In APS, cognition does not mean thought, consciousness, or representation. It refers to a developed mode of biological organisation that emerges from, but is not equivalent to, the more general evaluative activity characteristic of living systems.
All living systems exhibit biological agency and Biological Evaluation. Through Biological Evaluation, agency generates significance by differentiating among conditions according to their consequences for viability. Cognition requires a further organisational transition: biological significance must become integrated across time so that present activity is modulated in relation to viability-relevant possibilities extending beyond the immediate condition.
APS therefore uses the following threshold:
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.
In compact form:
Cognition is the organisation of biological significance across time.
This formulation distinguishes cognition from immediate responsiveness without requiring subjective awareness. A living system may respond selectively and flexibly to viability-relevant conditions without thereby being cognitive. The cognitive threshold is crossed only where biological significance is sufficiently integrated and temporally extended for activity to be modulated in relation to possibilities that are not reducible to an immediate stimulus or fixed regulatory response.
More elaborated forms of cognition may display integration among several viability-relevant conditions, context-sensitive modulation, learning and memory, and increasing temporal or counterfactual depth. Present activity may then reflect not only current conditions but past relations and viability-relevant possibilities that could obtain under alternative circumstances. The material processes and constraints supporting such organisation may themselves be spatially distributed, but their distribution does not imply interaction among scales; Scale identifies the spatial and temporal extent required to explain the relevant cognitive organisation.
Organism–environment coupling can provide material conditions and differences that become significant through Biological Evaluation, and such relations can therefore contribute to cognitive explananda. Coupling, ecological embeddedness, responsiveness, behavioural flexibility, biological significance, or semiosis do not by themselves establish cognition. Cognition requires the integration of biological significance across a temporally extended field of viability-relevant possibilities.
Cognition is therefore not a separate layer added to life. It is a developed mode of evaluative biological organisation arising within living systems whose activity has acquired sufficient integration and temporal depth. It does not require consciousness, subjective awareness, or reflective thought.