The MC2 Project [Machines of Collective Conscience]: A possible walk, up   to Life-like Complexity and Behaviour, from bottom, basic and simple   bio-inspired heuristics - a walk, up into the morphogenesis of information
  Synergy (from the Greek word synergos), broadly defined, refers to combined or co-operative effects produced by two or more elements (parts or individuals). The definition is often associated with the holistic conviction quote that "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts" (Aristotle, in Metaphysics), or the whole cannot exceed the sum of the energies invested in each of its parts (e.g. first law of thermodynamics) even if it is more accurate to say that the functional effects produced by wholes are different from what the parts can produce alone. Synergy is a ubiquitous phenomena in nature and human societies alike. One well know example is provided by the emergence of self-organization in social insects, via direct or indirect interactions. The latter types are more subtle and defined as stigmergy to explain task coordination and regulation in the context of nest reconstruction in termites. An example, could be provided by two individuals, who interact indirectly when one of them modifies the environment and the other responds to the new environment at a later time. In other words, stigmergy could be defined as a particular case of environmental or spatial synergy. The system is purely holistic, and their properties are intrinsically emergent and autocatalytic. On the present work we present a "machine" where there is no precommitment to any particular representational scheme: the desired behaviour is distributed and roughly specified simultaneously among many parts, but there is minimal specification of the mechanism required to generate that behaviour, i.e. the global behaviour evolves from the many relations of multiple simple behaviours. 
Vitorino Ramos