If you think in terms of behavior, there is the agent, the environment and some kind of reward signal to be optimized. The article "is saying" (liberally adapted by me) that behavior depends on both the agent and dynamics of the environment. Of course it does, the mind learns its values from interaction and rewards.
Why are people still trying to solve the mind-body problem when we have Reinforcement Learning? It's a much better conceptualization - without definitional problems, concrete, implementable in both biology and AI, and most of all, it's simple. It does away with most words used in psychology and philosophy, which is a good thing, because they have really imprecise meanings. Just try to define "consciousness" or "mind" - it's a 2000 year old mess.
This definition is worthless. It has an incredibly high false-positive rate. For example, according to this, any animal would qualify as "a mind", any self-sustaining chemical reaction would qualify as "a mind", and in fact anything that sort of looks like life (key concept is "self-organizing") would qualify as "a mind".
Breaking it down:
> emergent self-organizing process
Any life, and a lot of things that probably wouldn't be counted as life. For example, gravitationally bound spherical bodies in space.
> both embodied and relational
Mumbo-jumbo, presumably meaning "both physical and abstract".
> that regulates energy and information flow
Vague bordering on meaningless. This sounds more like it's describing a transistor than a mind.
> within and among us
Completely ill-defined. Who is "us"? Is this definition impredicative, where "us" is defined over the set of minds? If so, it's useless.
It's cool if people want to spin yarn about how to define various difficult-to-quantify abstract concepts, but it's frustrating when they act as if they're talking about some sort of factual discovery they've made.