Biological explanation is destabilised when agency, cognition, and sentience are treated as interchangeable. In APS, these refer to distinct organisational features.
Agency is the viability-oriented, constraint-closed activity through which a system sustains its own persistence. Cognition is the evaluation of environmental differences relative to viability within that organisation. Neither requires representation, intention, or consciousness.
Sentience, by contrast, refers to subjective experience and is not entailed by agency or cognition. The presence of viability-oriented regulation and evaluation does not imply awareness or feeling. Living systems can act, regulate, and evaluate without experiencing.
Maintaining this distinction preserves the structure of biological explanation. It allows continuity between life and mind without collapsing organisation into experience or reducing living systems to passive mechanism.
Key Point. Agency and cognition are intrinsic to viability-oriented organisation; sentience is not. Confusing them collapses biological organisation into subjective experience.