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Thank you!

Could you point me to some examples from these Chinese scholars, please?

The distinction between the senses is tenuous at best, and in my work I generalise taste and smell under the broader term chemosensing. This is necessary from an evolutionary point of view, since single-cell organisms don’t have tongues and noses!

Hi Dennis and George – interesting thread!

For my Master’s in Philosophy and AI, I used new findings from the science of olfaction to argue against the claim of ‘virtual realism’ that Chalmers puts forward in Reality+

Chalmers claims that fully immersive reality – indistinguishable from ordinary physical reality – is possible and likely to be achieved by the end of the century. That would require that all our sensory experiences can be simulated. However, smell resists digitisation. One reason for this is that smells are not substrate neutral. Another is that different states of the body impact how smells are perceived, but in Chalmers’ impure simulations, the body is left out of the system. Digital technologies assume a dualism between information and substrate. Smell complicates this dualism.

The major problem is that Chalmers uses only visual examples to support his arguments and assumes that visual perception can be generalised to the other senses. It can’t. Vision is already a form of virtual reality, in which the shape, size, texture, and location of objects are inferred from light reflected off their surfaces.

In my current research, I’m pursuing the idea that smell is a biological sense, attuned to metabolic processes. Smell, or chemosensing, is the most ancient of the senses and connects us in a living lineage with the most basic single-cell organisms. It helps to bridge the phenomenological gap in life-mind continuity as envisioned by Hans Jonas, who, in contrast to Whitehead, makes a strong distinction between living and non-living on the basis of metabolism, which is thought to give rise to inwardness, self-concern and purposiveness. If we take this point of view, then machines, which are not metabolic, will not have minds.

I’m intrigued to understand Whitehead better because his panexperientialist philosophy appears to undermine the direction of my argument. Nonetheless, it is my understanding his approach starts with understanding biological organism and then generalising it as a model of reality to the entire cosmos. This suggests that revising our understanding of biological organisms has implications for the generalisation, rather than the other way around…

That’s right, Jim. At least, it’s what I hope to achieve with my project! I think visual experience / visual consciousness gets in the way of imagining the experiences of very basic organisms that don’t have eyes and brains. Every cell has chemosensory capacity, so I believe smell is helpful in bridging this phenomenological gap.

I’ve noticed Whitehead makes use of auditory/musical metaphors when writing about abiotic organisms – vibrations, harmony, resonance etc.

Hi Jim! The connections between Whitehead’s process thought and Eastern philosophy is a great topic. It will be very interesting to hear your thoughts and observations.

😂 now I’m hungry…

I think this is a really important question, Rick. It’s something that I, too, would be fascinated to understand better.

@Joshua – it’s a definite yes from me for a further presentation on the topic and it would be very helpful to have some concrete examples of prehension and other terms. From my perspective, I will be trying to translate these into the phenomenological register of smell 🙂