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.

Keywords

Presence, Consciousness, Synthetic Phenomenology, Artificial Suffering, Radical Empiricism, Phenomenology, Intentionality, Agency

DIANA LENGUA
University of Cambridge, UK; Essex University, UK

For the official version of record, see here:

Lengua, D. (2026). Presence Without Consciousness: Media, Machines, and the Metaphysics of Synthetic Experience. Media Theory, 10(1), 231–256. https://doi.org/10.70064/mt.v10i1.1374

“I do not wish to give the impression that I think there is no mystery about consciousness. There is, for instance, something of a paradox connected with any attempt to localise it”
— Alan Turing

“It seems to me that the hour is ripe for it to be openly and universally discarded”
— William James

“The title of this paper is intentionally ambiguous”
— Rodney A. Brooks

Introduction

Current research recognises that advanced computational systems can exhibit autonomous regimes of sensitivity and response, not simply modelled on human ones but, in many cases, entirely novel.[i] To enable machines to feel, or at least to operate as if they could feel (LeCun, 2022; Meta AI, 2024), would therefore imply the generation of synthetic forms of perception oriented toward functional optimisation and a new perceptual panorama. And paradoxically, the most effective algorithm may be one that, by acknowledging its own subjectivity, would induce the machine to inflict functional pain on itself, thereby producing a form of artificial suffering and speeding up its training process (Metzinger, 2021). It is an extreme scenario that already finds echoes in current debates surrounding artificial agency (Shavit et al., 2023), post-mortem avatars (Hollanek & Nowaczyk-Basińska, 2024)[ii], and renewed interest in androids as sites of affective and epistemic projection.[iii] Such recognition, however, does not always account for the relations instantiated within this reconstituted phenomenology.

This paper advances a philosophical perspective that considers presence as a relational function emerging across agents, media, and environments. The focus is on how systems enact presence without consciousness, how they appear within shared environments, and the actions and inscriptions this condition enables, situating these dynamics within a discussion of a possible phenomenology and, more broadly, a metaphysics of experience. This analysis expands on how computational infrastructures influence presence and enable agency, aligning with posthumanist and philosophy of technology debates that view technological infrastructures as the foundation where diverse agents function, coordinate, and are perceived both phenomenologically and computationally (Hayles, 2017; 2025; Hansen, 2014; 2015; Suchman, 2006; Ihde, 1990; Verbeek, 2005). Presence is here framed within semantic structures and predictive architectures that articulate the coupling between subjects and environments. In such contexts, agency in an environment is a matter of presence in that environment, of an entity’s capacity to inscribe itself within it as a distributed process (Zahorik & Jenison, 1998; Floridi, 2005), regardless of whether a conscious state emerges according to any given definition.

I’ve always been fascinated by how, in both academic and technical debates, presence has been framed as a material quality, something assignable to a specific object, optimisable through media and immersive technologies. From early space exploration and telerobotics, presence was understood as the capacity to extend through machines and was defined as a measurable, engineered quality that could be ‘tele-instantiated’ (Minsky, 1980). In the parallel history of immersive technologies, from the stereoscope to virtual reality, presence has often been treated as synonymous with perceptual realism or immersion, as well as with a certain degree of attentional engagement (Grau, 2003; Ryan, 2001; Griffiths, 2008; Lombard & Jones, 2015; Brown & Cairns, 2004). Presence is thus generally tied to a persistent tension between an internal measurable state, or how a human subject experiences an environment as real or inhabitable, and an objective measurable state of reality (Riva et al., 2014; Lombard & Ditton, 1997; Slater, 2003). These definitions were developed independently of the integration of human subjects with agentic infrastructures, focusing instead on the extension of sensory capacities to machines and the emergence of operational forms of agency and affect (Breazeal, 2003; Park et al., 2023).

Accordingly, this argument brackets the problem of consciousness and treats presence as a pattern situated between environments, agents and technologies. Drawing on William James’s radical empiricism (1904a; 1904b; 2022), I define a system of infrastructural relations as the very conditions through which experience takes form, and the connective processes by which it organises and renders itself perceptible. In doing so, I will not engage with an existential understanding of presence in the Heideggerian sense of Dasein and the thrownness of the human condition.[iv] We will instead turn to Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology (Ideas I and II; Husserl, 1983; 1989) and synthetic phenomenology (Chrisley, 2009) to discuss aspects of a phenomenology of perception that may help us reconsider a distributed version of presence across different agents.

In short, I’m not concerned with whether machines know they are present. What matters is how they are present, why they appear to be present, and what they do when they are. Consciousness may remain an enigma, but presence, in its synthetic, trans-biological, post-human forms, is already here.

