Man's freedom to focus or not to focus, to think or not to think, is a unique kind of choice that must be
distinguished from any other category of choice. It must be distinguished from the decision to think about a
particular subject: what a man thinks about, in any given case, depends on his values, interests, knowledge, and
context. It must be distinguished from the decision to perform a particular physical action, which again depends on
a man's values, interests, knowledge, and context. These decisions involve causal antecedents of a kind which the
choice to focus does not.
The primary choice to focus, to set one's mind to the purpose of cognitive integration, is causally irreducible: it is
the highest regulator in the mental system; it is subject to man's direct, volitional control. In relation to it, all other
choices and decisions are subregulators.
The capacity of volitional choice presupposes, of course, a normal brain. A condition of disease can render any
human faculty inoperative. But this analysis assumes an intact, normally functioning brain and nervous system.
To recognize that man is free to think or not to think is to recognize that, in a given situation, a man is able to think
and he is able to refrain from thinking. The choice to think (not the process of thinking, but the choice to think) and
the process of focusing his mind are an indivisible action, of which man is the causal agent.
The choice to focus one's mind is a primary, just as the value sought, awareness, is a primary. It is awareness that
makes any other values possible, not any other values that antecede and make awareness possible. Awareness is the
starting-point and precondition of goal-directed (value-directed) human action—not just another goal or value
along the way, as it were. The decision to focus one's mind (to value awareness and make it one's goal) or not to
focus, is a basic choice that cannot be reduced further.
It must be stressed that volition pertains, specifically, to the conceptual level of awareness. A child encounters the
need of cognitive self-regulation when and as he begins to move from the perceptual to the conceptual level, when
and as he learns to abstract, to classify, to grasp principles, to reason explicitly. So long as he functions on the
sensory-perceptual level, he experiences cognition as an effortless process. But when he begins to conceptualize, he
is confronted by the fact that this new form of awareness entails mental work, that it requires an effort, that he must