Zuckerberg thinks he knows what 'presence' is. Here's what it really is.

Consider Zuck’s Metaverse, where you can immerse yourself in a world that is “more open, more accessible, more natural, and more about human connection” for the price of the headset that cuts you off from the actual natural world around you. Then there is Google’s Gemini, where you can chat to your phone about recipes, about parenting, or get encouraging feedback about your work presentation, and let’s not leave out the proliferation of AI’s catering to the male service user, with online brothels boasting about a “world without feminism” (I’ll let you imagine what that means), and the AI companions (virtual girlfriends whose personality and body measurements you can modify), already used by millions of men.

The enthusiasm and bombast around this technology is immense. The makers are promising nothing less than a revolution in human consciousness, relationships, and productivity. The breakneck-speed competition to corner the market is dizzying. But there is one gloriously revealing sentence spoken by Mark Zuckerberg at the debut of Meta’s augmented reality glasses at the company’s annual conference that communicates the fundamental depravity, cynicism, and emptiness of this technology at its core. No, it’s not “in the Metaverse, you’ll be able to do almost anything you imagine” – although he did say that and that strikes me as underwhelming and terrifying in equal measure. I refer to this sentence he uttered on that day: “Feeling truly present with another person is the ultimate dream of social technology”.

Now, the first thing this reveals – and this is being kind to the speaker – is that he has no idea what he is talking about. The idea that technology is about true human connection, let alone presence, reveals how little its makers understand about connection or human beings. Again, this is being kind to the speaker, because the alternative explanation is that he understands precisely, and has thought nothing of implementing and spreading the technology that will foster deep disconnection, thereby keeping us coming back for more of his product. Let me explain.

When I teach students of counselling and psychotherapy I make sure to tell them one of the great truths of our existence, indeed the most relevant truth that these students, who are training to sit with another human being who is confused or in pain, need to know. They are often anxious about asking the right questions of a client, responding meaningfully, or not saying the wrong thing to a grieving client. I like to offer them some basic reassurance and remind them of a very basic truth of our existence, that I emphasise to them will always come to their aid when sitting with another human being. It’s in the quality of your being-with someone, not in what you say – I tell them. I like to sum up this truth with a very simple statement: “we are biology”.

From attachment theory, to recovery from trauma, to understanding why therapy works, we encounter one fact over and over again: our human brain is a socially-situated organ, shaped by evolution - and this part is crucial: to communicate with other brains around it. Attachment and early childhood trauma theory and research have investigated the consequence of what happens when an infant’s brain enters a world where the brains of caregivers are easily overwhelmed by the needs of the infant and as a consequence fail to attune to the needs of the infant, whose brain – in turn – learns from the response they receive from the caregiver. Having one’s needs recognised and attended to in infancy and childhood leads to the development of brain that can learn, can develop its organismic potential, such as higher-order executive functioning, while less-than-attuned responses lead to trauma-based learning (i.e. fear-based, or protection-based restrictive learning) and reactive behaviours. It is a simple truth of our existence: we are born into a world of other people, and our experience of ourselves and others is moderated within this interplay of neurological processes: one autonomic nervous system talking to another autonomic nervous system. When this happens we feel seen, our very existence reflected in the presence of another.

We depend on another human being to feel like we exist, simply due to this fact of our biological reality. We need another autonomic nervous system nearby, to begin to develop a sense of ourselves as an existing being. We are organisms, and we are social beings. Nietzsche sums this up in his trademark poetic style when he says that “everything can be found in isolation except sanity”. Our brains house complex neural networks that ‘light up’, that is, they become activated as we interact with others, even if just through observation. We have developed neural circuits that analyse what others are doing, what their motivations may be, which helps us postulate theories about others’ behaviours – a crucial aspect of being able to work well with others and of being able to protect ourselves. We have developed ‘mirror neuron’ circuitry – making us mimic behaviours and feel emotions that are likely going on for those we are interacting with. Humans are neurobiologically hard-wired for connection.

The phenomenon of ‘presence’ rests within this biological reality. Those writing about presence often reflect on the quality of ‘being-with’; to feel like I am present with you, and for you to feel my presence I have to show up without preconceived notions, fully open to being with your experience and to my experience of you. Presence is defined as bringing one’s whole self to the present moment and being fully in that moment with another. I can only attain that quality of ‘presence’ if my nervous system is calm (or regulated) enough to take in everything about what is happening for you in this moment. (For the astute reader, this is also the space where healing can happen, for if I can do that, if I can offer you my regulated nervous system, this will in turn calm your nervous system, if it is agitated, or ‘heightened’. And there we will be, two complex biological organisms, experiencing the moment together, adding it to our story of who we are.)

To the social media creators, and their position that social media will deliver presence and connection, this biological reality is a godsend. Using the words like ‘connection’ and ‘presence’, shows that they have obviously tapped into the absolute core of our humaneness. Sadly, this understanding has only allowed them to confidently and aggressively market ‘connection’, for they are not wrong that humans are in constant and dire need of it. We do not respond well to loneliness, nor to feeling alienated, but those will be the inevitable consequences of seeking ‘connection’ (let alone ‘presence’) from social media, or AI consciousness. Our impulse to connect is a deep-seated part of who we are, and if we waste it on technologically-moderated interactions, all we will find is increasing alienation from ourselves, and each other. We will blame ourselves, for our ‘social anxiety’, for our ‘awkwardness around others’, not realising that the program functions exactly as intended. There is no true connection with another through a screen, especially in our hour of need, or loneliness. We need another flesh-and-blood human with their emotional, sensorimotor and neurological circuits, to be able to experience presence and connection, to feel understood and seen. Like tree roots, sending nutrients to one another in the ground, or the mycelium networks in earth, our neurons seek other neurons to connect with across this social synapse. It’s just biology.