Not Just Biology: Life as a Cognitive System
When we talk about living organisms, species, and evolution, our first instinct is to reach for biological explanations. But life is not just biological—it is fundamentally cognitive.
What separates the living from the non-living is not simply movement, reproduction, or metabolism, but the inherited evolutionary capacity to adjust behavior in response to a changing environment. This adaptive behavior is governed by the need to secure three universal conditions of survival and thriving: Energy, Safety, and Reproduction (ESR).
Now it is time to consider life not just through a biological lens, but as an expression of cognition—one that guides behavior in a dynamically changing environment. From this perspective, organisms are not bundles of reflexes or innate reactions, but entities embedded in continuous cognitive activity.
Life is infused with cognitive processes: recognition, meaning-making, analysis, learning, memory, planning, comparison, communication, manipulation, decision-making, and ultimately—strategic adaptation. These aren’t just human traits. They are evident, in various forms, across the tree of life—from simple bacteria to humans.

Behavior Change – The Only Tool of Survival and Adaptation
The environment is always in flux—never the same from one moment to the next. For any organism to survive, it must constantly adjust to these changes. And across all of life, from bacteria to humans, there is only one available tool to do this: behavior change—in a wider perspective—from shrinking and movement to speech and art.
Not mere action. Not automatic reaction. Not behavior in general—but change in behavior, prompted by meaning-laden cues.
Even so-called “simple” organisms have more than one option in their behavioral toolkit. And doing so requires selecting the most suitable option—at least the best available one in a given context. A bacterium can move or stay. It can consume or avoid. It can reproduce or delay.Even LUCA—the Last Universal Common Ancestor—likely faced the same fundamental dilemma: how to adjust its behavior in response to what truly mattered in its environment—distinguishing self from non-self, energy from non-energy, or when to divide and reproduce.
In even the simplest life, cognition begins with choices.
Behavior change, then, is not reflex—it’s the visible footprint of an invisible cognitive acts.
To navigate this shifting context, an organism must first retrieve meaning from cues, objects, and phenomena related to its energy, safety, and reproduction (ESR). And this meaning is not hardcoded or magical—it is cognized.
This is where many conventional views fall short. It’s tempting to think that most life—particularly non-human organisms—merely acts through reflex or instinct. But even instincts are not void of cognition—quite the opposite.
As early as the 19th century, some of the best minds proposed that animal instincts are not mechanical responses, but analogues of mental activity—compressed forms of cognition shaped by evolution. Thus, Charles Darwin wrote of instinct as “a form of mental activity,” describing it as behavior that is “characteristic of a species and inherited by its members.”
In On the Origin of Species, he observed:
“I will not attempt any definition of instinct. It would be easy to show that several distinct mental actions are commonly embraced by this term.”
“We are concerned only with the diversities of instinct and of the other mental qualities of animals within the same class…”
Ernst Ziegler later expanded Darwin’s view, emphasizing that instinctive behaviors are not only species-wide and developmentally stable, but also free from prior learning—yet still vital to survival (Ziegler, 1910 ). Alexander Jamieson compared animal instincts to human reason, calling them a kind of “natural insight” that fulfils a role similar to reflective thinking in humans (Beer, 2017).
The message is clear: Instincts are compressed cognition. They are not separate from thinking—they are thinking, encoded and refined over evolutionary time. This is why behavior change—not isolated action, mechanical response, or reflexive reaction—is the clearest signal of cognition.
It reflects three internal cognitive acts (3C's):

• Cognize the stimulus.
• Calculate its meaning.
• Choose an adaptive response.

This is behavior change in motion—the S–3C–BC model at work. And it is universal—from LUCA to modern mammals, including humans.

Function Before Organ – Reframing Evolutionary Logic
We’ve grown accustomed to thinking that function follows form. That an organism can see because it has eyes, can fly because it has wings, or can think because it has a brain. But this logic is backwards—it puts the cart before the horse.
In reality, organs emerge to serve a function (Leontiev, 1948). A decision isn’t made because an organism has eyes and sees a predator or prey. A decision is made because the organism recognizes a situation, calculates its meaning (size, distance, speed, direction, etc.), and chooses the most adaptive response from its behavioral repertoire. Perception is a tool in service of action—not the other way around.
This is why we model behavior change not as a direct result of stimuli, but as a cognitive sequence. The S–3C–BC model captures this process:
Stimulus → Cognize → Calculate → Choose → Behavior Change
Some have suggested adding a fourth ‘C’—for Control, referring to the physical execution of a chosen behavior. It’s tempting to expand a model by adding another letter—but conceptual clarity must take precedence over acronym symmetry. But this step lies outside the cognitive act itself. Cognition ends with choice; behavior begins with its implementation. The core model remains: S–3C–BC.

