In man, both life and consciousness reach their most highly developed form. Man, who shares with animals the
sensory-perceptual mode of consciousness, goes beyond it to the conceptual mode to the level of abstractions,
principles, explicit reasoning, and self-consciousness. Unlike animals, man has the ability to be explicitly aware of
his own mental activities, to question their validity, to judge them critically, to alter or correct them. Man is not
rational automatically; he is aware of the fact that his mental processes may be appropriate or inappropriate to the
task of apprehending reality; his mental processes are not, to him, an unalterable given. In addition to the two
previous forms of self-regulating activity, man exhibits a third: the power to regulate the action of his own
consciousness.
In one crucial respect, the nature of this regulatory activity differs radically from the two previous ones.
On the vegetative and conscious-behavioral levels, the self-regulation is "wired in" to the system. A living
organism is a complex integrate of hierarchically organized structures and functions. The various components are
controlled in part by their own regulators and in part by regulators on higher levels of the hierarchy. For example,
the rhythm of the heart is directly under the control of the heart's own "pacemaker" system; the pacemaker system
is regulated by the autonomic nervous system and by hormones; these are regulated by centers in the brain. The
ultimate regulative principle, inherent in and controlling the entire system of subregulators, from the nervous
system to the heart down to the internal action of a single cell, is, clearly, the life of the organism, i.e., the
requirements of the organism's survival. The organism's life is the implicit standard or goal that provides the
integrating principle of the organism's internal actions. This ultimate regulator is "programmed" into the organism
by nature, so to speak, as are all the subregulators; the organism has no choice in the matter.
Just as, on the vegetative level, the specific nature of the self-regulation, the controlling and integrating principle, is
"wired in" to the system—so, in a different form, this is equally true of the conscious-behavioral level in animals.
The ultimate standard and goal, the animal's life, is biologically "programmed"—through the animal's sensory-
perceptual apparatus and its pleasure-pain mechanism—to regulate its behavior.