Synesthetic Innerscapes

Abstract

When we speak of an “inner world,” we are trying to capture something that is to some extent more than metaphorical. We allude to the phenomenologically rich (and worldlike) sensation of being situated in the perspectival unfolding of spatiotemporal relations with inner sounds, images, past or imagined experiential settings. On the other hand, our inner experience has an elusive, underdetermined, and vaporous quality (Hurlburt and Schwitzgebel 2007). How can we build on the similarities between outer and inner worlds so that the latter can be enactively navigated as the former? This chapter argues that narrative, as a mean of extended introspection (see chapter 1.3), can have a role in stabilizing perceptual elements in inner experience into a worldlike ecology. The scope of this chapter is to provide a theory of Beckett’s narrative terraforming engineering, which transforms the mind into a perceptual, embodied, multisensory ecology or what the author terms an enactive innerscape. Once transformed into a world, however, Beckett’s mental kingdom acquires its own natural laws, such as the cross-sensory synaesthetic activation of sounds and voices. A reading of Beckett’s innerscapes as the result of introspective modeling terraforming might cast some additional light on this perceptual principle. The chapter begins by introducing the scientific debate about the use of spatial or geographical mind metaphors: on their possibilities or limitations in capturing the nature of mind and inner experience.