Life, Intelligence, and Cognition: The Living Triad and the Artificial Corollary

Contemporary research in psychology, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence tends to identifyintelligence with measurable cognitive performance — an equation this paper rejects. Drawing onAristotelian and Peircean resources, and building on the autopoietic and biosemiotic traditions, Ipropose a distinction between intelligence and cognition that situates both within a triadic frameworkof the living. Life, intelligence, and cognition are not separate items but interdependent dimensionsof a single living being. On the proposed account, life is condition — the substantial standing of anindividuated subject, in a determinate form and at a determinate here and now; intelligence is themodus essendi of that subject as a being in change, traversing the passage from potency to act;cognition is life as organisation under another description, the organised yield through which a livingbeing coordinates with its environment. The mediating relation, with the structure of a PeirceanThirdness, is a process of change in which autopoietic self-maintenance and biosemiotic sensemakingform a single integrated operation. This process — negentropy, in a stipulated philosophicalsemioticsense — converts environmental indeterminacy into meaningful order for a subject.From this architecture follows a reformed notion of agency-as-subjectiveness, distinguishable fromthe symmetric agency of actor-network theory and adjacent accounts. The artificial case appears as acorollary. Contemporary AI does not reproduce life as organisation in the full autopoietic sense; itreproduces an externalised abstraction of selected higher-order cognitive capacities. The structurethat results is not a defective version of the living triad but a different kind of organisation, whoseform cannot be specified by subtracting sides from ours. I call this structural configuration jaggedintelligence. The paper closes by drawing the implications of this redescription for the opacity ofadvanced artificial systems and for the problem of control.