• EM.Forster - The Machine Stops - intuition about future social media and interconnected devices.
• Telepresence and communication devices increase the doubt about reality, everything is virtual and flat - is it the real world? Or perhaps we are even a brain in a vat? This stems from the western view on perception, based on Descartes. Discoveries of the Late 16th and Early 17th century like the Microscope and Telescope influenced Descartes's doubt.
• Heidegger - It makes no sense to ask Descartes's question, because a human must be a being in the world in order to question about it.
• Davidson - Mental content cannot appear without a world and people around it.
• Descartes was also doubting what he's seeing through the window are automated machines dressed in cloaks and hats.

“Now, as more and more of our perception becomes indirect, read off various sorts of distance sensors and then presented by means of various sorts of displays, we are coming to realize how much of our knowledge is based on inferences that go beyond the evidence displayed on our screens. We see that the reality mediated by this tele-technology can always be called into question. Indeed, skepticism is increasingly reasonable in the face of the growing variety of illusions and tele-experiences now available.”

• Telegarden induces skepticism??? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCEC1tfc5Jc
• Maybe we will need epistemology again to learn how can we tell something is real. (Deep Fakes?). We will start to doubt everything.
• Or maybe we will actually start to appreciate the direct encounters more? Check Malpas - Acting at a Distance and Knowing From Afar. - Teletechonlogic is parasitic in our richer involvement? Fetishism?
• John Hagueland - Mind embodied and embedded - The problem is not the bandwidth but the indirectness will always be there, leading to skepticism.
• Merleau-Ponty, we do not notice ourselves and subject when everything goes well - Argon Gurshwitsch + Flow!.
• The embodied mind - Enactivism + mindfulness!
• Telepresence and Merleau-Ponty's maximum grip - how to get the maximum grip of something at a distance? rich feedback etc, with rich feedback we might still have the philosophical argument that we are brains in a vat, but they remain philosophical. Or do they? Maybe something is missing?
• Borgman - Information nearness and farness - repleteness - vertical richness (VERTICAL - WEIL! Incarnation. Jesus), continuity - width of richness , as opposed to shallow and discontinuous [DISCRETE! SENSORS!!]
• Also risk is missing. Vulnerability. Readiness - Merleau Ponty's Urdoxa.
• Intercorporeality!! - John Canny and Eric Paulos

“full-bodied presence is not just the feeling that I am present at the site of a robot I am controlling through real-time interaction. Nor is it just a question of giving robots surface sensors so that, through them as prostheses, we can touch other people without knocking them over. Even the most gentle person/robot interaction would never be a caress, nor could one successfully use a delicately controlled and touch-sensitive robot arm to give one’s kid a hug. Whatever hugs do for people, I’m quite sure tele-hugs won’t do it. And any act of intimacy mediated by any sort of prosthesis would surely be equally grotesque if not obscene.”

• What is missing relates to childhood development? Experience with the perceptual world? Or the sense of risk?