Episode 66 - Smell with Benjamin Young

Transcript

Ellie: 0:07

Hello everyone and welcome to Overthink.

David: 0:10

The podcast where two friends love to philosophize.

Ellie: 0:14

I'm Professor Ellie Anderson

David: 0:16

And I'm Professor David Peña-Guzmán.

Ellie: 0:19

And we are here with you today to talk about smell. This is the fourth episode in our five part series on the senses, and this is actually the only one where we have an interview here on air on the podcast because as those of you who are regular Overthinkers know, we usually have a guest every few episodes, every four episodes, or so. And we are pairing, however, this series with a bunch of interviews with experts on our YouTube channel. And so we have an extended version of the interview that you're going to hear today over on YouTube, as well as some interviews with other experts. So if you like hearing from other experts directly, aside from just hearing our, um, voices, which, you know, hey hey hopefully you like those too, then uh, check that out.

David: 1:03

And so us to not make people wait for our wonderful voices. Let's get into the episode.

Ellie: 1:10

Okay. What's so special about smell? It lets us detect tiny nuances in the materials around us. Even the trace of things that are long gone, smell has a particular relation between distance and proximity. And you know, one way to think about this is how smells really can seem to be invading your private space when they're particularly strong.

David: 1:33

Invading. Yes.

Ellie: 1:35

Like, get it away from me. And you can't. It is just, you know, they're in your nostrils. And the philosopher Immanuel Kant had thoughts about this. He says, quote from Kant here, the man who pulls his perfumed handkerchief from his pocket treats all around to it, whether they like it or not.

David: 1:55

I, I love the example of the perfumed handkerchief. It just like dates him, so specifically.

Ellie: 2:01

It totally does. Yeah. And this is from Kant's Anthropology, and he talks about there, you know, in this handkerchief example, that taking something in through smell in the lungs is even more intimate than through the mouth or throat.

David: 2:14

Oh, I'm, I'm not sure that I agree with that, although there is a sense of impregnation of smell. I mean like in the sense that, you know, people talk about carrying the smell with them even afterwards. Like you can't get rid of it.

Ellie: 2:30

Oh, interesting.

David: 2:31

In the same way that when something passes through the mouth and the throat, then it gets pushed down and under and it doesn't linger as a presence on the surface for others to identify. But I totally agree with Kant that people who use perfume, whether or not it's on a handkerchief, are forcing other people to essentially join their smell experiment for the day.

Ellie: 2:54

Their olfactory adventure.

David: 2:56

Their olfactory performance. And the reason that I say this, I don't know if you know this about me, Ellie, but I am chemosensitive and that means that smells are basically an affront to my dignity as a Kantian rational agent. And.

Ellie: 3:11

That's a lot of words. Even tell, tell me what this is. What is chemosensitivity?

David: 3:14

Well, it just means that I, I am hypersensitive to chemicals that give out certain smells. So deodorants, perfumes, colognes, cleaning products. If they have a strong smell, they give me a headache. And for this reason, my partner is not allowed to wear perfumes or cologne or scented deodorant because when he used to do that at the beginning of our relationship, I would immediately get a headache that would last anywhere from a couple of minutes to up to an hour.

Ellie: 3:45

Dude was just like rolling in wreaking of cologne and you were like, you look hot from a distance. But I am not interested in getting close to you.

David: 3:54

No, it's even small traces. If I can detect the perfume or the cologne, I already, it's kind of like the same way that some people who smell cigarette smells, it already has an offensive quality to it.

Ellie: 4:09

Oh, I, I have a little bit of that. I, I, have, I find cigarette smoke when it's, the smell of it indoors. It's really bad. Like if somebody's smoking next to me, it's not that big of a deal. But if, if there's an apartment or hotel room permeated with it. Oof. That's rough.

David: 4:23

Well, and you know, yes, a lot of people are chemosensitive to varying degrees and the headaches are really intense. I recall when Axe body spray was a thing like back in the mid 2000s, I think.

Ellie: 4:34

The smell of middle school, the smell of puberty. I would, I would venture to say.

