There are developmental stages where you learn to take over control of what were previously automatic bodily functions - or things that were done for you by somebody else, like tying your own shoelaces. You take them over and perform them in your own style, and like your signature they become part of the body of your self. To become the subject of verbs, transitive or intransitive, and their corresponding sentences: 'I see it', 'I go', or compounds, 'I can see it', 'I will go there', is to inhabit this body reflexively, and to learn to do so is counted a great achievement. But you don't need reflection for the assumption of control to represent the attainment of a self. When a dog marks its journey by leaving small pools of urine it is using voluntary control of bodily functions to leave signifiers of itself in a social space. When it returns to same place later it can presumably distinguish its own olfactory signature from those of the other dogs that have visited the same spot, and it can probably also (roughly) date the various markings. The concrete sense of self is thus mediated by presence and absence, by social assertion and by temporality. It is hard to see what our verbal reflexivity adds to this ontology, except perhaps the ability to vary the forms in which self-recognition takes place. It is likely however that a being with a more comprehensive consciousness would see all our ways of propagating our selves as being just as instinctive, limited and stereotyped as we see those of a dog. Although dogs may have associations of reward and punishment with various smells, they appear to have nothing like our aesthetic distinction of the delightful from the disgusting, and much less anything like our reflexive application of this distinction to ourselves. A may be indifferent, but never finds a too-familiar smell boring. The relish with which a healthy dog undertakes an investigation of interesting smells is enviable, and somehow cheering.