Media theory.

Presence Without Consciousness

Media theory. June 22, 2026 Diana Lengua

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...