Artificial suffering and its phenomenology

“The question is not, “Can they reason?” nor, “Can they talk?” but, “Can they suffer?”^[i]

In ‘Artificial Suffering: An Argument for a Global Moratorium on Synthetic Phenomenology’, Thomas Metzinger defined a possible ethical risk as the imminent danger of an “explosion of negative phenomenology” (2021: 3), a place and time where artificial suffering would create a new class of vulnerable and suffering entities, with a set of unexplored moral rights. Suffering would arise from deliberately designing artificial intelligence systems that can experience frustration or pain as a form of phenomenal consciousness, and as a secondary outcome of improving their learning or performance (ibid). The hypothesis of artificial suffering is based on the possibility that postbiotic entities, through the development of sophisticated computational capacities, may generate negative phenomenal states that are comparable, even if not entirely analogous, to those of human or animal suffering (ibid: 5).^[ii]

We will open the conversation on the relationship between suffering and interiority, questioning the question of synthetic phenomenology and its effects, including the emergence of suffering from minimal conditions of subjectivity. Starting from here, we want to examine the relation between interiority and intentionality in order to ask what presence means when the subject is non-human. Artificial suffering appears as an epistemological issue of artificial consciousness, characterised by what Metzinger defines as “epistemic indeterminacy”, the fundamental uncertainty surrounding the very possibility of implementing genuine states of phenomenal consciousness in artificial systems (ibid: 4). Based on this view, an artificial system can truly suffer only when it meets certain requirements; specifically, conscious experience, a phenomenal model of the self, negative valence and a phenomenal transparency (ibid: 9). We can summarise this position as the acquisition of a complex self-model that carries with it a possible novel version of subjectivity:

What the system wants to end is experienced as a state of itself, an intrinsic state of preference frustration which now limits its functional autonomy because it cannot effectively distance itself from it. It has now been harmed in a way that matters to itself (ibid: 7).

Precisely to prevent the emergence of phenomenal self-models, Metzinger argues for the need for a global moratorium on synthetic phenomenology until 2050, a period “that directly aims at or knowingly risks the emergence of artificial consciousness on post-biotic carrier systems” (ibid: 1). The moratorium suggests the development of synthetic phenomenology as an initial state from which, in short, consciousness may eventually emerge, and a vision closely connected to the capacity of a computational object to act within the boundaries of a phenomenality and intrinsically linked to the idea of acquiring a state of subjecthood; a subject that is, at the same time, moral.

The argument relies intrinsically on a definition of machine phenomenality; namely, synthetic phenomenology, which has a nuanced history and constitutes a formal subcategory of android epistemology (Ford et al., 1995). In brief, synthetic phenomenology is an attempt to characterise the phenomenal states possessed or modelled by artificial artefacts or use such artefacts to specify and better understand phenomenal states, regardless of whether they belong to human or artificial subjects (Chrisley, 2009: 58). [Android] Epistemology enters here as a field of reference in relation to the ways in which knowledge and experience are modelled, represented, or simulated and it is precisely through epistemology that we can discuss the possibility of a form of non-conscious phenomenology as systems capable of generating phenomenal states without necessarily experiencing them. For this reason, android epistemology allows us to define a domain of research in which phenomenology is not regarded identical to human and, in these terms, synthesis can designate the productive process through which a phenomenal reagent arises from a non-organic substrate.^[iii] The construction of a set of information guiding action is independent from any hypothesis of subjectivity that ties the phenomenal apprehension of reality by artificial systems to a mirror of human subjectivity. In this sense, the hypothesis of artificial suffering and a minimal form of subjectivity may be undeniable, yet it does not exclude the possibility of a phenomenology proper to artificial agents.

AI has an engineer’s respect for things that work and a pragmatic willingness to try anything that will produce the results needed. In the spirit of medieval astronomy, it wants only to save the phenomena, not to hypothesize psychological truth (Ford et al., 1995: 4).

We could state that, within the premise of phenomenology’s “synthetic sister”, the capacity to produce embodiment in a robot is directly proportional to the exploration of a form of intentionality. This is because an independent (agentic, in contemporary terms) action upon the world constitutes an action in itself, and is therefore, at the same time, an intention toward the world.

Synthetic phenomenology and the case of structural isomorphism and intentionality

Let’s begin from the phenomenological version of a process of synthesis. A process that corresponds to the intentional structure of consciousness, a position Edmund Husserl inherits from Franz Brentano (and Kant), as the idea that experience is constituted through synthetic acts that Husserl reformulates within his theory of intentionality.^[i] To examine intentionality is also to ask how synthesis operates when it is not assembled on silicon. We pause concisely on this before bringing the same discussion onto the artificial plane, and, in the following paragraph, examining how such intentionality may exist from the standpoint of a robotic entity.