David: 4:40

The, the smell of, yes, of boys in heat, basically. Um, and there were a number of schools that had to ban Axe body spray because all these horny teenagers, most of them between like 11 and 15 probably were dousing themselves with liters and liters of the spray, thinking that it was replete with pheromones because it was marketed. And so they thought that if they put on a ton of Axe body spray, it would make all the girls just lose control and throw themselves at their feet.

Ellie: 5:09

David, I'm sorry. There's so much to unpack there. First off, the fact that you said between 11 and 15 probably like you just hazarded a guess about this specific age, rather than just saying like tween, but then also the fact I, I didn't know that they were literally banned at schools because of their offensive odor.

David: 5:28

Yes.

Ellie: 5:28

Although good on the principal for that.

David: 5:31

Well, uh, so the guess on the age is just because I didn't go to middle school in the US so I don't really know the cutoff. Um, I came to the US when I was already in high school, so I assume it's like 11 to 15.

Ellie: 5:40

Just love that you felt you needed a specific age range.

David: 5:44

Yes, I need a visual for people to know the kind of boy that I'm talking about. But the stench was so bad that the teachers were getting these massive headaches. And just let me read you very quickly, this news report from 2013 about one of these schools closing down because of the stench of Axe body spray.

Ellie: 6:04

The school, the school closed down or, or they just had to ban Axe body spray?

David: 6:09

Well, in this case, it was a schoolwide shutdown. And that's a quote from the passage that I'm about to—

Ellie: 6:15

What? Okay. Okay.

David: 6:16

So here we go. So imagine this in a journalistic voice. It is hardly news that pre-pubescent boys have no idea how to properly administer Axe body spray. It is news when said inappropriate Axe use causes a schoolwide shutdown. Eight students were hospitalized, two others were taken to their own doctors after somebody released the especially pungent body spray in a

sixth grade classroom at 1: 6:43

00 PM. Emergency Crews rushed to Medgar Evers College preparatory school in Brooklyn to investigate the quote hazardous smell. This isn't the first time that Axe body spray has terrorized educational facilities.

Ellie: 7:06

I feel like the unsung, one of the many unsung difficulties of being a middle school teacher, which is already known as a difficult profession, is having to deal with the invasive odors that are being, you know, that you're being kind of with at all moments or, or lunged with, let's say.

David: 7:23

Uh, yeah. And the fact that people went to the hospital, in this case, just the cherry on top.

Ellie: 7:28

Yeah, eight students.

David: 7:30

And this isn't the first time that Axe body spray has terrorized educational facilities.

Ellie: 7:35

Oh my God. Today we are talking about smell.

David: 7:42

Why has smell been undervalued in Western philosophy?

Ellie: 7:45

How do we perceive smells? Given that unlike typical tactile objects, they don't have neat spatial temporal boundaries?

David: 7:53

We bring on philosopher Benjamin Young to discuss his research on the sense of smell and what we can learn from this special sense. Smells have always been undervalued in the west. They have been considered primitive and animalistic as well as just uninteresting and unimportant all around.

Ellie: 8:14

They just obviously hadn't read the Axe body spray story.

David: 8:17

Obviously a major breakthrough in the history philosophy and our interpretation of smell as a community. But one of your students, Ellie, Emilio Esquivel Marquez did amazing research for us for this particular episode based on a summer research project that he did on the philosophy of smell. So we want

Ellie: 8:36

Shout out to Emilio. Thank you.

David: 8:38

Yes, we want to thank Emilio for, um, his amazing work. And Emilio notes in his research that Darwin describes smell as barely of any service to humanity. He notes that the sense of smell is more highly developed among what he calls savages, you know, typical 19th century

Ellie: 8:58

Yeah. Ouch.

David: 8:59

Scientific proto anthropological language. But that even for them, for the so-called savages, it's not even all that helpful. And so it's basically useless. And this prejudice against smell was reinforced over time by new associations that happened in the 19th century between smell and sickness in particular. In the 19th century, whenever there were public health epidemics, they usually created extremely stinky urban centers, which then became the base for people calling for new and systematic sanitation movements, which eventually led to today's deodorized modernism, the kind of hyper sanitized space that that we inhabit. But that was not the case in the 19th century. And at the time, the connection between smell and sickness was often couched in terms of class. So people would denigrate classes they were considered smelly. And the philosopher Larry Shiner talks about this association between smell and class and talks about what he calls the dialectic of deodorization, which is that as anti smell sentiments spread, people became much more sensitive to smells themselves and then clamored for the removal of smells from public and private space. So the more you smell, the less you want it to smell.

