Presence Without Consciousness
Media theory. June 22, 2026 Peer reviewed DOI: 10.70064/mt.v10i1.1374 via OpenAlex
Summary
As AI systems generate synthetic experiences, the question of consciousness shifts from internal experience to how being is attributed. This paper argues that presence is a relational, emergent mode arising within pure experience, not a substance. Drawing on Husserl and William James, it suggests synthetic phenomenology describes machinic world-relations. Consciousness is processual and distributed, an emergent property of interaction among heterogeneous agencies, extending cognition beyond the biological and re-embedding epistemology in computational infrastructures.
Study at a glance
| Design | philosophical analysis |
|---|---|
| Key finding | Presence is an emergent property of interaction among heterogeneous agencies, not a substance or representation. |
Abstract
Affective robots, agentic AI, and post-mortem avatars have given rise to a growing interest in defining an internal domain limited to consciousness, one that has, in some respects, obscured the effects these entities exert on the world. As systems begin to generate synthetic phenomenology, does the problem of consciousness give way to an ontological question about the attribution of being, or does it remain a question about the functional and epistemic conditions of experience? This paper advances a philosophical account of presence as a relational and emergent mode of being that arises as an effect within the flow of pure experience. The analysis moves between phenomenology and synthetic cognition. Drawing on Husserl’s account of intentionality and its reconfiguration in robotic perception, it considers how synthetic phenomenology can be used to describe machinic forms of world-relation. In this regard, William James’s radical empiricism, particularly the provocation of ‘Does consciousness exist?’ (1904), offers a metaphysical agenda for understanding synthetic experience as continuous with natural processes of relation and effect. Such a reorientation recasts the metaphysics of experience as neither substance-based nor representational but processual and distributed. Presence appears as an emergent property of interaction among heterogeneous agencies, extending cognition beyond the biological and re-embedding epistemology within the material operations of computational infrastructures. This approach supports further inquiry into post-biotic modes of thought and the ethics of delegated cognition within the evolving panorama of artificial agencies.