Significance identifies viability-relevant relations. Integration is the organisation of what matters into functional unity.
Neither should be confused with conscious thought.
Integration concerns the coordination of significant relations so that they can contribute coherently to organised activity. Internal conditions can be related to environmental circumstances, competing demands can be coordinated, and multiple viability-relevant relations can participate in a functional whole.
This organisation may be biologically elaborate without satisfying the APS criterion for cognition.
In APS, cognition requires more than integration. 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.
Integration therefore does not by itself establish cognition, conscious thought, or phenomenal experience.
Nor should the explanatory relation among Integration, Cognition, Mind, Selfhood, and Reflective Agency be read as proof of a universal developmental or evolutionary sequence. The APS architecture specifies conceptual and explanatory dependencies. Claims of material, causal, developmental, or evolutionary dependency require independent empirical warrant.
Mind identifies a further explanandum: integrated evaluative cognitive processes maintaining a coherent self–world relation.
Phenomenal consciousness remains different again. Showing that significant relations are integrated, or even that they participate in cognition, does not explain why there should be something it is like to instantiate that organisation.
Integration organises what matters. It is neither cognition nor conscious thought by itself.