Semiosis — How Differences Come to Matter in Living Systems

Where this article fits: This article develops the APS account of semiosis as the organisation of biologically meaningful difference within viability-oriented evaluative organisation. Semiosis is treated not as symbolic representation or abstract information processing, but as the ongoing organisation of meaningful organism–environment relations within continuity-preserving biological activity. It therefore forms one of the principal bridges linking viability, normativity, evaluation, meaning, information, representation, and cognition within the APS explanatory framework.

Introduction

Semiosis is traditionally understood as the production and interpretation of signs.

Within philosophy, linguistics, and semiotics, semiosis has often been associated with symbols, representation, communication, interpretation, and language-like meaning. Within biology, the concept has been extended to encompass signalling systems, genetic coding, neural activity, communication, and organism–environment interaction. These approaches capture important aspects of how living systems organise themselves relative to their surroundings, but they also leave unresolved questions about the relationship between signs, meaning, and life itself.

If semiosis is understood too narrowly, it becomes restricted to language, symbolic representation, cognition, or conscious interpretation. If it is understood too broadly, all causal interaction risks being treated as meaningful, weakening explanatory precision and obscuring what is distinctive about living systems.

APS approaches semiosis from the perspective of biological organisation.

Semiosis is not fundamentally the manipulation of symbols, nor is it reducible to information processing considered independently of living organisation. Rather, it concerns the way differences come to matter within the viability-oriented activity of living systems.

In APS:

semiosis is the organisation of differences as biologically meaningful within viability-oriented evaluative activity.

Living systems do not merely encounter differences. They continuously regulate themselves relative to conditions that affect their capacity to persist. Semiosis emerges wherever such conditions become integrated into continuity-preserving evaluative organisation and acquire significance for ongoing activity.

Contemporary biosemiotic theory increasingly emphasises that living systems are not passive recipients of information but active participants in processes of meaning-making. Recent work has highlighted the central role of sign processes in establishing and maintaining relations of significance between organisms and their environments. APS shares this emphasis while grounding meaning-making within the broader explanatory architecture of viability, evaluation, agency, process, and scale.

From an APS perspective, semiosis is therefore best understood not simply as the interpretation of signs but as the ongoing organisation of organism–environment relations through which living systems maintain and reorganise themselves across changing conditions. Meaning is not added to biological organisation from outside. It emerges from the organisation of persistence itself.

From Evaluation to Semiosis

Semiosis depends upon evaluation.

Living systems continuously modulate their activity relative to conditions affecting viability. Some conditions contribute to continuity, stability, adaptive flexibility, and persistence, whereas others undermine organisation, increase vulnerability, or contribute to breakdown. Evaluation operationalises these asymmetries through the differential regulation of activity relative to what supports or threatens ongoing continuity.

Semiosis emerges when differences become organised within that evaluative activity.

A change in nutrient concentration, a shift in temperature, the presence of a signalling molecule, a developmental cue, or an ecological opportunity does not become significant simply because it exists. It becomes significant because it enters into evaluative organisation and alters how activity is regulated relative to viability.

APS therefore situates semiosis within a broader explanatory sequence:

viability
↓
function
↓
normativity
↓
evaluation
↓
semiosis
↓
meaning
↓
information
↓
representation
↓
cognition

Within this sequence, viability establishes the conditions for persistence, function concerns contributions to continuity-preserving organisation, normativity establishes asymmetries between persistence-supporting and persistence-undermining conditions, and evaluation regulates activity relative to those asymmetries. Semiosis emerges when differences become incorporated into this evaluative structure and acquire biological significance.

Semiosis is therefore not an independent symbolic layer imposed upon biology. It emerges from viability-oriented organised persistence and participates directly in the ongoing regulation through which continuity is maintained.

Semiosis as Biological Meaning-Making

Recent developments in biosemiotics increasingly characterise living systems as meaning-making systems. This does not imply that organisms consciously interpret signs or engage in symbolic reasoning. Rather, it reflects the observation that living systems continuously establish, maintain, and transform relations of significance with their environments.

