There must be a mechanism to select one goal from a set of competing goals. Minsky suggests a mechanism called cross-exclusion for this task; cross-exclusion is essentially a winner-take-all network of connections among agents. This kind of network can instantiate the principles of noncompromise. "Cross-exclusion groups can also be used to construct short-term memory units. Whenever we force one agent of such a group into activity, even for a moment, it will reman active (and theohters will remain suppressed) until the situation is changed by some other storng external influence."
(NB: This is a very important architectural principle, with lots of history -- see for example Grossberg's work. Note that in such a system, there must be recurrent processing of signals from one agent to another.)
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