The yuppie who defines himself through his consumption of objects available to all is the heir of the self that constructs itself from language available to all. The human self is a user of signs in a community of like selves, with all the uncertainty that such an individual-collective entity suggests. Yet the arrogant dismissal of this truth by the overweening bourgeois Self should nonetheless not lead us, however understandably, to affirm that we have no selves at all. It is a virtual, interpersonal reality that subsists in human culture and in which we participate. To use words, or any other form of representation, is to participate virtually in the communal scene of representation.
Emotions have a reassuringly physiological component.
This is not a task a computer can perform in any but a trivial sense. The much misunderstood cogito offers a minimal example. But that is not the point of the cogito . It is that I understand my own existence only insofar as I conceive thoughts, representations in principle shared by others. My being, in other words, is not wholly contained in myself, but implies the existence of a human community.