This cognitive sequence applies universally—from LUCA to mammals, from fungi to birds. Any organism that adapts to a changing environment must recognize cues, assess their meaning, and select a behavioral response (behavior change). These are not metaphors—they are cognitive operations, even when expressed as instinct.
Here, we focus specifically on behavioral adaptations to dynamic contexts, not structural adaptations like aromorphosis or idioadaptation. Still, even large-scale biological shifts can be viewed as the evolutionary consequence of successful behavioral strategies playing out over deep time. And this leads to a bold but simple truth:
Adaptation means cognition.
There is no survival, no well-being, no reproduction without it. Of course, this does not imply that all organisms engage in conscious thought like chess players plotting moves. But even the fastest, most automatic behaviors—what we call instincts—are the result of compressed cognition, encoded over millions of generations.
This brings us full circle to Darwin, Ziegler, and Jamieson, who described instinct as a form of mental activity. What was once implicit and reflexive is now made explicit through the 3C framework. And from this foundation, we can begin to chart the architecture of cognition across all life (Frolov, 2021, 2022, 2024).

Mapping the Mind – The Methodology Behind the 5-Task Cognition Model
This methodology is rooted in a simple but powerful question:
What types of stimuli a species must and can recognize in order to survive and thrive?
More specifically:

• What types of stimuli must different species recognize in order to trigger behavior change?
• What types of stimuli can drive behavior change across different forms of life?
• Are there universal categories (domains) of meaning that all organisms must interpret to survive and thrive?

To answer this, we systematically analyzed over 500 species—ranging from bacteria, prokaryotes, unicellular organisms, and fungi, to plants, insects, vertebrates, extinct species, mammals, and modern humans. Our focus was on their natural behaviors, environments, and survival strategies. We weren’t looking for reflexes or isolated reactions—we looked for transitions: those moments when an organism shifts from one behavioral mode to another in response to context (what we call b₁ → b₂).

We focused on species-wide, evolutionarily stable behavioral patterns—those already documented as integral to a species’ lifestyle and confirmed by long-term biological observation.
These behaviour changes and transitions reveal something deeper: not just behavior, but cognition in action. For the full methodology, see Artificial Intelligence and the Architecture of Cognition: Advancing General and Human-Like AI by Sergei A. Frolov (2022, Russian; 2024, English – Amazon Index).
At the core of this approach lies what we call the Cognitive-Adaptive Triplet Formula—often referred to as the "Magic 3x3x3" —

3C → BC (b₁ → b₂) × 3 Units → 3 Key conditions: ESR

This framework captures the fundamental logic of life’s adaptive intelligence. Cognition performs three core acts—Cognize, Calculate, and Choose—to generate a behavior change (a transition from one behavioral strategy to another). This process is conducted on behalf of three behavioral units:

• the main unit — the individual organism itself
• the reproductive unit — e.g., offspring, clutch, partner, etc.
• the survival unit — e.g., nest, burrow, territory, etc.

All three units must secure three key evolutionary conditions of life: Energy, Safety, and Reproduction (ESR). This 3x3x3 framework reveals the deep scaffolding behind behavior change.

The Five Meaning Domains – The Architecture of Cognition
By applying the 3x3x3 framework across hundreds of species, we identified five universal domains within the informational field—distinct clusters of meaning that consistently trigger behavior change.
This flow—from cognition’s internal architecture (3C → b₁ → b₂) to the external structure of environmental meaning—marks a crucial step. It shows not only how behavior change occurs, but where cognition must operate to make it possible.
Each domain represents a specific type of informational challenge that organisms must solve to survive and thrive. These domains are not arbitrary—they reflect distinct channels of meaning that recur across life’s evolutionary tapestry.
Each domain corresponds to:

• A basic adaptive task that must be solved
• A cognitive map used to navigate that type of information
• A mental representation of the world and the self
• A cognitive-behavioral potential load
• A behavior change controller

Table 1: Five Domains vs. Adaptive Tasks, Cognitive Maps, and Mental Representations



Table 2: Five Domains vs. Adaptive Tasks, and Behavior Change Controllers (Cognitive-Behavioral Potentials)



Five Basic Cognitive-Behavioral Structures (BCBS)
These five domains are not merely conceptual—they trace the deep logic of evolution itself, both biological and cognitive. At critical moments in evolutionary history, life faced extreme, often existential adaptive bottlenecks—moments that forced a choice: extinction, or the invention of entirely new cognitive strategies.

