For every thing that is there must already be a place or a context in which it is, in which the alternative is or is not can be rooted. So, if consciousness develops of the complexity in some non-conscious structures, then, before it is reognised and acknowledged by a self and since such a self is only some further refinement of the content of consciousness enabling it to reflect itself, there would be a stage of unreflected, unowned, merely happening, consciousness, such as we might imagine in an ant or an even simpler creature. That the thing is means that there is a place where it is, but in the case of a consciousness, even without a self, that place or space would still be a self, being the exclusive condition of its being at all.