Cognition & Mind

APS_MC develops an APS account of cognition as the evaluation of environmental differences relative to viability within constraint-closed biological organisation, showing how meaning and cognition arise as distributed features of living systems rather than as capacities confined to nervous systems.

Biological systems are often described as goal-directed, from cellular repair processes to organismal behaviour. Contemporary frameworks attempt to formalise this notion as an empirically testable property of organised systems. However, such approaches risk importing mentalistic assumptions or extending goal language beyond its explanatory scope. The Agency–Process–Scale (APS) framework resolves this by reinterpreting goal-directedness in strictly biological terms. In APS, goal-directedness is not the pursuit of internally represented ends but the viability-oriented biological organisation of activity within constraint-closed systems. More precisely, it describes the regulation of activity through which biological purpose—orientation toward continued viability—is enacted and realised in function. This article clarifies how biological “goals” can be understood without mentalism, grounding teleological language in the dynamics of persistence.

This article clarifies why APS does not equate life with sentience, and explains how biological agency, normativity, and cognition can be present without subjective experience.

Semiosis in APS is the enactment of differences that matter to a system’s continued viability.

This research stream explores cognition as a biologically grounded, viability-oriented process distributed across living systems.