Ellie: 10:24

David, I hate to break it to you, but this makes me think that your chemo sensitivity is classist.

David: 10:30

Um, and I dunno, it, it, maybe it is my own internalized class anxiety. I just want to live in a hermetic space populated only by 1% smells.

Ellie: 10:40

I want to read a theoretical analysis, taking the Axe body spray case as an example of classism. Like the, the boys wouldn't have sent eight people to the hospital if they'd been wearing Le Labo or something.

David: 10:53

What, that? Le Labo?

Ellie: 10:56

Uh, it's a fancy perfume brand.

David: 10:57

Oh wow. I am at the level of Axe bodyspray. I'm one of those kids.

Ellie: 11:01

You're, you're at the level of Mariah Carey's perfume line.

David: 11:05

I didn't even know that she had one.

Ellie: 11:07

Speaking of, we do interview a perfumer in our YouTube channel. But anyway, okay, this is now just sounding like a plug, is totally. One thing I learned from a Emilio's research is that the prejudice that you're talking about, David, was not always true. This prejudice towards deodorization, because before the Enlightenment perfumes in Europe tended towards the stinky and the animalistic. So nowadays we tend to think about perfume as masking body odor, or perhaps as introducing a foreign smell to the body, right? Like I want to smell like roses or Palo Santo. But back in the day, they were often used to enhance natural bodily smells. And so there was this, this thing called ambergris, which is a lump that sperm whales throw up.

David: 11:54

Yes, I've read about that. I've read about that. Yes.

Ellie: 11:57

So you know from our disgust episode that I have a bit of a phobia of vomit, so it describe this, but this lump that sperm whales throw up used to be popular before the 19th century rise of floral perfumes as a personal scent. And apparently it smells disgusting, unsurprisingly, but it was meant to amplify the human animal scent rather than disguise it. And ambergris wasn't the only kind of perfume like this at the time. Musk, which has a famously excremental scent, also something called civet were among the most popular perfumes before the 19th century.

David: 12:33

Wait, what is civet?

Ellie: 12:34

It's a lean, mostly nocturnal animal, native to tropical Asia and Africa.

David: 12:39

Okay, well, I know that in the history of perfumery, they used a lot of very different

Ellie: 12:44

It's a glandular secretion produced by both sexes of the civet species. I'm sorry, I totally interrupted you. That just needed to throw that in there. Continue David.

David: 12:53

No, but I mean, so in the world of perfumery before this shift to completely synthetic perfumes, which happened in the early 20th century with, uh, Chanel number five, that was the first all synthetic perfume.

Ellie: 13:04

Oh.

David: 13:05

Before that, they would have to look in nature for smelly substances. And yeah, you can get some flowers to do that, but the most smelly substances are animal byproducts. So like throw up of whales, the anal sacks of goats and other mammals. And, sorry, I want to, I don't want to trigger your disgust reflex here. So the point here being that there is a historicity to smells that doesn't match our contemporary values around what smells good or bad. And if you push it actually back further to the Greeks, the pendulum once again swings the other way. In terms of what was considered good or bad about perfumes. So for the Greeks, the function of perfumes really was to mask odors, kind of like it is today, but not necessarily even bad odors, just odors in general. And the reason was that odors or odoricity was thought to be the main difference or one of the main differences between mortals and the gods. And that's why we need perfumes. Uh, we, the mortals, it's precisely to mask our animal smells, which are reminders of our inherent mortality. So we have this animal body that is finite, that is decaying, and that is becoming smelly with time. And so with perfumes, we conceal our animality and we mask our own mortality. Diane Ackerman talks about this in her book, A Natural History of the Senses.