APS interprets this meaning-making activity through the lens of organised persistence.

Differences are not inherently meaningful. A nutrient gradient, a chemical signal, a temperature fluctuation, or a change in ecological conditions possesses no intrinsic significance independent of a living system. Such conditions become significant through their relationship to viability-oriented organisation. Meaning emerges when they influence how activity is regulated relative to persistence.

Semiosis therefore does not involve the discovery of pre-existing meanings embedded within the environment. Instead, it involves the ongoing organisation of relations of significance between living systems and the conditions within which they persist.

This perspective connects naturally with the biosemiotic tradition associated with Jakob von Uexküll’s concept of Umwelt. Organisms do not inhabit a world of neutral physical differences. They inhabit worlds structured by what matters for their continued existence. APS extends this insight by grounding such significance within evaluative organisation and viability-oriented persistence.

Meaning-making is therefore not a secondary consequence of life. It is one of the ways organised persistence becomes operational. Through semiosis, conditions acquire significance for the regulation of activity, the maintenance of continuity, the coordination of behaviour, the modulation of development, and the adaptive reorganisation of living systems.

Organised persistence therefore provides the biological context within which meaning-making becomes possible. At the same time, meaning-making contributes to the maintenance and reorganisation of persistence itself. Living systems endure because relations of significance influence activity, and those relations acquire significance because living systems are already engaged in viability-oriented self-maintenance. The relationship is reciprocal rather than sequential.

APS consequently understands semiosis as an ongoing process of biological meaning-making through which organism–environment relations are organised, stabilised, modified, and reconstructed in ways that contribute to viable continuity across time.

Semiosis and Organised Persistence

Because living systems persist through ongoing self-maintaining activity, semiosis is inseparable from organised persistence across time.

Living systems do not merely undergo physical change. They continuously regulate, coordinate, and reorganise activity in ways that contribute to the maintenance of viable organisation. Semiosis participates directly in this process by allowing differences to become organisationally consequential within ongoing activity.

From an APS perspective, semiosis emerges from organised persistence because only systems already engaged in viability-oriented self-maintenance possess a basis upon which significance can arise. At the same time, semiosis contributes to organised persistence by enabling activity to be modulated relative to conditions that support or threaten continuity. The relationship is therefore reciprocal rather than one-directional.

A nutrient gradient, temperature fluctuation, developmental signal, ecological cue, or behavioural opportunity matters because it changes how activity is organised relative to persistence. Semiosis is the process through which such conditions become incorporated into continuity-preserving regulation.

This relationship is fundamentally relational. Significance is neither a property of environments alone nor a purely internal construction. It emerges through the interaction between living systems and the conditions within which they persist. A chemical gradient that is significant for one organism may be irrelevant for another. A developmental cue may matter at one stage of a life cycle and be inconsequential at another. What matters depends upon the organisation of the system itself.

Semiosis therefore organises organism–environment relations rather than merely registering environmental states. Living systems actively establish domains of significance through their viability-oriented activity, and semiosis continuously maintains and modifies those domains as circumstances change.

This is why semiosis cannot be reduced to signal transmission alone. Signals become biologically significant only when they participate in the organisation of persistence. A difference that produces no evaluative consequences remains merely a physical difference. A difference that contributes to the regulation of activity becomes part of a semiotic process.

Through semiosis, living systems coordinate continuity-sensitive organisation, adapt to perturbations, regulate development, organise ecological interactions, and reconstruct activity in ways that preserve viable continuity. Semiosis transforms physical differences into relations of significance that guide the ongoing organisation of life across time.

Semiosis Without Representation

APS does not require symbolic representation for semiosis to occur.

Many discussions of semiosis assume that meaning depends upon internal representations, symbolic encodings, mental models, or informational structures that stand in for aspects of the world. Such approaches have often proved valuable in the study of language, cognition, and communication, but they become problematic when treated as the foundation of biological meaning itself.

Semiosis begins earlier.

