Abstract

Representation is often treated as the foundational basis of cognition, meaning, and intelligent behaviour. APS rejects this assumption. Biological systems do not require internal representations in order to regulate activity relative to viability. Evaluation and semiosis arise earlier and more fundamentally from viability-oriented organisation. Representation, where it exists, is a later organisational development emerging within certain forms of temporally extended cognition.

Representation — When (and Whether) It Arises in Biological Systems

Representation is one of the central concepts of contemporary cognitive science, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and philosophy of mind.

Living systems are often described as:

constructing internal models
encoding information
representing environments
storing symbolic content
or predicting external states

From this perspective, cognition appears fundamentally representational.

APS challenges this assumption.

Within the APS framework, biological systems do not require internal representations in order to regulate activity relative to viability. Evaluation and semiosis arise earlier and more fundamentally from viability-oriented organisation itself.

Representation, where it exists, is a later organisational development emerging within certain forms of temporally extended cognition.

Why Representation Became Central

Representational theories became influential because organisms often behave as though they possess internal knowledge about the world.

Animals:

navigate environments
anticipate future conditions
coordinate action flexibly
and respond to absent or delayed conditions

These capacities appear difficult to explain through immediate stimulus-response relations alone.

Representation therefore seemed to provide a solution.

Internal states could stand in for external conditions, allowing systems to:

predict
plan
remember
simulate
and coordinate behaviour beyond the present moment

This framework became especially influential within:

cognitive science
neuroscience
artificial intelligence
predictive processing
and computational psychology

APS accepts that some biological systems may indeed develop representational capacities.

But it rejects the assumption that representation is foundational to biological organisation itself.

Evaluation Comes Before Representation

APS begins from viability-oriented organisation rather than representation.

Living systems continuously regulate activity relative to conditions affecting persistence.

Some conditions support viability.
Others undermine it.

This differential modulation of activity constitutes evaluation.

Evaluation does not require:

symbols
models
internal maps
or representational encoding

A bacterium moving toward nutrients need not internally represent nutrients symbolically.

A plant reorganising growth under drought conditions need not possess internal world-models.

An immune system distinguishing tolerated from damaging conditions need not construct representations in the cognitive-scientific sense.

These systems already exhibit:

biological agency
normativity
evaluation
and semiosis

without requiring explicit representation.

Evaluation therefore precedes representation organisationally.

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.

Semiosis Without Representation

APS also distinguishes semiosis from representation.

Semiosis concerns the organisation of differences as biologically meaningful within viability-oriented activity.

A chemical gradient, thermal change, or signalling molecule becomes meaningful because it participates in evaluative biological organisation.

This does not necessarily require:

symbolic encoding
internal models
semantic representation
or explicit informational mapping

Differences matter biologically because they affect viability.

Meaning therefore emerges from:

evaluation
regulation
and persistence-maintaining activity

rather than from representation alone.

Representation may emerge later within some forms of cognition, but semiosis does not depend upon it fundamentally.

Cognition Without Representation

APS therefore rejects the assumption that cognition necessarily depends upon representation.

Cognition, in APS, is the temporally extended integration of evaluative activity relative to viability.

A system may:

coordinate behaviour contextually
integrate multiple viability conditions
regulate activity across time
and adapt flexibly to changing environments

without constructing explicit representational models.

This is especially important in:

plant cognition
microbial cognition
distributed biological systems
immune cognition
and embodied cognition research

Many biological systems exhibit sophisticated forms of cognition while remaining:

non-symbolic
distributed
processual
and tightly coupled to ongoing activity

APS therefore treats representation as one possible organisational development within cognition rather than as cognition’s universal foundation.

When Representation May Arise

APS does not deny representation altogether.

Instead, it asks:

Under what organisational conditions might representation emerge?

Representation becomes increasingly plausible where cognition exhibits:

counterfactual depth
temporal projection
behavioural simulation
explicit memory integration
symbolic manipulation
or detached modelling of absent conditions

Under these conditions, systems may develop organisational structures functioning representationally.

Importantly, APS treats such capacities as:

emergent
biologically grounded
and organisationally derivative

rather than foundational.

Representation therefore emerges only within already existing systems capable of:

evaluation
semiosis
cognition
and viability-oriented persistence

Representation and Predictive Processing

Contemporary predictive-processing and Active-Inference theories frequently describe cognition in representational terms.

Organisms are modelled as:

predicting sensory inputs
minimising prediction error
and updating internal models of the world

APS accepts that such frameworks may successfully describe aspects of advanced cognition.

However, APS rejects the stronger claim that all biological organisation is fundamentally representational.

Prediction itself presupposes:

organised viability
evaluative regulation
semiosis
and persistence-maintaining activity

Representation therefore cannot explain the existence of biological organisation from the outset.

It already presupposes organised living systems.

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.

Representation Is Not Biological Meaning

One of the most important APS clarifications concerns meaning.

Representational frameworks often assume:

meaning depends upon reference
symbols derive significance through correspondence
or cognition depends upon internal content-bearing states

APS reverses this explanatory direction.

Biological meaning emerges because differences matter to viability-oriented organisation.

Representation may later stabilise, formalise, or extend such meaning.

But meaning itself originates earlier within:

evaluation
semiosis
and biological normativity

This is why APS treats representational “accuracy” as functionally grounded rather than referentially foundational.

Representations matter biologically only insofar as they contribute to viability-oriented activity.

Representation and Artificial Intelligence

Representation is especially important in artificial intelligence because many AI systems operate through:

symbolic structures
statistical modelling
predictive optimisation
and representational architectures

APS does not deny the sophistication of such systems.

However, representation alone does not generate biological organisation.

Artificial systems may:

represent environments
simulate cognition
optimise predictions
and coordinate behaviour

while remaining externally maintained systems lacking endogenous viability-oriented persistence.

Representation therefore cannot by itself explain:

biological agency
normativity
semiosis
or organised persistence

These arise from viability-oriented organisation rather than from representational processing alone.

The APS Perspective

APS situates representation within a broader organisational framework.

From an APS perspective:

viability-oriented organisation grounds biological agency
evaluation modulates activity relative to persistence
semiosis structures differences as biologically meaningful
cognition integrates evaluative activity across time
and representation may emerge within some advanced forms of cognition

Representation is therefore:

neither foundational to life
nor required for basic cognition
nor equivalent to meaning itself

It is a specialised organisational development within some biological systems.

Representation must therefore be understood through the same organisational grammar governing biological explanation more generally:

agency
process
scale
viability
evaluation
semiosis
cognition
and persistence

Closing Perspective

Representation is often treated as the foundation of cognition and meaning.

APS reverses this explanatory order.

Living systems first exist as viability-oriented organisations.

Evaluation modulates activity relative to persistence.

Semiosis structures differences as biologically meaningful.

Cognition integrates evaluative organisation across time.

Only then, under some conditions, may representation emerge.

Representation is therefore not the foundation of life.

It is one possible development within already organised living systems.

Representation — When (and Whether) It Arises in Biological Systems

Representation — When (and Whether) It Arises in Biological Systems

Why Representation Became Central

Evaluation Comes Before Representation

Semiosis Without Representation

Cognition Without Representation

When Representation May Arise

Representation and Predictive Processing

Representation Is Not Biological Meaning

Representation and Artificial Intelligence

The APS Perspective

Closing Perspective

See Also

Related Articles

References

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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?

Why Life Is Not Information Processing

Why Life Is Not Active Inference

Consciousness — An APS Clarification

Why Life Is Not Intelligence — An APS Clarification

Why AI Is Not Biological Agency