Ellie: 14:42

Yeah, I feel like in a sense the history of philosophy of smell, or in this case the culture of odor, is deeply wrapped up in our desire to distinguish ourselves from the non-human animals. And so we have what you were just talking about, David, and we also have in a very different regard, back to Kant for a moment, this idea in the history of aesthetics or philosophy of art that smells can't be objects of aesthetic appreciation because the perception of them is too linked to the body, this, this kind of animal body. And so Kant excludes smell from the domain of aesthetic appreciation because it's not only too bodily, but also too internal and too subjective. And he says, I'm going to read you another Kant quote here, which is less juicy than the handkerchief quote, but I, I think also serves a purpose here, which is that smells do not, quote serve as a way of coming to know the object, but only to be sensible of my own state, end quote. So he thinks that what smells are actually doing is encouraging us to turn our attention to how our own bodies are affected by them, rather than encourage us to attend to the object itself. He thinks that in the case of vision, for instance, we are oriented towards the object. But in the case of smell, and he also includes taste here, we are oriented back towards ourself.

David: 16:10

I see. So this would be an emotivist theory of smell where you know, I smell something and rather than thinking about the object that is producing the smell, I just think either, ugh, gross, or yay, that's aromatic. And so it only gives me insight about myself rather than, than the world. And

Ellie: 16:27

Yeah. And not even, yay, that's aromatic, but, oh, look how my body is affected by smelling that. Right. So it's even less focused on the object.

David: 16:36

I see, I see. And I mean, that makes sense relative to Kant's philosophical system because for Kant, beauty really has to do with disinterested appreciation of a work of art or of something beautiful. But we can never reach that point with smells. And the reason is that smells are just too powerful and they penetrate. Earlier I, I talked about impregnation. Uh, here we have a slightly different way to think about it, but similar, they, they really penetrate the nose and we experience them as necessarily positive or negative, right? I've never smelled something that didn't seem either slightly positive or slightly negative at the very least, there are no such things as neutral smells. We just don't think that we're smelling in that case. And so it means that we can only experience smells as interested parties, meaning that we never get the kind of distance that for Kant is necessary for aesthetic judgment.

Ellie: 17:36

And if you're inclined to think that Kant is just being a snob here, and maybe he is, who knows? But thing that I think about is the many situations in which a smell really does feel so personal and does throw me back upon myself that I am unable to appreciate it as an aesthetic object. So for instance, speaking of fancy perfumes, this is far from Axe body spray territory. Um, my first boyfriend in college, whom I have talked about in the heteropessimism episode. So if you want to backstory for why this person was not a very good person, you can listen to that episode, although it didn't even go into like that much detail.

David: 18:16

After enough episodes, we will be able to piece together the collage that is Ellie's inner life.

Ellie: 18:22

I know, right? So he wore Tom Ford's Black Orchid, which was an extraordinarily iconic perfume at the time. It was unisex, et cetera. So the person who wore this was not a very good boyfriend. Things did not end well. And I remember a couple of months after we broke up going to my local mall and just out of curiosity to like have a moment of nostalgia opening up the perfume at Sephora and smelling it and running, fleeing from Sephora in tears, because it brought me back so much. It was such an overpoweringly visceral experience that I was transported both emotionally and also physically by fleeing the Sephora.

David: 19:11

Well, no, and I think this is a really good example of what Kant means when he says that smells cannot be objects of aesthetic appreciation. Because in this case, as long as you are reminded about and crying over your ex and also fleeing the Sephora, you just don't have the kind of relationship to the perfume, to this Black Orchid that would allow you to determine whether or not it is beautiful or whether it is ugly. Your emotions just get in the way of your aesthetics. So for Kant if you want to be a good philosopher of art, you have to be cool and collected, and above all, unemotional.

Ellie: 19:48

Not an object of aesthetic appreciation for me.

David: 20:11

We are super excited about our conversation today with Ben Young, who is an associate professor at the University of Nevada Reno, my alma mater. So there is a connection here between Ben and I. And there he teaches in the Department of Philosophy and in the Institute for Neurosciences, work often over the line between philosophy and science. And he is the author of several articles about olfaction which is the subject for today's interview. Currently, he's finishing a book that is tentatively titled Stinking Philosophy. So hopefully we'll talk about that title Stinking Philosophy. Is it that philosophy stinks or is it that we want to stink up philosophy? So we'll get to some of these questions. Ben, thank you so much for, for being with us today.