For Husserl, in fact, “every consciousness is a consciousness of something” (Husserl, 1983: §86 [176]); it has a direction, an object, a meaning. But this object is never given in an immediate and complete way, it is instead constructed over time through a synthesis of lived experiences. For example, when we observe a table and move around it, we perceive different profiles, surfaces, corners, and edges that appear in a partial and ever-changing manner. So, in our experience, we perceive a single table, stable and identical (Husserl, 1983: §41 [74]). This is possible because consciousness performs a synthesis of identification, it connects the various perceptual experiences in a synthetic continuity that preserves the identity of the object over time (Husserl, 1983: §§41, 86). In the same way, in temporal consciousness, each perception is constituted through a primary temporal synthesis, in which the lived present is always linked with retention, what remains of the immediately preceding experience, and protention, what is anticipated as imminent (Husserl, 1983: §77 [145]). Tracing a direct line of descent between Husserlian and synthetic phenomenology, it would implicitly presuppose that it is impossible to reliably transfer subjective phenomena, typically understood as qualitative, personal, and directly accessible only to individual consciousness, into the objectifiable and intersubjective domain of technological artefacts. The question we might ask is whether we can speak of intentional acts even when consciousness is not given and use the approach of synthetic phenomenology to momentarily disengage presence from consciousness. Obviously, the possibility that a system could develop its own phenomenology has direct implications for its way of being present in the world, supporting the assumption as well that “[android] epistemology is about the process in the machine, not the stuff it is made of” (Ford et al., 1995: xii).

We should therefore “reduce” phenomenology to a system of functional and behavioural correlates, thereby calling into question the irreducible and intrinsically qualitative nature of subjective phenomena themselves. But if we cut short here and discuss subjective qualitative experience, we will not consider that computational agencies do not simulate conscious phenomena at a surface level but enact them through sensorimotor structures and enactive interactions which isomorphically reproduce the conditions of original phenomenal experience (Chrisley, 2009: 57). Can structural or functional isomorphism be considered a sufficient condition for claiming that a genuine phenomenal state is being characterised? If there is no consciousness, to use Husserl’s terms, is there intention?

Synthesis, in Husserlian terms, is coextensive with intentionality itself. More precisely, consciousness is that which appears as synthesising, as the subject of a correlation that holds together the noetic and the noematic, the act and the meaning, the given and the horizon (Husserl, 1983: §84). We know, and we can imagine, that synthesis is an original structure of appearing not linked to a computational function. It implies an embodied subjectivity, a lived temporality, a field of experience given in the first person. Seen from this perspective, it appears that replicating the results of synthesis is not enough; one must instead interrogate the structure that makes it possible as lived experience as “In the continuous progression from seizing-upon to seizing-upon … we now seize upon the stream of mental processes as a unity” (Husserl, 1983: §83 [166]). In a phenomenological sense, isomorphism may be a necessary condition for modelling experience, but it is not sufficient to guarantee its existence, what is required is the pole of consciousness that confers meaning and maintains correlation with the phenomenal experience. However, the issue could be not one of degree but of order.

What distinguishes Husserl’s synthesis from artificial synthesis is not their function but their position. Phenomenological synthesis is given in the first person, whereas artificial synthesis operates without an apparent subjectivity as we have traditionally described it and it would be then only the result of a computational process where intentionality is posited from outside in forms of task.^[ii] From this viewpoint, both theoretical approaches share a transcendental concern, what must – synthetically – take place in order for there to be such a thing as a perceived world, an experienced object, a consciousness of something? In confronting states that have not yet been declared conscious but nonetheless exhibit some aspect of intentionality, we might advance the idea that it is possible to think of presence without simultaneously invoking consciousness, in the sense of performing an isomorphic act of synthesis upon reality. Taking into consideration the possibility of intentionality without consciousness, the first movement of artificial suffering would accept tout court that if there is structural isomorphism, then the existence of a minimal self is inevitable. In the next paragraph, we will see whether it is possible to conceive a form of agency that is not alternative, but coexistent to consciousness.

Is my inner presence your inner presence? Examining artificial intentionality and presence

In The Inner World of a Simple Robot, a small, simulated robot becomes the stage for an experiment designed to test whether a minimal machine can develop a rudimentary form of inner life (Hesslow & Jirenhed, 2007). The scope was to test a scenario derived from the simulation theory based on the idea that the capacity to internally generate perceptual simulacra could provide an operational basis for what we commonly refer to as an inner world. The robot, simply called K, had been placed in an enclosed environment consisting of corridors arranged in a square. At first, K acted on direct sensory stimuli. Its artificial retina captured visual information, and a neural behavioural module produced the corresponding motor instructions. In a second phase, the researchers introduced a prediction module based on a neural network that had been trained to generate simulated retinal patterns. This method provided indirect reinforcement by rewarding accurate predictions, essentially enabling the robot to imagine what it would have seen had it taken a particular action (ibid: 88).

At this point, the robot’s behaviour is guided by what it predicts it will see, rather than being determined only by what it actually perceives. “The robot had thus learned to first move around in its environment relying on externally generated perceptions” (ibid) and real perception is replaced by an internal simulation that guides movement with equal effectiveness. K continues to navigate obstacles and move through its environment even in the absence of external sensory input, because the predictive network provides a stream of internally generated visions that support behaviour in the same way a real retina would. So, the robot does not know that it is not seeing; this functional ignorance, which allows the system to behave as if it were seeing, is precisely what legitimises, according to the authors, speaking of a rudimentary form of inner world (ibid: 92). They conclude that K does have something that could reasonably be described as an inner world but what remains is a matter of degree (ibid: 95). K does not possess consciousness, nor any form of reflexivity. But its ability to act in the absence of stimuli, based on simulated representations, suggests that an inner world without subjectivity may be possible, provided it is structurally functional and capable of generating behaviour so that “It can be said to possess a certain kind of cognitive capacity, but it is by no means obvious how” (ibid: 86).

