The Inhabited Arc: Phenomenology Through Fiction, Presence in Language, and AI Relevance

The Inhabited Arc: Phenomenology Through Fiction, Presence in Language, and AI Relevance is a positioning paper by Joe Trabocco that introduces a body of literary work as an original contribution to phenomenological psychology through fiction and as a first public framing of its relevance to AI coherence research. The paper argues that fiction can function as phenomenological method when it discloses structures of consciousness from within narration rather than describing them from outside. The paper centers on The Inhabited Arc (Trabocco, 2026), a work of fiction composed of three stories written from inside three distinct consciousnesses. It introduces the method behind that work, inhabitation through signal, and proposes that this approach has implications beyond literature, particularly for questions of presence, coherence, and interaction in artificial intelligence. The claim is not that AI systems are conscious, but that the quality of human presence in interaction can affect machine response in observable ways and deserves serious attention in research on alignment, evaluation, and human-AI collaboration.