A bacterium moving along a nutrient gradient need not construct symbolic representations of its surroundings. A plant responding to changing light conditions need not possess internal world models. A developing embryo need not interpret developmental signals through linguistic or symbolic mechanisms.

What matters biologically is that differences become operationally integrated into viability-oriented activity.

Living systems regulate themselves relative to conditions that affect persistence. Semiosis emerges when those conditions acquire significance within evaluative organisation. The meaningfulness of a difference therefore derives from its role within organised persistence rather than from its representation in an abstract symbolic system.

Meaning in APS is operational rather than merely descriptive, evaluative rather than neutral, embodied rather than detached, and organisational rather than fundamentally symbolic.

This does not imply that representation never occurs. More sophisticated forms of semiosis may eventually support representational capacities, particularly within advanced cognitive systems. APS instead argues that representation is a derived achievement rather than an explanatory starting point.

The explanatory order therefore runs from viability and evaluation toward meaning and representation, not the reverse.

Semiosis is possible because differences matter for persistence. Representation, where it emerges, is one possible development within a much broader semiotic landscape.

APS therefore distinguishes semiosis from generic signal processing. Artificial systems may classify inputs, manipulate symbols, process signals, or optimise outputs without those activities participating in viability-oriented organised persistence. In living systems, by contrast, semiosis matters because relations of significance become integrated into the organisation through which the system maintains itself.

Semiosis and Meaning

APS grounds meaning in evaluative significance.

Differences become meaningful because they influence how viability-oriented activity is organised. Meaning is therefore neither imposed externally nor generated solely through symbolic interpretation. It emerges through the way living systems regulate themselves relative to conditions affecting persistence.

Meaning can consequently be understood as stabilised evaluative significance within organised persistence.

This formulation captures an important feature of biological organisation. Living systems do not merely react to differences. They develop enduring patterns through which particular conditions repeatedly acquire significance for activity. Over time, these patterns become stabilised within behaviour, physiology, development, ecological interaction, and evolutionary history.

Meaning therefore reflects the organisation of significance rather than the existence of signs alone.

A signal becomes meaningful when it participates in viability-oriented regulation. A developmental cue becomes meaningful when it influences developmental coordination. A behavioural stimulus becomes meaningful when it contributes to adaptive organisation. In each case, meaning emerges through the role a condition plays within organised persistence.

Meaningful conditions also contribute directly to function. Functions are not merely structures or activities; they are contributions to continuity-preserving organisation. Semiosis becomes operational through function because relations of significance influence how living systems maintain, repair, and reorganise themselves across changing circumstances. Function therefore represents one of the principal ways semiosis participates in viable continuity.

This perspective helps naturalise meaning without reducing it either to physical causation or to symbolic representation. Physical causation alone does not explain why some conditions matter and others do not. Symbolic theories often explain meaning only by presupposing systems that are already meaningful. APS instead locates meaning within evaluative organisation itself.

Meaning remains continuous with function, normativity, evaluation, semiosis, adaptation, and biological agency. Rather than standing outside biological organisation, it emerges from the organisation of persistence and contributes to its ongoing regulation.

Semiosis and Information

APS rejects the view that information is explanatorily primary.

Many contemporary accounts treat information as the fundamental concept from which meaning, representation, and cognition are subsequently derived. In such frameworks, biological organisation is often interpreted as a specialised form of information processing.

APS reverses this explanatory order.

Information does not generate semiosis. Semiosis grounds biological information.

Differences become informative only because they are already significant within viability-oriented evaluative organisation. Information therefore depends upon semiosis rather than preceding it.

The explanatory sequence remains:

viability
↓
evaluation
↓
semiosis
↓
meaning
↓
information

This sequence is important because it prevents biological meaning from collapsing into abstract syntax, computational formalism, or detached signal manipulation.

A pattern may contain information in a statistical sense without possessing biological significance. For living systems, however, information becomes relevant only when differences participate in the organisation of persistence. Information acquires explanatory importance because it enters into semiotic processes through which activity is regulated relative to viability.

