surpress/bend it to accommodate established dogma.

OK. So let'ts take a controller with an explicit (I hope you agree) model, the Smith predictor. The controller as a whole has a model, but the subsystem C(z) (in the wiki example) has not (in your terms).

Or better yet, a Model Reference Adaptive Control. The system as a whole IS predictive, uses models, etc.. but the "core" controller subsystem does "not".

Then I'd argue that in the simple PID case, the engineer does the job of the Model/Adjusting Mechanism, and it's a fundamental part of the implementation process (you don't just buy a PID and install it without tuning it first!)

So, in every control systems there is a model. It's only that when the plant is "simple enough" and invariant in the long term the model/adjusting subsystem is implemented in wetware, and only used during install.

This is just arguing semantics, though.

Very interesting article. Yes, the controller is not intelligent but you have to factor in the designer. (I think this is something like a response to the Chinese Room argument). Just a few comments:

It has no model of its surroundings.

It has, a very simple one: the sign of the gain of the plant (steady-state).

It has no model of itself.

No, but its maker does: the transfer function of the controller.

It makes no predictions.

As in the first point: implicit in the design of the system is that temperature goes up with +1 output. If you flip the sign you get positive feedback and the system does not work as intended.

It has no priors.

Its designer knows some a priori things, like the typical time constant of the temperature trajectory and its range.

It has no utility function.

Maybe not a formal one, but you could build one with things like integrated squared error.