Recent work by Levin and Watson (2025) challenges traditional machine metaphors for living systems by emphasising capacities such as self-construction, adaptive plasticity, collective problem-solving, and goal-directed behaviour. Such work illustrates how far contemporary accounts can depart from the image of organisms as passive machines executing fixed instructions.
APS likewise does not identify living systems with passive, fixed-instruction machines. Organisms regulate, repair, reorganise, develop, and respond to changing conditions through ongoing biological activity. Within APS, these phenomena are investigated in relation to viability-oriented, constraint-closed organisation and the problem of organised persistence.
The comparison should not, however, be converted into a claim that APS supplies a deeper biological explanation than approaches emphasising cognition, intelligence, problem-solving, or other forms of adaptive organisation. Nor does rejection of a simple machine metaphor establish limitations on mechanistic explanation.
APS distinguishes biological agency from cognition. Biological agency is viability-oriented organisational activity, whereas cognition requires further organisational capacities. This distinction allows APS to investigate biological activity without defining life by cognition, intelligence, prediction, or problem-solving.
These are differences in conceptual and explanatory architecture. Whether they produce substantive explanatory gain for APS, for an alternative account, or for neither cannot be determined from the differences themselves. Where the approaches address the same explanatory target, their relative contribution requires target-matched comparison.