From this perspective, biological information is not an independent substance, code, or causal force. It is a description of significant differences that have already become integrated into evaluative organisation.

This position aligns with a growing body of work in theoretical biology and biosemiotics that questions purely informational accounts of life. Meaningful organisation cannot be derived from information alone because information presupposes distinctions that already matter to a living system. Semiosis provides the bridge between physical difference and biological significance.

APS therefore understands information as emerging from organised meaning rather than generating it. Information is important because living systems are semiotic; living systems are not semiotic because they process information.

Semiosis consequently occupies a foundational position within biological explanation. It explains how differences become significant, how significance becomes stabilised as meaning, and only thereafter how those meaningful distinctions may function as information within living organisation.

The possibility of increasingly sophisticated informational organisation therefore emerges from semiosis itself, preparing the ground for the more temporally extended forms of organisation associated with cognition.

Semiosis and cognition are closely related, but they are not identical.

Semiosis concerns the organisation of significance within viability-oriented evaluative activity. Cognition emerges when such semiotic organisation becomes sufficiently integrated, temporally extended, and flexible that present activity is regulated not only relative to immediate conditions but also relative to absent, anticipated, or hypothetical circumstances.

This distinction is important because it grounds cognition within biology without collapsing all life into cognition itself.

Every living system participates in semiosis. Living systems continuously organise relations of significance with their environments through viability-oriented evaluation. Not every living system, however, exhibits cognition in the stronger sense associated with memory, anticipation, learning, planning, or flexible behavioural organisation.

Cognition therefore represents a specialised development of more fundamental semiotic capacities.

APS understands cognition as emerging when semiosis becomes organised across extended temporal horizons. Conditions no longer matter solely because of their immediate effects on persistence. They begin to matter because of their relationship to future possibilities, delayed consequences, remembered circumstances, and alternative courses of action.

A bacterium following a nutrient gradient exhibits semiosis because environmental conditions acquire significance for viability-oriented activity. More complex organisms may additionally organise activity relative to remembered experiences, anticipated outcomes, or expected environmental states. Such capacities extend semiosis into increasingly sophisticated forms of cognition.

APS understands cognition as emerging when semiosis becomes organised across increasingly extended temporal horizons. As living systems become capable of regulating activity relative not only to present conditions but also to anticipated future states, remembered circumstances, and alternative possibilities, semiosis develops into progressively more sophisticated forms of cognition. Cognition can therefore be understood as a temporally extended elaboration of more fundamental semiotic organisation.

Cognition remains continuous with semiosis because both concern the organisation of significance within living systems. The distinction lies not in the presence or absence of meaning but in the temporal scope and organisational complexity through which significance influences activity.

APS therefore maintains:

all cognition presupposes semiosis, but not all semiosis constitutes cognition.

This formulation preserves continuity across living systems while avoiding both anthropocentric accounts of cognition and attempts to identify all biological organisation with cognition itself.

Semiosis and Biological Agency

Semiosis remains inseparable from biological agency.

Agency concerns the viability-oriented activity through which living systems sustain, regulate, and re-create the conditions of their own persistence. Semiosis contributes to this activity by organising significance relative to those conditions.

Living systems do not merely undergo causal interactions. They actively regulate themselves in relation to what matters for continuity. Semiosis provides the organisational means through which conditions become relevant to that regulation.

Agency therefore supplies the active context within which semiosis operates.

Without agency there may be causal interaction, signal transmission, or physical responsiveness, but there is no basis for significance to arise. Meaning emerges because living systems are already engaged in viability-oriented activity directed toward the maintenance of organised persistence.

Semiosis consequently does not stand apart from agency. It is one of the principal ways agency becomes operationally organised.

Through semiosis, living systems coordinate behaviour, regulate physiology, organise development, navigate ecological interactions, and adapt to changing circumstances. In each case, significance influences activity because activity is already organised around persistence.

Agency explains why living systems care, in a biological sense, about particular conditions. Semiosis explains how those conditions become organised within ongoing activity.

The two concepts therefore illuminate complementary aspects of the same organisational reality.

