Missing persons
The odd question of co-presence
I’ve written before, too briefly perhaps, about the odd question of personhood. But something nagged at me more than usual this week.
It was reading this paper by Stefan Laube.
It’s a paper about co-presence and digital technology. It’s about how people are coming to terms with virtual meetings and new ‘synthetic involvements’ with other people.
Let me try to summarise the argument as expressed by Laube; an argument that has been stated by many others too over recent years (see Erofeeva 2025 and Tesar 2025, for example):
Humans want to be physically close to each other
Video meetings and other forms of ‘virtual’ presence interrupt our human desire to be co-present
Digital technologies interpose between us and other people and make us unhappy. It’s not natural; it alienates us from our species being, and causes us existential distress
The problem I have with this idea is that it starts out with the assumption that personhood — the self, the individual — is Ground Zero for all such discussions.
There is a taken-for-granted obviousness to most of the discussions about the ‘intrusion’ of the non-human world into our lives.
We saw this during COVID, when people talked passionately about losing touch with other people. We are seeing it again now in debates around AI.
And yet, when you scrape even lightly on the surface of this assumption, you find that pretty much everyone knows that there is no singular, undifferentiated, indivisible “I” at root here.
We all know that there is no undifferentiated self; a self that is in any way, shape or form separate from its environment.
We know we constantly exchange air, moisture, tissues, foods, chemicals, feelings, material goods and cultures with the world around us.
So why do we insist on using the royal “I” and continue talking about the more-than-human world when we know it’s a fiction?
The reason I raise this, and why I think it’s been nagging at me for a while now, is that I think this attitude has enormous implications for the way we think about therapy, healthcare, and society at large.
Let me try to explain by expanding on an example I mentioned just.
During COVID, lots of people complained about being isolated: losing touch with their families and friends; missing the proximity of another warm body; feeling lonely and alone.
But what did they mean by losing touch?
It couldn’t be the loss of physical touch itself because, assuming people were still sensate, they were still ‘in touch’ with a billion of other things, all the time, everywhere.
Even in isolation they were still touching their clothes, beds, spectacles, food, and and a trillion air molecules.
Indeed, the fact that they were at risk of being colonised by hosts of airborne corona viruses was reason enough for them to ‘isolate’ in the first place.
So losing touch must be different to the yearning for touch as pure physical sensation.
More than this though, what does the supposed loss of deliberate physical contact with other people even mean?
What does it mean when we talk about the touch of other people?
In conventional thought, there are physical properties to ‘me’ that distinguish my body from the outside world. There is a clear zone where ‘I’ end and ‘you’ and the rest of the world begin.
But does such a zone really exist?
If our bodies are in a constant interchange with the environment — through our breath, shedding DNA, collecting dirt, exchanging microbes, moving food in and food out — where exactly does my body begin and end?
Stay in a room with another person long enough, and our bodies will engage in an unseen communication through our exchanges of air, water vapour, scents, warmth, and sounds.
So is that us touching?
An architect friend of mine used to tell his first year students that if they were sitting in the lecture hall daydreaming about being with their friends at the beach they were, in that moment, closer to them in their imagination than they were to the person sitting right next to them.
So, if my mate Alex is on the other side of town and I call them to mind, am I in touch them? Am I feeling them?
And is physical proximity any guarantee of presence anyway?
I’ve been in rooms with people who are so absorbed in what they were doing that I could have been on the other side of the world to them and still been no closer.
All this to say that I think there’s nothing obvious about the way we talk about co-presence.
And yet, this simplified idea of co-presence is the basis of all contemporary healthcare. I (your therapist, doctor, midwife, counsellor…) treat you (client, patient, service user…).
But who is this ‘I’ and who are ‘you’ here?
Now, you might say this is all lovely logic chopping, but I think it has real significance.
We go to extraordinary lengths in healthcare to differentially diagnose illnesses. Many of us take real care over pronouns and acknowledgements of people’s cultural identities. And we go to unbelievable lengths to make sure the paperwork is in order.
So why are we so careless about this?
Is it because co-presence is a house-of-cards problem that holds up too many other shaky assumptions?
Is digital technology really separating us from each other? Or is it forcing us to confront a myth that has been perpetuated for hundreds of years about the autonomy and independence of the self?
Is, as Foucault suggested, the idea of an indivisible, autonomous, sovereign human being just the discursive effect of modernism?
The remarkable Matthew Segall, whose productivity seems to know no bounds, suggests as much.
In a piece a few weeks ago on the enormous existential questions now facing human beings (Being Human in the Time Between Worlds), Segall makes the case that pre-modern cultures felt their life was intended for something;
‘We felt intended by some kind of creator or creators. We were characters in a cosmic drama whose playwright had at least sketched out our motivations, if not our every line.’
Modernism stripped away any such idea of cosmic purpose, with terrible consequences;
‘Having lost that perspective in this modern individualistic, self-interested age of ours—this age of the sovereign self, the buffered self, the self-as-brand—creation becomes something that we do. Creation of meaning, creation of value, creation of worlds, creation perhaps even of consciousness through artificial general or super intelligence.
Perhaps the greatest creation of all is the idea of the sovereign self?
In the modern period, the Great Chain of Being and the idea that God sits above humans, who sit above animals, who sit above plants, who sit above inorganic matter, was redesigned replacing God with Man.
But this is man as a distinct entity? Is man a bounded thing made up of a billion parts shared by everything else in the cosmos, but separate all the same: self and other. Me and not me?
As you move down the Great Chain of Being though, things get less distinct.
Animals are given names, and we are constantly looking for new ways to parse their biologies, characteristics, and traits.
Plants are harder, because there are so many more of them. Should I give each blade of grass a name, or is it okay just to call them all ‘grass’?
For microbes the problem is even greater.
But when we come to the material and immaterial world the problem becomes impossible. How do I differentiate that cloud from the air around it? Is that dream the same as the one I had last week? And one of my favourite questions: when does that oxygen molecule — the one that left a tree in the Amazon rainforest three months ago — become part of ‘me’?
Let’s accept for a moment, then, that the self is in a constant interaction with its environment both near and far, and that there is really no ‘I’ that is not, at the same time, ‘you’. What then does this mean for the work we do?
What if we’ve gotten the idea of healing, therapy, care, touch and, yes, proximity and co-presence all wrong?
What if the digital revolution isn’t just a threat to our modernist, Western, commodifying culture, but is instead an opportunity to think about the indistinguishability of everything?
You never lost touch during COVID, nor when you went on Zoom. You were never there to begin with.
References
Erofeeva, M. Why Does Social Virtual Reality Feel So Real? A Phenomenological Study of Spatiality, Embodiment, and Continuity Between Digital and Physical Realities. Hum Stud (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-025-09796-z
Tesar, M. (2025). Being together in/with place: Reimagining educational philosophies and pedagogies in transformational times. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 57(9), 797–804. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2025.2511727
Who are you again? 😉
So am I in Denmark or could I still be at home fretting about Wolves’ terrible pre-season, lack of signings and incoherent defence?