6 ideas
A living system is a network of processes that continuously produces the very components that make up that network, including the boundary that separates it from its environment. What defines life is this self-producing organization, not any particular material or function. As long as the organization is conserved the system lives, and when it breaks down the system dies.
Cognition is not the representation of an outside world. It is effective action that lets a living being keep existing in its environment. Every living system, even a bacterium, knows in this sense, so to live is to know and to know is to live.
An organism and its environment trigger changes in each other through repeated interactions, but neither determines or instructs the other. Over time their structures drift together in a congruent way while each keeps its own organization. This explains adaptation without assuming that information is transferred from the world into the organism.
What happens to a system when something acts on it is determined by the system's own structure, not by the outside agent. An external event can only trigger a change, and the system's structure specifies which changes are possible. Seen this way, a teacher, a signal, or a stimulus never installs a result directly. It only perturbs a system that responds according to its own makeup.
When a frog's eye is surgically rotated 180 degrees and allowed to heal, the frog strikes at prey in the opposite direction from where the prey actually is. It never corrects this error, however many times it misses. This shows that the nervous system does not read an objective external space. Behavior comes from internal correlations of neural activity, and the frog is not mapping a world.
Language is not the transmission of information between minds. It is a recursive coordination of behavior, meaning coordinations of the ways we coordinate actions with each other. Observers, self-consciousness, and a shared world of described objects arise only inside this social languaging, which makes human knowledge a collective product that we bring forth together.