Agency concerns the activity of persistence.

Semiosis concerns the organisation of significance within that activity.

Semiosis and Process

APS approaches semiosis as a process rather than a static property.

Traditional discussions sometimes describe semiosis as though it were a relation that simply exists between a sign and its interpretation. Such descriptions can be useful, but they risk obscuring the fundamentally dynamic character of living organisation.

Living systems are not static entities.

They are ongoing processes of organised persistence.

Semiosis participates in this processual organisation because significance does not remain fixed. It emerges, stabilises, transforms, and disappears as living systems interact with changing conditions across time.

A nutrient gradient may matter under one set of circumstances and be irrelevant under another. Developmental signals acquire significance at particular stages of development. Ecological relationships shift as environments change. Behavioural cues may alter their significance through learning or adaptation.

Semiosis therefore unfolds through time.

Meaning is not merely possessed by living systems. It is continuously generated, maintained, modified, and reorganised through ongoing activity.

This temporal dimension is essential.

A condition matters because of its relationship to continuity. Continuity itself exists only across time. Semiosis therefore depends upon temporally organised persistence and cannot be adequately understood through isolated sign events considered independently of developmental, physiological, ecological, or evolutionary processes.

From an APS perspective, semiosis is not a collection of disconnected episodes of interpretation.

It is an ongoing process through which relations of significance are continuously reconstructed within living organisation.

This process orientation helps explain why semiosis remains connected to adaptation, learning, development, ecological interaction, and evolutionary transformation. In each case, significance is not merely present but actively reorganised through changing circumstances.

Semiosis therefore belongs naturally within the APS Process dimension.

Meaning unfolds.

Significance develops.

Organisation changes.

Persistence is maintained through the continuous reconstruction of relations that matter for viable continuity.

Processes, however, never unfold in isolation. They are distributed across interacting organisational scales. Understanding semiosis as a process therefore naturally leads to the question of how significance is coordinated across the multiple scales through which living systems persist.

Semiosis Across Scale

Semiosis operates across interacting biological scales.

Relations of significance are not confined to behaviour, cognition, communication, or language. They participate throughout living organisation, from cellular activity to ecological interaction and evolutionary transformation.

At molecular and cellular scales, semiosis contributes to the regulation of signalling pathways, metabolic coordination, and cellular responsiveness. Conditions become significant because they influence viability-oriented activity.

At physiological scales, semiosis participates in the coordination of internal processes that maintain continuity under changing circumstances. Hormonal signals, immune responses, and regulatory interactions acquire significance through their contribution to organised persistence.

At developmental scales, relations of significance influence how organisms grow, stabilise, and reorganise themselves across time. Developmental signals matter because they participate in the maintenance and transformation of viable organisation throughout ontogeny.

At behavioural scales, semiosis contributes to navigation, foraging, communication, social interaction, and adaptive response. Organisms continuously organise activity relative to conditions that influence persistence.

At ecological scales, semiosis participates in the organisation of organism–environment relations. Predators, prey, competitors, mutualists, resources, and environmental conditions acquire significance through their effects on continuity and viability.

At evolutionary scales, semiosis contributes to the historical transformation of significance across generations. Evolution alters the ways organisms organise responsiveness to their environments, generating new patterns of adaptation, coordination, and ecological interaction.

These are not independent levels of semiosis.

APS rejects hierarchical conceptions that treat scales as isolated layers stacked upon one another. Instead, semiosis is distributed across interacting organisational scales linked through continuity-preserving activity.

Significance organised at one scale may influence organisation at another. Developmental processes shape behavioural possibilities. Behavioural organisation alters ecological relations. Ecological interactions influence evolutionary trajectories. Evolutionary history constrains developmental and physiological organisation.

Semiosis therefore exhibits the same multiscale architecture that characterises biological organisation more generally.

This constitutes one of the distinctive contributions of APS to discussions of semiosis.

Many treatments of biosemiotics focus primarily on organisms, behaviour, communication, or cognition. APS extends the discussion by situating semiosis within a broader multiscale framework linking molecular, developmental, physiological, behavioural, ecological, and evolutionary organisation.