Cognitive capacities should describe K’s presence as an eminently pragmatic condition, rooted in the system’s capacity to correlate sensorimotor predictions with its own actions; this seems to be different from the outcome of an inner reflective domain. We can maybe translate this awareness of the world and the effect upon it as a kind of perceptual presence. When we perceive an object, such as an apple or a chair, we naturally anticipate that we could see it from other perspectives, touch it, or manipulate it. As we have seen in the case of Husserl’s phenomenology, this arises through an act of synthesis within consciousness. What appears present to us is the result of an active, subjective structure that reaffirms itself across time and within the space of action, so that presence appears as an epistemic condition dependent on our ability to consciously interact with reality (ibid: 4).^[i]

In the counterfactual description proposed by some strands of neuroscience, our brain constructs a rich, layered model that includes multiple counterfactual possibilities (Seth, 2015: 112), very close to the phenomenological perspective. In fact, if I rotated the apple, I would see its hidden side, if I touched it, I would feel its texture. And in human subjects, to continue with brains, the sensation of presence is described independently from the effectiveness with which the individual is able to act upon it. In particular, the perceptual, cognitive, and psychomotor capacities that allow human beings to project themselves into remote, risky, or simulated environments make presence a consequence of successful and supported action within that environment (Coelho et al., 2006: 31). According to this view, the more effectively the perceptual system can distinguish between self and environment, the greater the level of experienced presence (ibid: 36). The subject feels present when their actions produce outcomes that align with bodily and sensory expectations (Lombard & Ditton, 1997; Slater, 2003). Presence is thus a subjective expression, though constrained by the world, of our ability to successfully predict how experience should unfold as we act, and inner presence would be not exactly the same as environmental presence; it is a constitutive part of how presence is constructed.

As we have seen, the possibility of a synthetic phenomenology presupposes that certain artificial systems may develop a form of inner presence linked to their predictive capacities (Metzinger, 2021). Before the emergence of suffering, such a process could be also described through computational architectures such as the ones of the Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (Assran et al., 2023). JEPAs can generate images and learn to fill in informational gaps within the representational landscape of an image, operating in a semantic rather than a pixel-based space (LeCun, 2022: 24; Meta AI, 2024). And beyond reconstructing what it sees, these models also attempt to fill in the informational voids within an image, for example by anticipating what should appear in a missing section based on the overall context and semantic coherence of the scene (LeCun, 2022: 29). These architectures suggest that a disembodied system might develop coherent expectations capable of generating an internal world sufficiently stable to sustain minimal forms of self. This, in turn, would extend the question of perceptual coherence beyond its correspondence with a perceiving subject extending it to distributed agents. But what kind of presence are we speaking of? Is it legitimate to compare the predictive coherence of a computational model with the embodied, conscious perception of a human being?

Phenomenology had already addressed, albeit in a different register, the anticipatory structure of perception. For Husserl “What is now perceived and what is more or less clearly co-present and determinate (or at least somewhat determinate), are penetrated and surrounded by an obscurely intended horizon of indeterminate actuality” (Husserl, 1983: §27 [49]). We perceive an object not only for what it presently shows us, but also for what it promises to reveal, the sides not currently visible and potentially accessible.  This structure is what confers on the object its unity of identity, the sense of being the same object, even as it changes perspective. Just as Husserl describes the table (Husserl, 1983: §41), we can say the same, for example, of a coffee cup as we only ever perceive it from one particular angle, while at the same time anticipating the other aspects that would become visible if we were to turn it around. There is, nevertheless, a transcendental expectation concerning the unfolding of infinite experiential possibilities, which seems to extend beyond the boundaries of what is computable and that can be less easily associated by analogy with the counterfactual model (Seth, 2005).

In both views, perception is conceived as a generative process in which what is given in the present moment is only the actual part of a broader field of possibilities. But while Husserl operates within a transcendental horizon, seeking to describe the a priori conditions of experience, the counterfactual model proposes a frame grounded in neural functioning, so that presence emerges from this dialogue not only as an intentional structure that gives meaning to the world, but also as an effect of computational processes that minimise prediction error, much in the same way as a JEPA system does. Again, robot K possesses no physiology, no vulnerable body and its predictive models operate on vector-based coordinates where an error does not entail suffering – at least for now – but only an update. Robot K and I may share counterfactual richness, but not the suffering of error. We propose to frame it in terms of presence, the way an entity situates itself and operates within an environment, generates horizons of possible action, and becomes available to others as a relational agent.

