Biological regulation is indispensable to life. Living systems continually coordinate activity in ways that maintain viable organisation under changing conditions. Regulation can be flexible, history-dependent, anticipatory, context-sensitive, and highly complex.
None of these properties by itself establishes cognition.
APS therefore does not identify cognition with regulation, adaptive success, or viability relevance. The proposed distinction is more demanding:
Biological agency becomes cognitive when integrated biological significance modulates activity across a temporal field of viability-relevant possibilities in ways not exhausted by immediate or fixed regulation.
This is a proposed biological discriminator, not a consequence guaranteed by APS architecture. A cognitive interpretation must demonstrate explanatory work beyond an adequate non-cognitive regulatory account of the same phenomenon.
The test is comparative: cognition should be attributed only where the evidence warrants the additional organisational dependency.