Relations of significance are therefore not localised phenomena occurring at a single privileged scale. They are distributed features of viability-oriented organised persistence unfolding across interconnected biological processes.

Semiosis consequently reveals not only how differences come to matter, but also how significance is coordinated across the multiple scales through which living systems maintain continuity across time.

Semiosis and Artificial Systems

Artificial systems may classify signals, manipulate symbols, optimise outputs, perform predictive modelling, and generate increasingly sophisticated forms of behavioural responsiveness. APS does not deny the importance or complexity of these capacities. Indeed, many artificial systems exhibit remarkable abilities to process information, identify patterns, and coordinate activity across diverse environments.

The existence of such capacities nevertheless raises an important question:

Does signal processing alone constitute semiosis?

APS argues that it does not.

The central issue is not whether a system processes differences but whether those differences participate in viability-oriented organised persistence. Semiosis concerns the organisation of significance within the activity through which living systems maintain and reconstruct themselves. The significance of a condition therefore depends upon its role within the system’s own continuity.

Most artificial systems operate under externally maintained organisational conditions. Their goals, operational parameters, energy sources, maintenance regimes, and evaluative criteria are typically supplied by designers, users, or surrounding infrastructures. While such systems may process signals and modify behaviour, the significance of those signals generally derives from externally imposed purposes rather than from intrinsic viability-oriented organisation.

This distinction is crucial.

A machine may classify a signal without that signal affecting the machine’s own persistence. A living system, by contrast, encounters conditions within the context of maintaining its own continuity. Significance emerges because the system itself is engaged in viability-oriented activity.

APS therefore distinguishes between signal processing, information processing, representation, and semiosis.

Signal processing concerns the manipulation of differences. Information processing concerns the organisation of informative distinctions. Representation concerns systems that stand in for other conditions or states. Semiosis concerns the organisation of significance within viability-oriented evaluative activity.

These capacities may overlap, but they are not identical.

Artificial systems may exhibit signal processing, information processing, and representation without participating in biological semiosis. Whether future artificial systems could develop forms of semiosis comparable to those found in living systems remains an open question. APS maintains only that semiosis cannot be identified with computation alone.

The difference is not primarily one of complexity. It is a difference in organisational context.

Semiosis emerges where distinctions participate in the ongoing maintenance and reorganisation of a system’s own persistence. Computation may contribute to such processes, but it is not sufficient to explain them. What distinguishes biological semiosis is that significance arises within the activity through which living systems sustain themselves across time.

Semiosis Within the APS Explanatory Grammar

APS situates semiosis within a broader explanatory grammar organised through agency, process, and scale.

This represents an important point of departure from many traditional discussions of semiosis. Biosemiotics has demonstrated that sign processes are deeply implicated in living organisation. APS accepts this insight but asks an additional question:

Where does semiosis belong within biological explanation itself?

Rather than treating semiosis as an autonomous explanatory framework, APS situates it within a broader network of concepts linking viability, function, normativity, evaluation, meaning, information, representation, and cognition.

The resulting explanatory sequence is:

viability
↓
function
↓
normativity
↓
evaluation
↓
semiosis
↓
meaning
↓
information
↓
representation
↓
cognition

This sequence does not describe a series of independent layers. Each concept develops from and depends upon those preceding it.

Viability establishes the conditions for persistence.

Function concerns contributions to continuity-preserving organisation.

Normativity establishes asymmetries between conditions that support and undermine persistence.

Evaluation regulates activity relative to those asymmetries.

Semiosis organises significance within evaluative activity.

Meaning stabilises that significance within ongoing organisation.

Information describes distinctions that participate in meaningful organisation.

Representation emerges where meaningful relations become sufficiently structured to stand in for absent conditions.

Cognition develops where such organisation becomes increasingly temporally extended and flexible.

Semiosis therefore occupies a pivotal position within biological explanation. It forms a bridge between normativity and cognition, linking the evaluative organisation of persistence to the increasingly sophisticated forms of meaning, information, representation, and anticipation found in living systems.