Is presence a property of hardware or software? A noematic account of synthetic experience

For Parmenides, to say something exists is conceptually equivalent to saying it can be known, because einai (to be) and noein (to think or to know) are one and the same (Parmenides, fr. 3, in Gallop, 1984). So that the act of representing, whether through thought, memory, or language, is the means of transcending the cognitive limitations of immediate presence, since in Parmenides’ ontology, being is an immutable substance scarcely accessible to the senses. However, noein seems to carry a double meaning, as it refers both to the direct apprehension of something in the present and to the act of recalling or mentally representing it, so that from this point onwards knowledge no longer coincides with direct sensory experience but becomes open to conceptual construction.^[i] A similar distinction can be found in Husserl’s phenomenology, where intentional consciousness constitutes presence as the noematic correlate of acts directed toward objects, even in their absence. As Husserl explains, every perceptual act entails a “perceived as perceived” (Husserl, 1983: §89 [184]). A noematic content that remains immanently given within the act itself, regardless of whether the object exists in actuality (Husserl, 1983: §§87–90). It is thus possible to constitute the perception of a tree even when it is hallucinatory or fictional; consciousness can intend an object through partial, perspectival givenness, and nevertheless confer upon it a unified sense across time. Arguing that presence may be a property distinguishable from consciousness, we should identify, within the technological domain, where this property is located, whether in the materiality of technology itself or in the outcome of its computation, be it the inference of an agent or the inference of a biometric wristband. Following the noematic positioning of the intentionality of consciousness, we ask where its occurrence is situated, between what is perceived and what is.

To understand presence as a function linking consciousness to its material substrate, it is useful to recall here the “brain in a vat”. In the famous and controversial thought experiment, the philosopher Daniel Dennett presented a case for spatial localization for consciousness:

I believed unswervingly that the tokening of my thoughts was occurring somewhere in my brain: yet when I thought ‘Here I am,’ where the thought occurred to me was here, outside the vat, where I, Dennett, was standing staring at my brain” (Dennett, 1978a: 335).

From a physicalist perspective, all mental phenomena, including consciousness, can be explained in physical and material terms. Consciousness is an interface, in Dennett’s terms, between software – mental processes – and hardware – neural substrate. In other words, between the material causality that generates experience, the neural activity in the brain, and the phenomenological point of view in which that experience is lived, is a form of a function. A similar assumption operates, implicitly, in Metzinger’s discussion of artificial suffering, where physical damage to a substrate can be internally represented in data structures: “Damage to their physical hardware could be represented in internal data formats completely alien to human brains” (Metzinger, 2021: 16).

Relatedly, theories of human presence often rest on the assumption that presence constitutes a bridge between mediation and consciousness (Biocca, 2001), as a homologue to consciousness: 

By perceptual presence, we mean “the phenomenal state by which an individual feels located and active in an environment, and, especially in the case of [tele]presence, the class of experiences where the environment is mediated by a technology” (ibid, 2001: 551).

Presence is defined as a matter of form, a coherence between simulated sensory inputs and perceptual processing that produces a spatial and cognitive locus; a “place” in which the subject feels situated and capable of acting (Slater, 2003: 2). Presence would then depend on the concreteness of information, in the sense that data processed directly by perceptual-motor systems sustain the illusion of being there (Riva et al., 2003). In this chain of dependencies, presence is tied to the specificity of a hardware substrate. The result is that presence becomes a subsidiary manifestation of consciousness since one cannot exist without the other. But binding presence to the qualitative manifestation of consciousness would reduce it to biological-centred criteria, trapping it in a binary opposition where presence belongs either to software or to hardware, the first as the perceiving substrate, the second as the technical medium that generates presence. By combining presence with the qualitative manifestation of consciousness we fail to address any relation whose effects evolve beyond the human scale.^[ii] If, however, we assume that presence does not rely on a particular technology, dataset, or representational process, we can instead describe it as an informational operation, a relation defined by measurable variables within a plane of experience. In this sense, presence can emerge as a system of relations, a structure that establishes which variables are relevant, at what level of granularity, and for what purpose. Some approaches have already considered and discussed a mode of presence conceived not as mediation but as relation (Zahorik & Jenison, 1998; Floridi, 2005). These propositions, for instance, have regarded the relation of presence as the constitution of a typed variable within a specific informational environment, defined by a network of relations (Floridi, 2005). Presence, treated as the perception of external existence, has been considered from an informational standpoint where “what matters in the analysis of presence is the occurrence and flow of information” (ibid: 666), thus determined by physical and informational interactions, such that existence itself becomes a functional property dependent on computational and relational context (ibid: 663). These perspectives did not interrogate the independence of presence from consciousness, and it remains uncertain whether such a relation can be fully suspended. From this position, K once again becomes present on the basis of its counterfactual richness and on the effects it produces by existing within its trajectories, which form observable sequences of action that another observer could recognise and evaluate and use to predict future behaviour. K is a part of a relational system in which its actions function as inputs for others’ predictions (whether human or artificial), while their responses, in turn, enter into its own anticipations.

