Compositionality has been considered as an essential property of human cognition. It looks as if meanings of sentences were derived from compositions of words and complex human acts were generated from compositions of reusable behavior primitives. However, if we look at our everyday behaviors, most of them seem to be generated in more "organic" ways rather than in computational ways of, as like, manipulating concrete objects. Our behaviors are quite context-dependent, surprisingly flexible and emergent while being robust and fluent.
Now, our synthetic robotics studies for two decades are ready to show that this aspect of "organic" compositionality in cognitive behaviors have resulted from self-organization processes of neuro-dynamic systems that have direct coupling with the sensory-motor reality. Ultimately, our approaches are extended to elucidate immanent properties of "symbols", "self" and "time", through the triangular researches on neuroscience, dynamical systems and phenomenology.