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.