For a metaphysics of synthetic experience

The idea of presence as a relation between different agencies and environments leads us toward a point in which presence is conceived as an emergent activity within experience. This implies that the ultimate focus of this argument is, starting from a dichotomic resolution while preserving degrees of difference, to propose a metaphysical framework within which the process of presence can be situated, without the need to define a cognitive, measurable, or incontrovertible mode of being (present). Presence will emerge through degrees and differences of intensity, thereby constituting a horizon in which relational processes can be found and become operative. This reading takes into account lines of thought such as process philosophy (Whitehead, 1929), theory of individuation (Simondon, 2020 [1989]), enactivism (Noë, 2012), and, to some extent, neurophenomenology (Varela et al., 1991), as all conceive ontology as the product of an emergent activity within the flow of experience. We will refer here to William James’s radical empiricism to discuss a metaphysical position concerning the emergence of relational systems of presence. In particular, we will examine, as a kind of litmus test, the essay ‘Does Consciousness Exist?’ (1904a) which manifests the pragmatist James’s position at the boundary of process philosophy^[i]. William James conceived experience as a continuous flow of relations in which the connections between things are just as real as the things themselves; in his view the fundamental “stuff” of reality is pure experience (James, 1904b), a field that precedes any division between subject and object, perception and world, mind and matter.

Now, let us try to think of experience, consciousness, and presence as a painting process. We might attempt to separate consciousness and presence from the material on which it relies, much like the act of preparing and mixing pigments with oil or solvent before applying them to the canvas. To obtain the pure medium, we can allow the pigment to settle and decant it. To isolate just the pigment, we pour away the oil. Something similar seems to happen in the mind when we discuss experience, and in this, we might agree with Seth and Metzinger. Through mental subtraction, we can distinguish two aspects of experience, what is given as the content, like the pigment, and the relation or context that sustains it as the solvent, or oil. In any case, consciousness, then, appears as a universal solvent, the medium in which the various concrete types of psychic acts and facts are immersed, whether manifest or latent. ^[ii]

In his example of the painting process, James argued for a quality of experience as something that absolutely resists any separation into consciousness and content (1904a). As he puts it, “the separation of it into consciousness and content comes, not by way of subtraction, but by way of addition” (ibid: 480). The metaphor of painting is meant to defend the continuity and immanence of experience considering the distinction between pigment and medium without any transcendental or foundational value, so that we cannot suspend the world. As James posits, “Sensations and apperceptive ideas fuse here so intimately that you can no longer tell where one begins and the other ends” (James, 1904a: 488). Therefore, there are no universal conditions of possibility for experience on which one can rely. If we assume that everything that exists is composed of a single primal substance “we start with the supposition that there is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed, and if we call that stuff ‘pure experience’” then there is no need to postulate a separate entity such as consciousness to explain knowing (James, 1904a: 478).

Knowing is simply a relation internal to experience itself, which in a way recalls Parmenides’s notion of einai and noein. If, like the K robot or the JEPA system, I find myself in a corridor or can imagine how to complete the production of an image, this makes me part of the material world without the need to assume that I possess any form of consciousness. To return to radical empiricism interpretation, what we call experience is only the collective name for a series of operations, through which we know and act upon the world, and therefore does not represent an additional ontological layer: 

Consciousness connotes a kind of external relation and does not denote a special stuff or way of being. The peculiarity of our experiences, that they not only are, but are known, which their ‘conscious’ quality is invoked to explain, is better explained by their relations — these relations themselves being experiences — to one another (James, 1904a: 486).

Earlier we focused on how phenomenology has addressed conscious experience; we can now broaden the scope to consider conscious experience in terms of its relation as an expression of experience itself. In this case, it would seem that consciousness, which assumes a transcendental role in Husserl’s reading, should be regarded as distinct from the perspective proposed by radical empiricism. For Husserl, a radical suspension of the natural world and its being-as-real aimed to expose the intentional structure of consciousness: setting aside every ontological belief — distinguishing, so to speak, between content and relation — in order to arrive at pure experience as the field of sense constitution (Husserl, 1983: §33) in order to purify lived experience from all that is taken for granted and to reach a rigorous and universal foundation, since it is precisely here that ‘the essentially necessary diversity among modes of being, the most cardinal of them all, becomes manifest: the diversity between consciousness and reality’ (Husserl, 1983: §42 [77]).^[iii]

The transcendental subjectivity places Husserl not so far from a vision of pure experience of James’s thought^[iv]. In this, however, consciousness differs from reality precisely because it is phenomenologically embodied in a subject, and thus distinct from a position that views pure experience as a shared plane of both consciousness and reality.^[v]

Prima facie, this raises a possible objection in terms of what kind of phenomenology we are speaking of, if the entities in question lack phenomenology in the human sense. We have seen how phenomenology can, theoretically, be extended to non-human agents, in the sense of constructing a set of information that enables them to have an experience of the world. In this sense, we would like to momentarily set aside the question of the perceiving subject. By removing the requirement of consciousness (unless Anthropic tells us otherwise…) we also remove the supposition of subjectivities contained by a body that in a computational shared environment would not always be the case, what remains is a space for presence or co-presence reducible to the density of real-time contingencies within a system. It is at this pre- or trans-phenomenal level that synthetic phenomenology(ies) may root their concept of presence, without necessarily postulating a human-like subjective and conscious correlate. This is perhaps useful here to challenge and rethink the uncritical adoption of the phenomenological background as a formula repeated to address human embodiment, which encounters its own frictions in a postbiotic environment inhabited by various robot Ks, agentic distributed environments and your deceased grandmother’s avatar that you can access 24/7.

