1. A system for flexible cognitive perception and action selection, the system comprising: one or more processors and a non-volatile memory having instructions therein such that when the instructions are executed by the one or more processors, the one or more processors perform operations of: filtering and tagging of input data from an external environment by a pre-processing recognition module, resulting in at least one tagged percept; storing the at least one tagged percept and associating the tagged percept with at least one knowledge frame based on shared descriptors between the at least one tagged percept and the knowledge frame by a frame memory module, resulting in an activated knowledge frame; supplying a utility rating to each activated knowledge frame based on a set of reward values by an evaluation module; sorting and comparing the activated knowledge frames, and evaluating the activated knowledge frames for a goodness of fit between the utility ratings of the activated knowledge frames and the input data by a hypothesis module; determining, with the hypothesis module, a best hypothesis for a current situation in the external environment based on a current highest rated activated knowledge frame; and wherein the pre-processing recognition module performs operations of: extracting, and identifying a set of salient features in the input data; filtering the set of salient features for relevancy based on similarity to the current highest rated activated knowledge frame; and semantically tagging percepts.