At this secondary level, the mind's responsibility is to be flexible enough to change its programs, allowing the organism to adapt to changes in the environment. Subjective consciousness is a power of the mind to transcend and change its own programming. At the cutting edge of this development, the human mind has abstracted and idealized the drift toward objectivity. One dimension of that idealization is science, another is the quest for spiritual freedom from the contingency of experience. In both cases, mind seeks to free itself from illusion, and to transcend the identified self-interest which is the axiom of cognition in an organism that is a product of natural selection.
Truth begins as a strategy in the game of survival.
The game itself, of natural selection, continues to disturb life and cause it to adjust, complicate and expand its capabilities of representation, responding with ever greater subtlety to the world. The movement toward objectivity is paid for with an overhead of complexity, separate selfhood, and self-consciousness. Once its picture of the world is complete enough to include itself, mind is able to model its situation and to grasp that it lives in a context of illusion. This awareness is the price to be paid for the privilege of self-conscious existence. Mind becomes capable of touching truth, even though it was designed merely for advantage.