one fundamental question about action selection is whether it is really a problem at all for an agent, or whether it is just a description of an emergent property of an intelligent agent's behavior. however, if we consider how we are going to build an intelligent agent, then it becomes apparent there must be "some" mechanism for action selection. this mechanism may be highly distributed (as in the case of distributed organisms such as social insect colonies or slime mold) or it may be a special-purpose module.