Certain behaviours of systems can appear to have a character we could call selfness, as in the case where one can extend the usefulness or the working life of machines by treating them as if they expressed a will and feelings in their operation, subjective properties with which we communicate by forming a relationship with their owners. Such behaviour requires no decision about the actual subjectivity of the machine or system other than a suspension of disbelief, but we are aware that it is fuelled by a projection, a transference of something from ourselves into this other organism. It is less common to consider such a relationship with our own body or mind because we are able to identify or to weave any odd behaviours into our subjective script. We might go as far as to wonder why we did something, but the reasons are sought in terms of the language of intentions and purposes, and the self-directed feeling of selfness easily flows in and occupies the new terrain. In experience we can see the shifting of the boundaries of the region in which such selfness is concentrated and while some parts might be in the deep centre and so escape from suffering changes in identification, once the process is understood identification ceases to be entirely natural or able to be taken for granted. If the analogy with some movable, mercurial stuff holds up, then we are led to wonder whether the feeling originates from a reservoir or a spring. In either case the question of its ultimate source remains. One possible answer is that it begins in a kind of bootstrap within the machine itself, as if the sentience that A can endow upon B is the sentience which B had previously endowed upon A. Another is that it all comes from Something Else which is so far outside the system as not be conceivable within the limitations that it necessarily imposes.