A synergistic view of autonomous cognitive systems

As advances in neuroscience, cognitive science and robotics continue to elucidate the physical basis of autonomous behavior in animals, many deep questions remain open, including: What sort of system can evolve and support perception, cognition and action? What general principles or attributes can be defined for such a system? If so, how do these principles and attributes make complex behavior possible? In this paper, we report on the early stages of research to address these questions from a complex systems and systems biology perspective. We argue that flexible modularity and hierarchical interaction of synergies in a modular system are fundamental to the possibility of cognition. We describe a minimal model comprising three interacting core subsystems that embodies the principles of flexible modularity and synergy. Finally, we present a simple neural model of action generation based on the principles of interacting modular synergies.