1. The APS Definition
Cognition is the organisation of biological significance across time.
In APS, cognition belongs within biological organisation without being identical with life or biological agency. Living systems already regulate activity, respond selectively to changing conditions, maintain their organisation, and alter activity in relation to conditions that support or threaten continued functioning (Di Paolo 2005; Spencer 2026). These capacities establish the biological conditions within which cognition can arise, but they do not by themselves establish cognition.
Cognition concerns the organisation of what matters biologically across time. Biological significance need not remain restricted to an immediate relation between a present condition and a present response. In cognitive organisation, significance can become integrated with retained conditions, present circumstances, and viability-relevant possibilities in ways that affect current activity.
This makes cognition biological without making all biological organisation cognitive.
2. Pre-Cognitive Foundations
Cognition depends upon a sequence of explanatory relations already established within APS:
Biological Agency → Biological Evaluation → Significance → Integration → Cognition
This sequence expresses explanatory dependency rather than chronology, hierarchy, or separate components.
Biological agency is viability-oriented organisational activity. Through Biological Evaluation, conditions acquire differential significance relative to the maintenance and re-establishment of living organisation. Some conditions support continued functioning, others impair it, and still others alter what forms of activity are viable.
Significance is therefore already present before cognition. A living system can encounter conditions that matter biologically without cognitively organising those conditions.
Integration is likewise not sufficient by itself. Living organisation can coordinate multiple processes, retain effects of prior conditions, and regulate activity over time without thereby becoming cognitive. Accounts of adaptivity and biological autonomy already show why viability-sensitive organisation and regulation must be distinguished from stronger cognitive attribution (Di Paolo 2005; Spencer 2026).
The pre-cognitive domain is therefore genuine. Biological Agency, Biological Evaluation, Significance and Integration are not incomplete or lower forms of cognition. They are forms of organisation from which cognition may arise when additional explanatory conditions are satisfied.
3. The Current Boundary Proposal
The canonical definition states what cognition is. A separate question concerns when biological agency should be attributed cognitive organisation.
The current APS boundary proposal is:
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.
This is a provisional boundary proposal, not a second definition of cognition.
Its purpose is to make cognitive attribution empirically discriminating. The problem of identifying a defensible mark of cognition is itself well established, and cannot be resolved simply by redescribing sophisticated biological activity as cognitive (Adams and Garrison 2013).
Temporal extension alone is not sufficient. A regulatory system may retain effects of prior states, anticipate recurrent conditions, or alter present activity in light of earlier perturbations without requiring cognitive explanation. Work distinguishing allostatic regulation from counterfactual cognition illustrates why prospective regulation alone does not settle cognitive status (Corcoran et al. 2020).
Likewise, flexibility, complexity, learning, memory, anticipation, or sensitivity to absent conditions cannot independently establish cognition. Their significance depends on the organisation in which they occur and on whether cognitive explanation identifies dependencies not already explained by an adequate non-cognitive account.
The boundary therefore concerns how biological significance is organised across a temporal field of viability-relevant possibilities, not simply whether the past affects the present or whether behaviour is adaptive.
4. What Cognition Is Not
Cognition should not be identified with life itself. Life does not require cognition; cognition presupposes life.
Cognition is also not synonymous with biological agency. All living systems exhibit biological agency, but agency does not automatically become cognitive simply by being adaptive, evaluative, responsive, or temporally extended.
Nor is cognition reducible to regulation. Homeostatic control, developmental organisation, physiological adjustment, and other forms of viability-sensitive regulation may be sophisticated without being cognitive.
Cognition is not defined by Semiosis, Information, or Representation. Each may become explanatorily useful in particular phenomena, but none constitutes a universal stage through which cognition must develop. Representational explanation, in particular, should be warranted by the phenomenon rather than inferred merely from the use of cognitive vocabulary (Ramsey 2007).
Cognition is not equivalent to Intelligence. Intelligence may involve specialised forms of problem solving, abstraction, behavioural flexibility, or symbolic organisation, but these capacities do not define cognition.
Cognition is also not equivalent to Consciousness or Mind. Consciousness is not required for cognitive attribution, and Mind represents a further organisation of evaluative and cognitive processes rather than the point at which cognition first appears.
These distinctions preserve cognition as a specific biological explanatory category rather than a general label for biological sophistication.
5. Cognition Within APS
Cognition occupies a distinctive explanatory position within the broader APS account of living organisation.
It depends upon Biological Agency, Biological Evaluation, Significance and Integration without being reducible to any of them. It contributes, where present, to the organisation of activity across temporal relations that extend beyond immediate or fixed regulation. Mind in turn depends upon cognition without being identical with every cognitive process.
Cognition need not be restricted to brains or nervous systems. Contemporary biological approaches to cognition provide serious grounds for investigating cognitive organisation beyond conventional neural and human-centred cases (Lyon et al. 2021). Neural organisation provides powerful mechanisms for cognitive activity, but neural implementation is not part of the APS definition.
The absence of neural tissue, however, provides no positive evidence for cognition by itself. Non-neural complexity, signalling, physiological coordination, plasticity, learning-like behaviour, or distributed regulation still require independent explanatory assessment before cognitive attribution is warranted.
Cognitive organisation must be materially implemented within the living system whose activity is being explained. Agency, Process, and Scale provide complementary analytic projections of that organisation: what the living system does, how continuity is maintained despite change, and where persistence is organised across spatial and temporal extents. They are analytic projections rather than components of reality.
Within APS, cognitive attribution therefore remains relative to a specified explanandum and an adequate comparator. The relevant question is not simply whether a system can be described cognitively, but whether cognition explains something about the specified phenomenon that an adequate non-cognitive account does not.
6. Summary
Cognition is the organisation of biological significance across time.
It arises within living organisation but is not identical with life, biological agency, evaluation, regulation, adaptation, or temporal extension. Biological Agency, Biological Evaluation, Significance and Integration provide pre-cognitive foundations from which cognition may arise without themselves constituting cognition.
The current APS boundary proposal holds that 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. This proposal remains provisional and empirically assessable.
Cognition may be neural or non-neural, representational or non-representational, but none of these implementation features defines it. Its distinctive explanatory role lies in the organisation of biological significance across time.