Making new ideas means keeping more than one idea in mind at once. Lots of ideas, if individual features of concepts are explicitly represented (NB: This form of representation reminds me of Treisman's feature maps.) Therefore, we can talk of total or partial mental states.
To do this, Minsky introduces a key simplification -- the notion that agents are binary (on or off). From this, "A `total state' of mind is a list that specifies which agents are active and which are quiet at a certain moment. A `partial state' of mind merely specifies that certain agents are active but does not say which other agents are quiet." Partial states are therefore incomplete descriptions, and because of this we can validly talk about a person being in more than one partial mental state at the same time. Interestingly, conflicts will arise here when agents within divisions (i.e., as if within same kind of feature map) are activated simultaneously (compare "small white ball" to conflict in "round square").
This really does bring to my mind parallels with Treisman's notion of visual attention.
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