Conventional framing
Process is often understood as a sequence of events or changes that occur within or to a system, typically treated as secondary to the structures that undergo change. In such accounts, structures are primary and processes describe what happens to them over time.
APS reframing
APS treats process as constitutive rather than derivative. Living systems are not static structures that undergo change, but ongoing organisations of activity that continuously produce and maintain their own conditions of existence.
Process is the dynamic organisation of constraint-closed activity through which viability is sustained across time and scale. It is inseparable from organisation: constraints shape activity, and activity sustains those constraints.
Agency, process, and scale are analytically distinguishable but ontologically co-constitutive dimensions of this organisation. Agency expresses viability-oriented activity, process enacts that organisation through time, and scale reflects its spatiotemporal coordination.
Process is therefore not an effect of life, but the continuous activity through which viability-oriented organisation is enacted.
Key Point
Process is not what happens to life — it is the ongoing activity through which life exists and persists.