The mind with its different identities seems to be cunningly assembled  - by way of a division of labour, interlocking dependencies and minimal effort, or maximal energetic efficiency, in each agent - in order that it can work successfully, that is, process the living in the interest of life. That it fails to do so in so many instances may be the result of a strategic response on the part of life to the intrinsic and absolute uncertainty of the demands of living; life's response to irreducible uncertainty being scattershot variability. In this pragmatically inclined way of thinking success is a measure of conformity to reality, and hence a measure of truth, on the understanding that since the reality is ever-changing there can be no a priori criterion of truth. All of this ignores the many uses of failure. Agents may be designed to fail under certain conditions so they can self-destruct and release their energies for other agents. Failure may be part of success, or even one of its rewards. Success justifies itself and needs no commentary and so our systems of value are designed to give meaning to failure. An intensified self-awareness is a natural consequence of failure because in this case the next step does not follow, so we are inclined to accord a high value to such awareness. But this somewhat Nietzschean perspective is too simplistic since awareness or consciousness, pushed far enough leads upstream of all conferring of value, upstream of the will which is merely another name for life. If we are living beings who put being in question, this is only because we can also put living in question. The difference is that the one kind of questioning is speculative and the other is experiential and a posteriori, demanding as its condition that we first fail, and gloriously so.