ACADEMIA Letters Life and cognition. A postscript Arturo Carsetti For Monod, the living being is a teleonomic object endowed with a project realized in its struc- ture and through the infuence of its performances, an object which reproduces itself invariant. Teleonomy, autonomous morphogenesis and, invariance are, therefore, the characteristics of this object whose expression and realization is its own structure. But for each expression of structure, there is necessarily a defnite amount of information associated with it. An ex- pressed information, in turn, presupposes a “broadcaster”, a broadcaster which, for Monod, is an object identical to the frst according to the laws of invariance. The teleonomic project is nothing other than the transmission of the content of invariance defned, precisely, as that quantity of information that, transmitted from one generation to another, ensures the conserva- tion of the structure. This is the kingdom of Necessity in which Chance comes to creep in, thus seizing, each time, the opportunity for adequate selection. It is in such a frame of reference that Nature fnally appears to Monod (in accordance with his reinterpretation of Democritus) as a tinkerer characterized by the presence of precise principles of self-organization (1). However, while Monod was obliged to incorporate his brilliant intuitions into the frame- work of frst-order cybernetics and a theory of information with an exclusively syntactic char- acter such as that defned by Shannon, research advances in recent decades have led not only to the defnition of a second-order Cybernetics but also to an exploration of the boundaries of semantic information. As H. Atlan states, on a biological level “the function self-organizes together with its meaning”. Hence the need to refer to a conceptual theory of complexity and a theory of self-organization characterized in an intentional sense. There is also a need to introduce, at the genetic level, a distinction between coder and ruler as well as the opportunity to defne a real software space for natural evolution. The recourse to non-standard model the- ory, the opening to a new general semantics, and the innovative defnition of the relationship between coder and ruler can be considered, today, among the most powerful theoretical tools Academia Letters, August 2021 Corresponding Author: Arturo Carsetti, a.carsetti@gmail.com Citation: Carsetti, A. (2021). Life and cognition. A postscript. Academia Letters, Article 2648. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL2648. 1 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0