Embodied Cognitive Morphogenesis as a Route to Intelligent Systems

The embryological view of development is that coordinated gene expression, cellular physics, and migration provides the basis for phenotypic complexity. This stands in contrast to the prevailing view of embodied cognition, which claims that informational feedback between organisms and their environment is key to the emergence of intelligent behaviors. We aim to unite these two perspectives as embodied cognitive morphogenesis, in which morphogenetic symmetry-breaking produces specialized organismal subsystems which serve as a substrate for the emergence of autonomous behaviors. As embodied cognitive morphogenesis produces fluctuating phenotypic asymmetry and the emergence of information processing subsystems, we observe three distinct properties: acquisition, generativity, and transformation. Utilizing a generic organismal agent, such properties are captured through models such as tensegrity networks, differentiation trees, and embodied hypernetworks, providing a means to identify the context of various symmetry-breaking events in developmental time. Related concepts that help us define this phenotype further include concepts such as modularity, homeostasis, and 4E (embodied, enactive, embedded, and extended) cognition. We conclude by considering these autonomous developmental systems as a process called connectogenesis, connecting various parts of the emerged phenotype into an approach useful for the analysis of organisms and the design of bio-inspired computational agents.