A Formal Model Of Cognitive Synergy

"Cognitive synergy"- a dynamic in which multiple cognitive processes, cooperating to control the same cognitive system, assist each other in overcoming bottlenecks encountered during their internal processing. - has been posited as a key feature of real-world general intelligence, and has been used explicitly in the design of the OpenCog cognitive architecture. Here category theory and related concepts are used to give a formalization of the cognitive synergy concept. Cognitive synergy is proposed to correspond to a certain inequality regarding the relative costs of different paths through certain commutation diagrams. Applications of this notion of cognitive synergy to particular cognitive phenomena, and specific cognitive processes in the PrimeAGI design, are discussed.