Benjamin: 20:58

Thank you so much for having me.

David: 21:00

One of the places where it makes sense to begin is with what in your work you call the olfactory object. Most of us have this folk understanding of what it is that we're smelling. When we are smelling, uh, we think we know what is happening, but in reality we are typically mistaken about the object of our olfactory perception. And so I want you to talk to us a little bit about that folk understanding that we have, how it leads us astray in thinking about olfaction, and how you understand the nature of the olfactory object? This is a very complicated question as you can already see. And then how all of this fits into the history of the philosophy of smell. So what kind of intervention are you making?

Benjamin: 21:49

Okay. Yeah, so I certainly did say that there's this folk conception and it gets most everything wrong. I don't know if I still would stand by that. I don't know if we actually have a uniform folk conception of what smells might be right and far be it from a philosopher who spends all their time like reading and writing for almost like 15 years now about smell to tell everyone else what they think. That being said, I'm pretty sure that our everyday conception of smells are heavily mediated by our being visually dominant and that we use language and vision to think about and theorize and navigate our environments all the time. And in that sense, when we start talking about what objects are in reality, then visions turns out to be the default. And on the default account of what we think objects are on an everyday basis, they're kinds of things that you would pick up and manipulate. And the way that, at least vision scientists usually refer to these things, is they're entities. They're things that have boundaries and edges, right? They're the things that you can manipulate to some extent. And in that sense, if you were thinking about everyday objects, you probably have a cell phone right within arms reach. When we start thinking about objects in a visual sense, and we talk about these, we're usually talking about them as things that exist in reality with clear boundaries, and they have some sort of spatial connection to us, relative to our bodies, right? Either how we manipulate them or how we're located relative to them. I think that whole picture goes out the window when you start thinking about smells. Smells aren't the same kinds of things. You don't really manipulate smells. You don't pick them up and move them around, right? And at the same time, it turns out to be, you can have an experience, a smell of things at a great distance. So one of my favorite examples about how smells will change at great distances is coming from Reno to the north California coast, you start off in an arid desert, um, and it has its own shrubbery, right? And it has a certain smell to it. And then you get up into the Sierras, and then you have the pine smell of the Sierras, and eventually you hit right, the central plain and you get that smell of all the agriculture, right? And then eventually you hit like the north Cal coast, right? You get the smell of a different pine smell and the eucalyptus and the briny ocean. Now in that sense, there's going to be a point towards the end where you can smell the bay, right? Or you can smell the Pacific Ocean well before you can see it. And that's not like the usual visual objects. So we can smell things at great distances from us and report that we're smelling them. At the same time smells are weird because we can walk in them, right? I mean, most visual objects you can't inhabit. So I like to talk about these in terms of you're kind of in this odorous plume, but it's a sea of smells. So you're constantly surrounded by smells and there's these different air currents, right? And somehow we are in that. But that's hard to think about from like a visual standpoint, right? Cause there's not many objects that you would say you can visually inhabit. So the difficulty we run into when we start even thinking about smells is that the background assumptions that we have to talk about smells don't look like the ones that we would have from vision. And where I think the folk conception, at least in English goes wrong, is we say we smell the object, we smell the orange. So you say, oh, I've got an orange smell. And then you think what you're actually smelling is that orange over there on the table, right? Or the ocean as you're sitting on the beach. So in those instances, the wonder's going to be what exactly is the smell? Cause there's certainly a sense in which the orange isn't lodged in your nose. And there's a certain sense in which even though you're taking in the smell of the ocean or the plumes from the ocean, right? It's not directly that thing out there. So we usually refer to the objects in terms of the source, but I think the source gets things wrong.

Ellie: 25:52

That's such an evocative example. And you talk about the background assumptions that we have involving smell make me think about the way that philosophy as a discipline, both is what allows us to really question and identify our background assumptions, but often can also be the discipline that trickles into daily life in a way that background assumptions get created right by ideas in the history of philosophy that are somehow misguided. So can you tell us a little bit about how smell has been seen in the history of philosophy?

