Questions Arising from a Proto-Neural Cognitive Architecture

A neural cognitive architecture would be an architecture based on simulated neurons, that provided a set of mechanisms for all cognitive behaviour. Moreover, this would be compatible with biological neural behaviour. As a result, such architectures can both form the basis of a fully-fledged AI and help to explain how cognition emerges from a collection of neurons in the human brain. The development of such a neural cognitive architecture is in its infancy, but a proto-architecture in the form of behaving agents entirely based on simulated neurons is described. These agents take natural language commands, view the environment, plan and act. The development of these agents has led to a series of questions that need to be addressed to advance the development of neural cognitive architectures. These questions include long posed ones where progress has been made, such as the binding and symbol grounding problems; issues about biological architectures including neural models and brain topology; issues of emergent behaviour such as short and long-term Cell Assembly dynamics; and issues of learning such as the stability-plasticity dilemma. These questions can act as a road map for the development of neural cognitive architectures and AIs based on them.