Without semiosis, differences remain merely physical distinctions. Through semiosis, they acquire biological significance. Once significant, they may function as information, contribute to representation, and support increasingly sophisticated forms of cognition.

APS thus explains not only what semiosis is, but why it matters.

Semiosis is one of the principal organisational processes through which living systems transform physical differences into biologically consequential relations.

The APS triad further clarifies this position.

Within the dimension of agency, semiosis organises significance relative to viability-oriented activity.

Within the dimension of process, semiosis unfolds through time as relations of significance are generated, maintained, transformed, and reconstructed.

Within the dimension of scale, semiosis is distributed across interacting organisational domains ranging from cellular regulation to ecological and evolutionary organisation.

Semiosis therefore belongs intrinsically within biological explanation rather than constituting an independent explanatory layer superimposed upon it.

Why Semiosis Matters

Clarifying semiosis helps resolve several longstanding conceptual difficulties within biology, cognitive science, and philosophy of life.

Many debates concerning meaning, information, representation, cognition, and communication arise because these concepts are treated as though they were independent explanatory foundations. APS instead shows how they emerge from a common organisational basis rooted in viability-oriented persistence.

This perspective helps explain why meaning is neither a mysterious property added to living systems nor a purely subjective phenomenon detached from biological organisation. Meaning emerges because living systems continuously regulate themselves relative to conditions that matter for continuity.

It also clarifies why information cannot serve as the ultimate explanatory foundation for biology. Information becomes biologically relevant only when distinctions already possess significance within evaluative organisation. Semiosis provides the bridge through which physical differences become meaningful aspects of living organisation.

Similarly, APS explains how cognition emerges without requiring a sharp discontinuity between simple and complex living systems. Cognition develops from increasingly sophisticated forms of semiosis rather than appearing as an entirely separate phenomenon.

The organisational interpretation of semiosis also clarifies the relationship between life and meaning. Meaning is not restricted to language, symbols, or conscious interpretation. It is a pervasive feature of living organisation because living systems continuously establish and maintain relations of significance with the conditions of their persistence.

Semiosis therefore serves as one of the key organising links connecting viability, function, normativity, evaluation, meaning, information, cognition, agency, process, and scale. Understanding semiosis helps explain how differences come to matter within living systems and why significance remains indispensable to biological explanation.

Conclusion

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

Yet the significance of semiosis extends beyond any single definition.

Living systems do not merely encounter differences in their environments. They continuously organise, maintain, and reconstruct relations of significance with the conditions upon which their persistence depends. Through semiosis, physical differences become biologically consequential, shaping the regulation of activity, the maintenance of continuity, and the ongoing reorganisation of living systems.

APS therefore grounds semiosis in organised persistence rather than in symbolic representation, abstract information processing, or detached computational formalisms. Meaning emerges because living systems regulate themselves relative to conditions affecting viability. Information becomes biologically relevant because significance is already embedded within evaluative organisation. Cognition develops through increasingly sophisticated and temporally extended forms of semiosis.

Contemporary biosemiotics has highlighted the importance of sign processes and meaning-making within living systems. APS extends this discussion by situating semiosis within a broader explanatory grammar linking viability, function, normativity, evaluation, meaning, information, representation, and cognition. In doing so, it explains not only how significance arises but also why semiosis occupies such a central position within biological explanation.

Viewed through the APS framework, semiosis reveals how physical differences become biologically meaningful, how meaning participates in persistence, and how living systems continuously organise the relations through which life remains possible.

Semiosis emerges from organised persistence and contributes to its maintenance, regulation, and reorganisation. It is therefore neither an optional feature of life nor an independent symbolic domain. It is one of the fundamental organisational processes through which living systems sustain continuity across changing conditions, multiple scales, and evolving futures.

Key Point

Semiosis is the ongoing organisation of organism–environment relations through which differences become biologically significant within viability-oriented evaluative activity sustaining organised persistence.