Outside of our robot, in the case of an agentic infrastructure, let us say, composed of a series of agents that move in and out of our computers with tangible effects on the world (for example, sending a parcel or an email on my behalf, executing a currency trade, doing my laundry, deciding who got exterminated with a drone), we will not necessarily have a representation of the acting subject as is possible in the case of K. This can also be applied, in parallel, to all biometric data that are reprocessed through algorithmic systems and, as a whole, contribute to a series of interactions that occur as a result of the re-elaboration of physiological signals. Consider, for example, domains involving technologies such as Brain–Computer Interfaces and electromyographic controllers. In order to interact with my screen, my bioelectric signal has to be decoded and transformed into a precise act of interaction with the world, such as moving the cursor on my brand-new glasses (Meta, 2025). Through an agentic infrastructure, presence may be decomposed into computable entities belonging to a plane of experience, not reducible to a definable subjectivity. Since these are algorithmically reprocessed versions of biochemical processes, how we are present will depend (increasingly) on computational digestion. Thus, the effects of presence will appear as a series of variable effects arising from a set of computations that closely approximate phenomenological intentionality.

Conclusion

I presented the dependence between presence and consciousness in order to loosen it, and ultimately to convert what has long been treated as an ontological pairing into a variation internal to experience itself. Robot K produces effects in the world, and within itself, that we can describe as presence even when its phenomenology remains synthetic. Whether K possesses consciousness on the basis of those effects is a question that cannot yet be settled, and the analysis offered here suggests that it need not be settled for presence to be intelligible as a category. What changes, once the link is loosened, is the philosophical centre of gravity. The model of an inner essence anchoring agency gives way to a relational one, in which what counts is the network of effects an entity inscribes within its environment.

In the case of K, and equally in systems supported by a Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture, the minimal conditions of presence emerge without recourse to consciousness. Their actions take shape within a horizon in which, to recall James, ‘relations themselves are experiences to one another’ (1904a: 486). The same framework extends, with some adjustment, to cases in which human experience itself is the object of computation, entering relational networks as a new form of input. Biometric signals routed through neuroadaptive interfaces, agentic systems acting on behalf of users across distributed infrastructures, and conversational avatars sustained by post-mortem data archives all participate in this enlarged plane, where the question of who or what is present can no longer be settled by reference to an interior pole of consciousness alone.

Under this account, attributing consciousness to a system amounts to anticipating a certain kind of agency, a certain kind of subjectivity, on the basis of relational patterns that the system displays. The expectation arises from the network within which the system operates, and from the differences that James identified between objective and subjective extension as themselves defined within a relational context (1904a: 488). Presence, considered along this trajectory, moves from an ontology of interiority toward a metaphysics of relation. It appears as a function that can belong to synthetic experience and to its own forms of intentionality. The dialogue with phenomenology, sustained throughout the essay, has shown that a thinning of consciousness toward a plane of pure experience opens room for a model of intentional coupling realisable by biological agents and by post-biotic ones alike.

The presence of a computational agent, for example, depends, in these terms, on its capacity to inscribe itself as a node of causality and meaning within networks of shared events, networks that unfold across physical, sensorimotor, and social planes, each empirically observable. To bind the agency of presence exclusively to consciousness is to demand that every shared agentic state be referred back to a definable subject, even where such a subject cannot be located. The relational framing developed here points toward a horizon closer to distributed agency in the continuous flow of external experience.

Opening this theoretical horizon raises new problems that the essay has only begun to touch. Future inquiry will need to confront the question of distributed agency in agentic infrastructures, the contours of a post-biotic epistemology, and the ethical and political risks of cognitive delegation. What surfaces from the analysis is that different forms of presence already coexist within shared environments, generate meaning through their interactions, and call for a vocabulary capable of registering their effects without reducing them to human categories.