Benjamin: 26:24

There's not much within philosophy. There's neglective smell, but there was a great time where smells were talked about. So of course, Plato and Aristotle are going to factor in any historical account, right? Where we have to go back to the, as people would say, right, the originals, because we're footnoting that we're something. And I think by default, most contemporary people are more like Plato than Aristotle. So Plato has this claim that really the olsanctuary qualities of smell don't really have qualities. The only basic categories of smell are just whether or not they're pleasant or unpleasant, or whether or not they have a good valence or bad valence. But what he does say regarding the odor object itself, is that the odor object is a matter of the original source object, diffusing and giving off parts. This seems to be the folk conception to some extent, right? Plato probably nails that as the original folk philosopher, right? Where he goes, hey, it's not that you're smelling the actual orange, right, or the ocean? You're smelling parts of that that has detached into a vaporous cloud and then the vaporous cloud gets stuck in your nose and that's what you smell. Aristotle on the other hand, wasn't exactly sure how to characterize the qualitative character question, but given his general claim that what you're smelling is going to be some sort of medium or what you're seeing is the form of matter as it transmits through something, he claims that what we have is these things called flavorful entities and flavorful then entities then go through this medium of air, or water because he wants to account for aquatic species being able to smell as well. And so it's going to be the same kind of flavorful entity that's going to go, either go through the medium of air or water for us to be able to, in the end, smell it. But what is really fascinating about Aristotle is he's not clear on whether or not smell should be considered to be a distal sense or a proximal sense. Whether or not we are in the end sensing something at a distance or sensing something close by. And he says, well, smell is kind of a hybrid. It's a little bit of both because you can smell things at a vast distance, but at the same time you are literally touching the thing because it's getting lodged inside your nose. So he considers it somewhere between flavor or taste and touch. I think that gets the dialectic kind of right for the olfactory object, right? On the one hand, smells seem to get stuck. They literally hit you in the nose, right? And at the same time, you smell things at a vast distance. So jumping ahead horribly. Historically, there's not much of a debate from like Plato and Aristotle to the commentators, to the moderns. And of course within the moderns you can have Locke, having his distinction doing primary and secondary qualities. And he is going to say, well obviously smells can't be things in reality that are mind independent. They must be something about how the mind generates a smell. And so in that sense, the smell is supposed to be something that's mind dependent and generated by the mind. Reid differs with Locke to some extent and there's some debate now in the literature that's fully coming out how to interpret Reid's idea, but he's having a similar idea that turns out to be that the olfactory quality or what we consider to be the thing smell is something about how the mind imposes a smell upon the objects in reality, the distal entities. I'm going to jump again horribly to Perkins. So there's this great philosopher Marlin Perkins who writes a book in 1983 that is a wonderful book on the senses that has like three chapters on smell, the most robust account of smell from Aristotle, right? So there's this almost two thousand years, right, of empty literature on smell within philosophy. And of course we're just covering Western philosophy. I mean there must be philosophy that's latent within at least Indian traditions and Chinese and Japanese traditions and world traditions. Right? Which I, I don't have a background in or know anything about, which would also say something more about the nature of smell. So McHugh has a book about Indian literature that actually documents some of the theories of smell they have within Japanese culture. They have different ceremonies and games that they play with smells. So there are other rich traditions about smell that might not have this 2000 year gap for the most part. But jumping to the modern traditions, the modern traditions all agreed to some extent that what we're smelling is something like a gaseous cloud.

David: 30:48

And this image of a gaseous cloud is really enticing because a cloud by definition is this nebulous object with very imprecise boundaries that are constantly shifting. So I can imagine that this raises a lot of questions about how the mind can grasp this particular kind of object in the act of smelling. Can you talk about that a little bit more?

Benjamin: 31:12

The question's going to be for the most part, whether or not the mind imposes the quality on the cloud, or whether or not it's something about the cloud that then gets lodged into our nostrils and gives us a perception of the things out there. And so one way of highlighting this is that Bill Lichen writes this wonderful paper called "The Sliding of Smell," um, that says basically philosophers need to pay more attention to smell. There's all these cool things that happen in smell that will question our pre theoretic ideas and that will bring to bear different ways of thinking about objects and perception. And his claim that he highlights is that the object that we smell, the intentional object that we smell is we smell gaseous clouds, odors. And since we smell these gaseous clouds, we don't have to worry that obviously we're smelling the order source, the orange, we're smelling the cloud given off by the orange. This is the vapor view, for the most part, though it's not noted as such. Now, Clare Batty then picks up on, on this idea a little bit further and says, well, here's the other weird thing about this. If it turns out to be that we're smelling, turns out to be these gaseous clouds, odors, then they have weird persistence conditions. They exist in different ways than normal objects. I mean, you have that moment, you come home and you have family or a roommate or someone there who happens to bake cookies, and you walk in and you smell cookies, and you're like, oh.

