Abstract

This article clarifies the place of consciousness within the Agency–Process–Scale (APS) framework. APS argues that consciousness is not required to explain agency, meaning, normativity, evaluation, or biological function, all of which arise from viability-oriented organisation. Consciousness is instead understood as a later evolutionary development emerging within certain forms of cognition and biological integration.

Consciousness — An APS Clarification

Consciousness is one of the most fascinating and contested topics in philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence. Human experience appears to possess an irreducibly subjective dimension: there is something it is like to see, feel, think, remember, or suffer.

Because consciousness feels immediate and central, it is often treated as the foundation of agency, meaning, cognition, and even life itself.

APS challenges this assumption.

Within the APS framework, consciousness is not the starting point for understanding living systems. Agency, normativity, evaluation, semiosis, function, and meaning arise earlier and more fundamentally from the viability-oriented organisation of life itself.

Consciousness is therefore understood not as the source of biological meaning, but as a later evolutionary development emerging within certain forms of cognition and integrative organisation.

Nor does APS identify consciousness with computation, information processing, or behavioural complexity considered independently of viability-oriented organisation.

APS Box — What APS Means by Cognition

In APS, cognition does not refer to thought, consciousness, or representation. It refers to a mode of biological organisation.

Cognition is the structured, temporally extended organisation of evaluative activity through which living systems regulate viability-relevant differences beyond the immediate present.

Living systems do not passively receive or encode information. Their organisation determines what counts as a relevant difference and how that difference is acted upon. Cognition is the way this selective differentiation is structured and coordinated within systems whose activity is oriented toward their own persistence.

All living systems exhibit biological agency and evaluative responsiveness, but cognition arises only where this activity becomes sufficiently structured, integrated, and temporally extended. Cognition develops where evaluative semiosis becomes coordinated across time in ways that regulate activity beyond immediate conditions.

In more elaborated systems, cognition may involve:

integration across multiple viability-relevant conditions
context-sensitive modulation of activity
temporal extension (counterfactual depth), where present activity reflects past or possible conditions
cross-scale coordination linking local processes with system-wide organisation

These are not defining requirements, but ways in which the organisation of cognition can become more complex.

Cognition, in this sense, is not a separate layer added to life. It is a developed mode of evaluative biological organisation emerging from viability-oriented activity when that activity becomes sufficiently structured, integrated, and temporally extended. It does not require subjective awareness or reflective thought.

The Problem with Beginning from Consciousness

Many philosophical discussions begin with consciousness because subjective experience appears uniquely difficult to explain.

This orientation has produced what David Chalmers called the “hard problem” of consciousness:

Why should physical processes give rise to subjective experience at all?

Similarly, Thomas Nagel argued that consciousness possesses an irreducibly first-person character — the “what it is like” of experience — that resists purely objective explanation.

These are legitimate philosophical problems.

However, APS argues that consciousness has often been asked to explain phenomena that do not in fact require consciousness at all.

Living systems already exhibit:

agency
normativity
function
evaluation
selective responsiveness
persistence-oriented regulation

long before consciousness appears evolutionarily.

A bacterium moves toward nutrients. A plant reorganises growth under stress. An immune system distinguishes self from non-self. A cell repairs membrane damage.

These activities matter to the organism because the organism must continuously sustain itself in order to persist.

None of this requires subjective awareness.

APS therefore separates:

the problem of life,
from the problem of consciousness.

Agency Before Consciousness

APS defines biological agency as viability-oriented activity through which living systems actively sustain themselves across time.

Agency does not require:

self-reflection
deliberation
symbolic thought
conscious awareness

A living system acts because its organisation is structured around the maintenance of viability.

This produces:

normativity — some states support persistence while others threaten it
function — processes contribute to maintaining organisation
evaluation — conditions are differentially modulated relative to viability
semiosis — differences become meaningful for the system

These are organisational features of life itself.

Consciousness is not required to generate them.

APS Box — Analysis vs Synthesis — Two Directions of Explanation

Scientific explanation can proceed in two complementary directions:

Analysis explains a system in terms of its parts and their interactions.
Synthesis explains a component in terms of the wider system within which it operates.