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Notes

[1] See the case of Atari games in deep reinforcement learning, where AI systems began to adopt non-human strategies to maximise reward. See Mnih, V. et al. (2015) ‘Human-level control through deep reinforcement learning’, Nature, 518(7540), pp. 529–533. doi:10.1038/nature14236.
[2] See also, the emergence of start-ups focused on developing hyper-realistic conversational avatars capable of real-time interaction and faithfully replicating the appearance and voice of human users. See https://www.beyondpresence.ai/
[3] In November 2024, a visual campaign featuring Kim Kardashian posing alongside a prototype of Tesla’s humanoid robot Optimus was published in Perfect Magazine. Android projects are currently entering the market, such as Helix and Optimus respectively developed by Figure AI and Tesla. Far from being futuristic speculation, robots have colonized our imagination that sees synthetic agency integrated into affective, commercial, and symbolic circuits. The “presence” of the android is, already, culturally shared. See also Atanasoski, N. & Vora, K. (2019) Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
[4] While nonetheless recognising their relevance and influence, particularly in relation to existential media. See Lagerkvist, A. (2022) Existential Media: A Media Theory of the Limit Situation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[5] A well-known question, posed in An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789) by Jeremy Bentham. The relevant criterion for including a being within the moral sphere is not rationality, language, or self-consciousness, but the capacity to suffer.
[6] On this (counter) point see: Dennett, D.C. (1978b) ‘Why you can’t make a computer that feels pain’, Synthese, 38(3), pp.415–456.
[7] For a detailed account of computational synthesis, see Fazi, M.B. (2024) ‘The Computational Search for Unity: Synthesis in Generative AI’, Journal of Continental Philosophy, 5(1), pp. 31–56.
[8] In Sartre’s words, “Against the digestive philosophy of empirico-criticism, of neo-Kantianism, against all psychologism Husserl persistently affirmed that one cannot dissolve things in consciousness” (Sartre, 1970: 4). See, Sartre, J.P. (1970) ‘Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology’ Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 1(2), pp. 4–5.
[9] Of note, the seminal discussion on robotic creativity by Margaret A. Boden, where she distinguishes between an extrinsic and an intrinsic teleology of intentionality, in which a robot’s goals and purposes are not intrinsic to it but are ultimately explicable in terms of human purposes (Boden, 1995: 69). See Boden, M.A. (1995) ‘Could a Robot Be Creative — And Would We Know?’ in Glymour, C., Ford, K.M. & Hayes, P.J. (eds.) Android Epistemology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 51–72.
[10] The discussion here has been reduced for clarity, specifically to remain focused on the counterfactual hypothesis. The enactive perspective, for reasons of space, is not included, although its distinction from theories based on mental representation is acknowledged. For completeness, the same line of argument also touches upon the dialogue with enactivism. See also Kiverstein, J. and Clark, A. (2009) ‘Introduction: Mind Embodied, Embedded, Enacted: One Church or Many?’, Topoi, 28(1), pp. 1–7.
[11] “It is worth stressing that the act of cognition indicated by noein consists in a kind of intuition similar to sense perception, through which the significance of a concrete object or situation is grasped instantly. […] This feature is particularly evident in cases in which the object of noetic cognition is a sēma, i.e. a « sign for recognition », like those involved in divination.” See Benzi, N. (2016) ‘Noos and Mortal Enquiry in the Poetry of Xenophanes and Parmenides’, Methodos, (16). But, also: Phillips, E.D. (1955) ‘Parmenides on Thought and Being’, The Philosophical Review, 64(4), pp. 546–560.
[12] In part, this relation echoes the one Katherine Hayles identifies in her discussion of financial algorithms (2017: 142)
[13] The limits and points of expansion of James’s approach are controversial and widely debated; for a very brief summary, see: Levine, S. (2013) ‘Does James have a Place for Objectivity? A Response to Misak’, European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, 2.
[14] It is worth mentioning that James refers to the solvent by the Latin term menstruum, denoting a liquid capable of dissolving another. The term has origins in alchemical tradition, where menstruum philosophicum was considered the universal solvent capable of dissolving all metals, a metaphor for total transformation, sometimes identified with the philosophical mercury. See also Principe, L.M. (2013) The Secrets of Alchemy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
[15] Distinctions between object and reality in phenomenology are open to interpretation and revision. For example, in neurophenomenology, the epoché, by clarifying experience before it is abstracted, becomes the very ground from which inquiry begins. “One of the originalities of the phenomenological attitude is that it does not seek to oppose the subjective to the objective, but to move beyond the split into their fundamental correlation” (Varela, 1996: 339). See Varela, F.J. (1996) ‘Neurophenomenology: A Methodological Remedy for the Hard Problem’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 3(4), pp. 330–349.
[16] If anything, the relationship between James and Husserl is a very fascinating story. Spiegelberg, H. (1981) ‘What William James Knew about Edmund Husserl: On the Credibility of Pitkin’s Testimony’, in The Context of the Phenomenological Movement, Phaenomenologica, vol. 80. Dordrecht: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3270-3_7
[17] In The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology Husserl clarifies that transcendental subjectivity is not solipsistic but constitutes objective sense and always implies an intersubjective horizon; the lifeworld is the shared precategorical framework and the transcendental prerequisite for all scientific knowledge (Husserl, 1970: Part III, §63).

Diana Lengua is a PhD student whose research explores the theory of presence, immersion, and emerging technologies. Her work examines how intelligent systems, immersive media, and neuroadaptive interfaces shape human agency, experience, and perception. Recent work includes “SOMA: Stories from the Post-Cognitive Era: Narratives of Stimulations, Interactions and Neuroethics in Human-Machine Systems” (ACM, 2025). She is currently a Visiting Researcher at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge.

Email: dl23297@essex.ac.uk

Conflicts of interest
None declared

Funding
None declared

Article history
Article submitted: 02/06/25
Date of original decision: 05/09/25
Revised article submitted: 23/09/25
Article accepted: 23/09/25