Ellie: 32:42

Lucky.

Benjamin: 32:42

Right? That's a good day, right? You come in, there's the smell of fresh, warm cookies, and you're all excited, and you're like, oh, you made cookies. They're like, yeah, we ate them. So when that happens, right? Aside from your expectations, automatically going, oh, right. Like, what? Why? Right? Why, why? Mess with me that way? But there's a real sense in which the smell is there, but the cookies aren't.

Ellie: 33:04

The worst case scenario.

Benjamin: 33:06

Right? So now, now you're sitting there and you're frustrated and you're going, but I can smell cookies, right? And there's a clear sense in which you are accurately having an experience of a smell. There's nothing elusory or a hallucination going on, right? They're not hallucinating. There's really the thing there. There's just no object anymore, right? So there's no visual object. And what she wanted to point out was the persistence conditions of smells. Seems to be very different than the persistence conditions of other kinds of objects. You can smell them even though they've been consumed, right? And so in that sense, the objectable faction in that sense has different existence conditions than the visual objects we might have. Now she thinks that our experiences of smell at an instant don't present us with smells as inhabiting an exact coordinate in space. We experience the smells as being in an environment, but they don't have the same kind of spatial, temporal locations, right? The place in some sort of coordinate space as being reachable to us, or from a distance from us in the same way that visual objects do. And so I think that's really interesting claim to have, right? So we have a distal experience of the smell. We can inhabit the smell. It exists at a different rate than a visual object, right? But at the same time, it turns out to be that it doesn't present itself as being out of place. I disagree with her. We'll circle back to this, but I think that more interesting disagreement that all of us have here, because I happen to be an odorant theorist too, is what is it about the cloud that gives it the smell that it does? So if you think about your environment as being a gaseous sea of an invisible clouds, then why is it that you smell one set of clouds over another? Right? So you walk in the house, right? You smell the house, the environment, but you also smell the cookies against the environment. So what is it about the plume itself or the odor cloud that gives you this cookie smell? And so what I argue is this is where matter comes in. It's something about matter that smells. So it's not something that our mind imposes upon matter, but matter itself generates smells, which we then transduce. And I'll just be unclear here because I don't know whether or not it's the mind making the smell or the environment making you smell something in some way. It, it's probably some give and take and I have no idea how to work that question out. And I have a paper noting this that I say, I don't know how to solve this problem actually, but there's quite clear that there's something about the molecules themselves that generates our experience of smell. That's something for the neuroscientist and the psychologist to figure out as time goes on. It's an open question, so I, I like to leave it there. Right. I mean it's one of the nice things about being a philosopher is knowing your limits and going like, here's my theory. I don't know whether or not it's going to be true or not.

Ellie: 35:58

No, I, I think that's absolutely right, is one of the helpful benefits of being a philosopher is, is knowing what you don't know, right? And knowing the limits of what, what, uh, you do know. So this is all super, super fascinating, this account that you've given for us. In particular, I picked up on something earlier that you said about how we inhabit smells because I think that helped me put into place a distinction between taste and smell, because so many people talk about how taste and smell are really not that distinct. But I think what you said, you know, the fact that we inhabit smells, but I think we could say we don't inhabit taste is quite interesting. But I want to think about how the kind of under privileging of smell has, I don't know, sort of proven inadequate in the history of philosophy. You've pointed out a number of views in the history of philosophy about smell, and also the fact that we tend to undervalue it. Right? And in your dissertation you argue that most theories of consciousness and cognition in particular privileged senses other than smell. But if we start from smell, then these theories prove inadequate. So can you tell us a little bit about how, following the historical under privileging of smell, we get to an impoverished view of what human cognitive processes look like? How would we think about thinking if we started from smell instead of say, vision?

