Presence Without Consciousness
Media theory. June 22, 2026 Diana Lengua
As affective robots, agentic AI, and post-mortem avatars generate synthetic phenomenology, the problem of consciousness becomes an ontological question about attributing being rather than merely a functional or epistemic one. This paper advances a philosophical account of presence as a relational and emergent mode of being arising within the flow of pure experience. Drawing on Husserl's intentionality and William James's radical empiricism—particularly his provocation 'Does consciousness exist?' (1904)—it argues that synthetic experience is continuous with natural processes of relation and effect. Presence emerges as an interaction among heterogeneous agencies, extending cognition beyond the biological and re-embedding epistemology within computational infrastructures. This reorientation supports inquiry into post-biotic thought and ethics of delegated cognition.