Significance identifies what matters to an organism. Integration organises those significant concerns into coherent functional patterns. Neither process should be mistaken for conscious thought.
In APS, integration is the process through which significant relations become organised into coherent functional wholes capable of coordinated activity. It allows multiple concerns, needs, opportunities, risks, and constraints to be related to one another within a larger organisational context.
Integration therefore solves a problem of coherence rather than a problem of consciousness. It enables living systems to coordinate what matters, but it does not by itself generate awareness, subjective experience, or reflective thought.
Conscious thought, where it exists, depends upon many additional organisational achievements, including cognition, mind, selfhood, and reflective agency. Integration is a necessary bridge within this pathway, but it is not identical with mind.
In APS, integration organises significance. Cognition uses organised significance. Mind emerges from increasingly coherent forms of cognitive organisation.