In practice, science has strongly favoured analysis, treating explanations that move toward smaller components as more fundamental. This has encouraged reductionist interpretations in which genes, molecules, or particles are taken to provide the deepest explanations.

APS rejects this asymmetry. Components and systems are mutually defining:

parts only have significance within an organised system
systems only exist through the coordinated activity of their parts

Biological explanation therefore requires both directions. It is not a matter of choosing between parts and wholes, but of understanding how organised activity is maintained across them.

Cognition and Consciousness Are Not Identical

APS distinguishes agency, cognition, and consciousness as related but non-identical dimensions of biological organisation.

A system may exhibit:

agency without cognition
cognition without consciousness
and consciousness only where particular forms of integrative organisation emerge

In APS:

agency refers to viability-oriented self-maintaining activity
cognition refers to the temporally extended integration of evaluative activity relative to viability
consciousness refers to subjective experience or awareness

This distinction is essential because many contemporary discussions collapse these categories together.

APS rejects the assumption that cognition necessarily implies consciousness.

Plants, immune systems, microbial collectives, and many animals may exhibit sophisticated forms of regulation, evaluation, memory, and adaptive coordination without evidence of reflective awareness.

Cognition therefore extends more broadly across life than consciousness does.

Consciousness as an Evolutionary Development

From an APS perspective, consciousness is best understood as a later evolutionary elaboration emerging within increasingly complex forms of biological organisation.

Across evolutionary history:

viability-oriented organisation appears first
agency emerges with self-maintaining systems
normativity follows from persistence requirements
cognition develops through increasingly integrated and temporally extended evaluation
consciousness appears only in some lineages

This preserves evolutionary continuity without collapsing all life into consciousness.

Cells are alive without awareness.

Plants exhibit agency and sophisticated regulation without evidence of subjective experience.

Many animals display cognition without reflective self-consciousness.

Humans add symbolic thought, language, abstraction, and explicit self-reflection.

Consciousness therefore grows out of life rather than defining life from the outset.

What APS Explains — and What It Does Not

APS provides a naturalised account of:

agency
normativity
function
evaluation
semiosis
meaning
and cognition

It explains how living systems can act meaningfully in the world without requiring consciousness as an explanatory foundation.

However, APS does not solve the hard problem of consciousness itself.

APS does not explain:

why experience feels like something
why subjective awareness exists
or whether consciousness can ultimately be reduced, emergent, or fundamental

This is not a weakness of the framework.

It is a clarification of explanatory scope.

APS separates two questions that are often conflated:

How do living systems regulate themselves, evaluate conditions, and organise meaningful activity?
Why is there something it is like to have certain states?

APS addresses the first question directly.

The second remains philosophically open.

Meaning Does Not Begin with Consciousness

One of the most important implications of APS is that meaning does not originate in reflective awareness.

Meaning begins wherever differences matter to the continued viability of a living system.

A nutrient gradient matters to a bacterium.

Water stress matters to a plant.

Tissue damage matters to an immune system.

These systems need not consciously experience such conditions for those conditions to possess biological significance.

APS therefore grounds meaning in evaluative biological organisation rather than in human consciousness alone.

Consciousness may:

experience meaning
symbolise meaning
reinterpret meaning
and reflect upon meaning

but it does not create meaning from nothing.

APS Box — How APS Relates to Other Theoretical Frameworks

Contemporary frameworks such as control theory and nonlinear dynamical systems theory provide powerful and indispensable accounts of living systems. They explain how systems regulate their behaviour, maintain stability, and exhibit complex dynamics across time.

APS does not replace these approaches, nor does it reduce them to a single underlying model. Instead, it addresses a different question: what kind of organisation makes a system a living system in the first place.

Multiple theoretical frameworks can therefore apply to the same system, but they do so in different ways and address different explanatory questions. A dynamical systems description may characterise the system’s trajectories, and a control-theoretic model may describe its regulatory structure. These accounts are often non-reducible to one another, and each can be independently valid.

