From Life to Cognition, the evolution of agency and the emergence of mental life.

What makes a system cognitive? Both the information processing and the
dynamicist paradigms in cognitive science can be shown to be too
liberal on the characterisation of cognitive systems and their
demarcation from the non-cognitive. Whereas informational processes
spread over the realm of living systems and technological artifacts,
dynamical systems are ubiquitous in the physical realm. The question
of the origins and minimal characterisation of living system has
faced similar problems and provides a departure point towards
increasingly complex forms of living agency towards cognition. The
evolution of cognition faced a number of problems and major
transitions from the appearance of unicellular motility to
multicellularity, from the origin of the nervous system to the
appearance of bilateral symmetry and mechanically articulated
bodies.... until the appearance of encephalized and corticalized
systems whose agential capacities are the result of a developmental
process of self-monitored behavioural bootstrapping. Under certain
body and environmental conditions the nervous system will evolve so
as to make possible more plastic, flexible and integrated (i.e. more
complex) behaviour. In turn, complex behaviour requires the emergence
of a new level of normativity and functionality in living beings,
that provided by the developmental history of neural organisation,
leading to a progressive autonomy of sensorimotor interactions. In
analogy with the far from equilibrium and self-sustained organisation
of living metabolic organisation the new form of neurodynamic
organisation found in higher animals can be called "Mental Life". The
mind has a life of its own: a self-maintaining dynamic organisation
that remains open to its world in order to maintain its coherency and
identity. We defend that the appearance of an open process of
sensorimotor interactions sustained by the nervous system and
normatively regulated by its bioregulatory embodiment (an emotional
world) gives rise to cognitive phenomena, embedded on but distinct
from biological organisation.