The Layered Autopoiesis of Life-Cognition: Information, Agency, and Self

At the heart of contemporary enactive and autopoietic thought lies a simple generative insight: cognition = life. This idea, first formulated by Maturana and Varela (1980) and reaffirmed by (Stewart, 1996), asserts that the very processes that allow living systems to maintain themselves are also the roots of their “knowing”. To live is to “know”— where “to know” does not primarily mean abstract conceptual knowledge, but rather a spectrum starting with “to feel”, to be affected, to experience. This is akin to the deeper meaning of cogito in Descartes' cogito ergo sum: an act of experiencing oneself as a living, sensing, and responding being. For simple life forms, this “knowing” is feeling — a direct, embodied, self-sustaining sensitivity to difference, both internal and external.This broader sense of knowing — starting evolutionarily as intrinsic sensitivity, as felt presence, as an organism's way of being affected by and responding to the world — reorients our understanding of cognition. It reminds us that cognition is not confined to intellectual operations or symbolic representation. Rather, it has its roots in the very act of living: in the regulation of boundaries, the modulation of internal states, the navigation of viability conditions. In many languages, the verb 'to know' overlaps with 'to feel' or 'to perceive,' indicating a deeper, pre-reflective foundation to all knowing.From this foundation of “knowing”, we build a layered account of how life processes information, expresses agency, and constitutes identity. Each level of biological and cognitive complexity builds upon the previous, subsuming earlier forms while generating new modes of interaction and selfhood. This essay outlines five such levels of organization, integrating insights from autopoiesis, information theory, systems thinking, and philosophy of mind.