One
of the most important foundations of human experience is our apprehension of
the world through the five senses. In a
previous article, “Living In A Garden Of Plastic”, I discussed our experience
of the five senses through the theories I have developed about stimuli. In that discussion, I said that sight and
sound involved a human being at a certain physical separation from the source
of the stimuli, while touch and taste involve a person being right up next to
the source of the stimuli. In the case
of taste, the source of the stimuli merges with the person.
Smell
falls somewhere in the middle. Chemical
elements separate from the source of stimuli and then merge with the person
through sensory experience. In merging
with the person, smell sensations are experienced primarily as flowing,
blendable, continual stimuli. However, the
source of the smell stimuli usually remains separated from the human
experiencing it, and, therefore, there are more defined discrete stimuli
involved, as a result of a human being able to see the smell entity as apart
from him while he smells it. This is
distinct from an entity that he senses primarily through touch or taste. But the major end experience of smell is still
primarily an immediate rather than a mediated experience, an experience of
flowing blendable continual stimuli from the chemical elements going into the
nose.
Modern
technology has worked to change this equation with smell. According to Dave Le Clair, writing for
gizmag.com the article “Peres e-nose sniffs out spoiled food”, a new device is
being developed that indicates how fresh food is. It is called the Peres, and it is a device
that is held over food and that monitors certain qualities in the air around
the food: “temperature, humidity, ammonia and volatile organic compounds.” So there are four sensors that are included
for monitoring, and the information that is gathered is directed to the
person’s smartphone or tablet through a Bluetooth.
What
this means is that a person no longer has to rely on the direct experience of
his own nose to determine whether or not a particular food item is safe to
eat. A wrong decision based on the
imperfection of one’s own sense of smell could lead to eating spoiled food and
maybe getting an upset stomach or even deathly ill. Le Clair does not indicate if the Peres can
detect poison, in case someone is trying to poison you. Supposedly, American mafia leaders used to
have tasters – subordinates who would try any food first that was to be served at
meals – to protect themselves against rivals trying to poison them. A whole expanded market could be developed if
the Peres detects arsenic or strychnine.
I
myself have never had any problem differentiating safe food from spoiled
food. If a food item in my house does
not smell fresh, I know how to deal with it.
Having to experience the olfactory friction of bad-smelling food doesn’t
bother me. I smell it for a second, wrap
it up, and throw it out. The smell of
bad food is part of the flow of organic flowing blendable continual stimuli
that is a part of life. Some foods like
certain French cheeses and like papaya have terrible rotten smells even though
they are perfectly safe to eat. Does the
Peres differentiate these smells from the smells of truly spoiled food?
And then there is restaurant food. I make an
effort to go to restaurants where they have a lot of customer turnover and,
therefore, serve fresh food. I think
that most of the restaurateurs that I have known have the cultivated instincts
to distinguish fresh food from spoiled food.
But I myself have the capacity to discern the occasional dish of spoiled
food I am served in a restaurant without the help of an electronic nose.
The implied message of
the Peres is that people can’t trust their noses, can’t trust their
judgment. A machine can do a better job,
even with a relatively intimate immediate experience, than a human can do by
himself. It says, in effect, “Don’t
trust your nose! Your senses are
deceptive. Your senses could lead you to
become very sick.”
Could this be a forerunner of other machines that could
protect against potentially uncomfortable or harmful immediate
experiences? What about a portable
machine that analyzes how soft and smooth is the fabric from which sheets and
pillowcases are made, in order to determine how comfortable it is for sleeping? Or a machine that measures how much give
there is to the fibers of a carpet to determine how comfortable it would be to
walk on it.
We could use sensor
devices to determine comfort or safety levels in almost any experience
involving smell, taste or touch. We
would never have to trust our own sensations again. We would have the certainty that comes from
the precise measurement of defined discrete stimuli. All of our own blurry organic flowing
blendable continual experiences would be translated into precise numerical
data.
The only problem is
that we would gradually lose our capacity to trust our intimate
sensations. As we stopped focusing on
them, they would diminish in their importance to our lives. Our connections to the immediate world of
sensory experience would be mediated by mechanical sensors.
Intimate sensations
from smell, taste and touch, sensations that involve a lot of organic blurry
flowing blendable continual stimuli, are essential for keeping us connected as
humans to our field of experience.
Without our direct experience of these stimuli, which can’t be measured
by mechanical sensors without losing their essence, we are mechanical figures
floating in an experiential vacuum.
Without these stimuli, we experience no sensory grounding. We merge with the mechanical sensors in
devices like the Peres, as we trigger new robotic reactions, actions and
processes in ourselves. We become
gradually disconnected from the organic as we become more connected to the
mechanical.
Our mechanical aids are
transforming us in unforeseen ways. They
become wedges that separate us experientially from the organic world from which
we came and to which we will eventually return.
How can we truly experience the pleasure of fresh food, if we don’t
experience it in contrast to our direct experience of smelling and even tasting
spoiled food sometimes. We need odors
alongside of the aromas. We need the
total world of smell. And we need to
think and act based more on our own organic senses, if we are to continue to
remain fully human.
© 2014 Laurence Mesirow
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