Santiago School proposes ‘autopoiesis’, or self-generating networks in a Living System, which undergoes continuous changes while maintaining its web-like interconnections. Each of the components of the structural organization continually create and modify one another.

• Self renewal is on-going and continuous
• New structures emerge and are assimilated into the structural organization; often with every connection to the environment
• The system is autonomous; the environment only triggers the expressions, it does not direct them; or perhaps they may co-participate through a larger system
• The resulting behavior can be unique, novel or unpredictable
• Structural coupling between organism and environment allows for systematic ‘learning’-changes in structure which further alter the nature of the coupling

Sequences of the co-structuration accumulate over time into unique pathways of individual history. Living Structures always bear a record of their developmental evolution. As C. Wright Mills has said, every social agent is acting within her environment according to her personal history and the affordances of the time period of society at that stage of its development.

Once the 4th phase of Brain Evolution is operational, the structure of the emergent autonomy is such that the strange loop of transcendence applies (called the 5th Mentation). Coupled co-participation benefits mutually from this transcendental attractor.

Once the strange attractor of entangled transcendence is achieved, the Whole System becomes Holarchic. While the organism retains autonomy (free will) over its own ‘self determined’ patterns of connectivity, it also retains the key to its own cognition (and thus its advancement) vis-a-vis whatever aspects of the transcendental attractor it responds to (alongside consequent entanglement). Should the organism select cooperative mutuality, it becomes an assimilated symbiont. Together the Greater System, the Strange Attractor, and the Symbiont create a new world. This process is Cognition.

Cognition then is not a representation within the brain of some external reality but the process of continual co-creation of that reality. It involves not just the observation of coming forth (appearance, ala Quantum Witness)but active participation in the bringing forth (poiesis). Each act of coupled cognition brings forth an autonomous world. Modally, entire universes are brought forth at every instance.

Every aspect of living structure is involved in symbiotic cognition (conjugation), not just the brain and nervous system but all the organs and their tissues and the molecules are coupled to the system as cooperative information. Matter may be seen as internal semiotics with which transcendental assimilation cognifies.