Why a One-Page Structure?
APS develops a general account of life and biological explanation across multiple articles and conceptual layers.
This page provides a compressed view. It shows, in a single structure, how APS organises biological explanation—from the most basic conditions of life to the emergence of cognition.
The Core Structure
APS explanation proceeds through the following sequence:
Viability → Evaluation → Semiosis → Integration → Temporal Depth → Cognition
This is not a temporal process but an explanatory order. Each term identifies a distinct aspect of biological organisation, and each depends on those before it.
Viability
APS begins with viability.
Living systems are defined by their ability to sustain the conditions required for their own persistence. This is an ongoing activity: systems must continuously regulate themselves in relation to changing conditions.
This activity is biological agency.
Evaluation
Because a system must persist, its activity is not neutral.
Some states and processes support continued existence, while others undermine it. Evaluation is the differential modulation of activity in relation to these conditions.
All living systems exhibit evaluation. It is the most basic asymmetry in biological organisation.
Semiosis
Evaluation structures what matters.
Differences in the environment become significant for a system when they affect its viability. Semiosis is the organisation of these differences as meaningful within the system’s activity.
Semiosis is not representation. It is the structuring of relevance.
Integration
Living systems are not collections of independent processes.
Their activity is coordinated across multiple components, spatial scales, and timescales. Integration refers to the organisation of this coordination.
Through integration, evaluation is organised at the scale of the system as a whole.
Temporal Depth
In more complex systems, regulation extends beyond the immediate present.
Activity may be stabilised across time, influenced by prior states, or structured in relation to possible or anticipated conditions. This introduces temporal depth into organisation.
Evaluation is no longer tied only to immediate conditions, but to extended patterns of activity.
Cognition
Cognition arises when evaluative activity becomes sufficiently integrated and temporally extended.
It is not the starting point of biological organisation, but a development within it. Not all living systems are cognitive, but all cognitive systems depend on the underlying structure described above.
Cognition is therefore the structured, temporally extended organisation of evaluative activity.
What This Structure Explains
This sequence clarifies how APS organises biological explanation.
It shows:
- why life is defined by viability rather than mechanism, information, or optimisation
- how normativity arises from organisation rather than representation
- how cognition depends on, but is not identical to, more basic biological processes
It also explains why many existing frameworks misidentify their explanatory starting point: they begin with more organized phenomena such as cognition, information, or control, rather than with viability-oriented organisation.
These ideas are broadly aligned with process and autonomy approaches in theoretical biology and philosophy of biology (Varela et al. 1991; Moreno & Mossio 2015; Montévil & Mossio 2015; Nicholson & Dupré 2018).
How to Use This Page
This page is not a replacement for the detailed articles in APS.
It is a guide.
Each term in the sequence is developed elsewhere on the site, where its full conceptual and empirical role is explained. Here, the aim is simply to show how the pieces fit together.
Key Point
APS explains life by starting from viability-oriented organisation and showing how evaluation, semiosis, integration, and temporal depth give rise to cognition as a structured development within living systems.