Within APS, the cognition pathway is a proposed dependency architecture for investigating how increasingly integrated forms of viability-oriented organisation may relate to cognition and its associated capacities.
The pathway can be summarised as:
viability
↓
agency
↓
evaluation
↓
semiosis
↓
meaning
↓
information
↓
representation
↓
cognition
↓
intelligence
↓
consciousness
The arrows represent proposed dependencies rather than demonstrated causal or developmental succession. Individual transitions retain their proposition-specific evidential status and require independent assessment.
The sequence does not describe separate substances, modules, components, levels, or universally necessary explanatory categories. It provides an APS research architecture for distinguishing related organisational questions without treating the pathway as a collectively demonstrated biological progression.
Within this proposed architecture, APS investigates:
- cognition in relation to increasingly integrated viability-oriented organisation;
- representation as potentially downstream rather than necessarily foundational;
- intelligence as specialised rather than universal;
- consciousness as a possible development associated with highly integrated cognition rather than a defining property of life.
These propositions do not have identical evidential status. The pathway therefore organises APS research questions without itself establishing that every proposed dependency or transition has been biologically demonstrated.