Over time, these pressures gave rise to five universal modules—what we call the Basic Cognitive-Behavioral Structures (BCBS). These structures represent the foundational architecture of cognition across life, each aligned with a core adaptive task and its corresponding domain of meaning:

• Binary (1st BCBS): Safe vs. unsafe, yes/no, presence/absence
• Elementary (2nd BCBS): Object tracking, direct interaction with motile entities
• Manipulatory (3rd BCBS): Influence, deception, context shaping
• Combinatory (4th BCBS): Social coordination, group dynamics, role navigation
• Symbolic-Sapient (5th BCBS): Abstract thinking, meta-reasoning, symbolic systems

We call these cognitive-behavioral structures basic or universal not because they are simple, but because they form the irreducible foundation of cognition across life. Each task defines a threshold that cannot be bypassed or broken down further without losing adaptive function. Every species belongs to one of five groups, classified by the number of these tasks they must solve to survive.

These structures emerged sequentially over evolutionary time, building layer by layer as species developed the capacity to interpret and act upon increasingly complex informational flows.
Together, these structures, domains, and tasks define:

• Five evolutionary tracks of cognitive-behavioral development
• Five major species groups, classified by the number of adaptive tasks they are capable of addressing
• The emergence of five Basic Cognitive-Behavioral Structures (BCBS)—the internal architecture of cognition across life, comprised of interconnected domains, tasks, cognitive maps, mental representations, cognitive-behavioral loads, and controllers

From Domain to Design: Five Tracks of Cognitive Evolution
This framework is more than a classification system—it is a map of life’s cognitive design.
Each evolutionary breakthrough marked a leap in cognitive architecture—expanding behavioral range, cognitive-behavioral load, symbolic capacity, and social complexity.
As life evolved, organisms faced increasingly complex adaptive challenges (tasks) - see Figure “Five Evolutionary Tracks of Cognition”. This diagram traces the emergence of five universal Basic Cognitive-Behavioral Structures (BCBS)—each aligned with a new domain of meaning and a corresponding behavioral task. From the binary cognition of LUCA to symbolic reasoning in humans, each track represents an evolutionary leap in how organisms interpret their world and adjust behavior.

Figure: Five Evolutionary Tracks of Cognition

Together, these five tracks form the architecture of life’s cognition—and of human cognition itself—a model that unifies evolution, cognition, and behavior change across all species. With this architecture now in place, we are equipped to explore its implications for the future—both biological and artificial.

Cognition Is Evolution’s Engine

For centuries, biology has framed life through the lens of molecules, mutations, and anatomy. But what if life’s deepest signature isn’t structure—it’s strategy? Not just muscle and movement, but meaning and choice.
This 5-task model offers a paradigm shift: a unified framework that reveals cognition as life’s core evolutionary mechanism. By identifying five universal adaptive tasks—each tied to a distinct informational domain—this model traces how organisms, from LUCA to Homo sapiens, have evolved by recognizing meaning and changing behavior accordingly.
This is not cognition as we’ve narrowly defined it—confined to brains, language, or higher mammals. This is cognition as evolution’s engine: the ability to detect patterns, assess risks and opportunities, and select behavioral solutions (behavior change) that improve survival and thriving.
Behavior change—not reflex, not instinct, not simple reaction—becomes the visible trace of this invisible decision-making process.
Through this lens, life reveals itself as an evolving cognitive-behavioral system. Species evolve not merely through genetic inheritance, but through adaptive intelligence—the capacity to recognize and solve recurring tasks within one or more of five universal domains of meaning.
Not all organisms address all five domains. Instead, life is stratified into five major groups of species, each defined by the number of basic cognitive tasks its members must solve to survive and thrive. The complexity of an organism’s cognitive architecture reflects the breadth of meaning it must navigate—not a universal standard, but a tailored evolutionary demand.
This model of five tasks sees all living beings—without exception—as cognitive-behavioral systems. Each builds its survival on a specific set of adaptive tasks, tuned to its evolutionary context.
By viewing life through this lens, we move closer to understanding cognition not as a human anomaly, but as a universal evolutionary language—a logic older than language itself.