However, such accounts do not by themselves distinguish living systems from non-living systems. Many non-living systems also exhibit regulation, feedback, and complex dynamics.

APS contributes by specifying the organisational conditions under which a system must actively maintain its own viability. A system is viability-oriented when its processes are organised such that their effects contribute, directly or indirectly, to maintaining the conditions required for the system’s continued existence.

Importantly, in APS, viability is not defined by reference to life itself. It is specified in terms of the persistence of an organised system within a bounded region of possible states. A living system is therefore not defined in a circular sense as “that which maintains viability”, but as a system whose organisation is structured around maintaining these conditions.

In this sense, APS provides a way of identifying what makes a system a living system, rather than a general account of everything such a system does.

This does not mean that APS provides a complete or self-sufficient account of living systems. Describing how such systems behave, regulate, and evolve requires additional theoretical frameworks. APS specifies conditions that are necessary for identifying living systems, but it does not by itself exhaust the explanations required to understand them.

A complete scientific understanding of living systems therefore requires multiple forms of explanation. Dynamical and control-theoretic accounts explain how systems behave and regulate. APS clarifies the conditions under which such systems count as living systems at all.

Key Point:
Explaining regulation, dynamics, or behaviour is not the same as explaining what makes a system a living system. APS addresses this latter question by specifying the organisational conditions under which viability is maintained.

Consciousness and Artificial Intelligence

APS also clarifies several contemporary confusions surrounding artificial intelligence.

Artificial systems may exhibit:

sophisticated information processing
adaptive behaviour
predictive modelling
and forms of functional cognition

APS does not deny these capacities.

However, APS distinguishes such capacities from biological agency.

Current AI systems are not intrinsically organised around their own viability as self-maintaining living systems. Their goals, evaluation criteria, and operational conditions are externally specified rather than internally grounded in biological persistence.

For this reason, APS distinguishes:

computation
from intrinsic biological normativity
simulation of agency
from viability-oriented agency itself

Whether artificial systems could ever become genuinely conscious therefore remains an open question rather than a purely computational one.

APS neither dogmatically denies nor prematurely attributes consciousness to artificial systems.

Instead, it clarifies the organisational conditions that would need to be addressed before such claims become philosophically meaningful.

Reframing the Debate

APS does not directly compete with contemporary theories of consciousness such as:

predictive processing
integrated information theory
global workspace theories
or enactive approaches

Instead, APS reorders the explanatory sequence within which such theories operate.

Consciousness is no longer treated as the foundation of:

agency
normativity
meaning
or cognition

These arise earlier within the organisation of living systems themselves.

Consciousness is therefore approached through the same organisational grammar governing biological explanation more generally: agency, process, scale, viability, evaluation, and cognition.

Consciousness therefore becomes something to explain after biological organisation is already understood — not something invoked to explain life from the beginning.

Where This Leaves Us

Consciousness is real, profound, and philosophically difficult.

But from an APS perspective, it is not the foundation of biological reality.

Life comes first.

Agency grounds action.

Normativity grounds meaning.

Evaluation modulates activity relative to viability.

Semiosis structures differences as mattering.

Cognition elaborates regulation across time.

Consciousness allows some living systems to experience and reflect upon an already meaningful world.

This does not resolve the philosophical difficulty of subjective experience.

But it places that problem within a clearer biological and philosophical framework.

Consciousness — An APS Clarification

Consciousness — An APS Clarification

The Problem with Beginning from Consciousness

Agency Before Consciousness

Cognition and Consciousness Are Not Identical

Consciousness as an Evolutionary Development

What APS Explains — and What It Does Not

Meaning Does Not Begin with Consciousness

Consciousness and Artificial Intelligence

Reframing the Debate

Where This Leaves Us

See Also

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References

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What Is Life? — A Biological Question Revisited

Why Life Is Not DNA’s Way of Making More DNA

Why Life Is Not Intelligence — An APS Clarification

Semiosis — How Differences Come to Matter in Living Systems

Evaluation — How Living Systems Modulate Activity Relative to Viability

Cognition — Where Does It Belong in Biology?