Why can't we speed up the acquisition of conservation? Because simulations of mature agencies requre too many special rules, and children are unable to manage this complexity. (NB: Again, here is the role of a maturing control structure -- to efficiently manage such complexity).
Minsky notes that conflict resolution is much more difficult than it has appeared in his book to this point, because he has been concentrating on simple examples. He hints that later in the book he will complement his notion of competition among agents with the notion of cooperative processing.
(NB: One of his key attacks on connectionism has been problems with scaling up (see, for instance, the epilogue in the 1988 edition of Perceptrons. One wonders whether conflict resolution methods that have been proposed to this point will scale up to deal with more complex situations!)
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