Benjamin: 37:22

Okay, sure. One thing you might just want to think about, right, if the objects are a little bit different, that means that they're going to have different spatial coordinates, but that's also going to mean that you might have to think about the time scale. So one thing about not thinking about other senses than just vision or using language to theorize is that you assume that the time scale of your experiences is going to be the ones that you get in vision. And the moment you open your eyes, you're automatically presented with objects that have spatiality to them, that have a distance to you. But when you think about smells, they're really slow. So I have usually have a presentation every now and then when I present the difference between how quickly you can see something versus smelling something. But you can see a gorilla flashed on a screen, right? The classic change blindness experiment.

Ellie: 38:10

Yep, Psych 101.

Benjamin: 38:11

Right within 15 milliseconds, right? Extremely fast. It takes 150 milliseconds for you just to detect and discriminate a smell. And then it turns out to be that you become conscious that smell like 300 milliseconds, at half a second you begin to have an experience of whether or not it's a good or bad smell, and only at like a second can you say like, I know what I'm smelling. So it's an order of a magnitude slower. So one thing you might think about is how our temporal experience of reality is shifted by thinking about vision versus audition, right? Which might be a little bit slower than vision or something like smell, which is going to be slower than both of them. And so what I'd like to argue quite often is smelling takes time. So if you want to have your experience of the ocean and the sage brush, right, and the trees along the way, and whatever else, it might be the taco stand, hopefully down the beach, right? So when you have all those together, it takes a lot of time to begin to realize that you have this, what I call a smellscape, with complex smells against the background of other smells. And most of the time, since we don't only use smell and we smell something, and then we glance around, we got these multimodal cues that kind of fill in the smellscape for us. So one thing that might be different is just trying to figure out what would our picture of reality be like if we had to rely upon a different sensory modality that was slower than vision. So that would be one thing that I've stressed in some more recent writings, that what we consider to be objects might be relative to a sensory modality and then temporal dimension of that in the same way that you can say that you can see mountain ranges, right? But it takes time to see a mountain range, right? It's not something that you can usually just open your eyes and see all of a sudden. So that that would be one way that things would shift if we started focusing on the perceptional and temporal dimensions. But let's talk about cognition then, right? So when we start thinking about how we think about things, it's very clear that this is mediated by vision and language. And the nice thing about vision is that it usually presents us with a complex object with all of its parts all at once, right? So if we imagine a very simple object, right? Just like a Necker cube, even when you just have some visual imagery of a Necker cube, you can see the edges, right? You can see the lines, right? Maybe if you're gifted at visual imagery, you can manipulate whether it's going in or out from you. But all those parts of it are all there. But when you think about smells, we smell these objects, these odor plumes as uniform, yet complex entities, but we don't have access to the parts. So an example that I'd like to often use in talks is if you think about pasta sauce, right? So your average tomato basil sauce, right? It's going to have tomatoes and basil. It's in the night, right? From garlic, some onions, right? So kind of simple, right? You think about shifting that to puttanesca sauce, right? Where you're having some sort of anchovies and some black olives in it. Now, you can clearly taste the difference between the two sauces, but if I was to ask you and you didn't make the sauce, so you don't know what went into it, what's in it, right? So you're sniffing it, you're going, oh, I can tell like A is different than B. They clearly smell different to me. They're both pasta sauces. So same category, and you go, okay, so what's the difference? What are the components of that? Now notice if I showed you a square and a triangle, you'd have no problem saying these components are different because of lines and edges and angles and so on and so forth. When it comes time to smell, we get these holistic experiences of a complex entity that don't give us the parts. So the fancy way of putting this is that you have a compositional entity. You have a complex representation that is composed from parts, but it's not decomposable. You can't, in the end, pull out the parts. Notice that that's a very different category of things than your visual objects. Now, one way this might play out is if it turns out to be that how we in the end sense smells and think about smells, turns out to be in a different kind of format, that it has a different structural representation than vision, then that would explain why we're really bad at naming smells. Um, and it might just be because the structure of cognition between the two or the representational format is different.

David: 42:36

Yeah, and this is what in your book, you describe as the problem of meteorological complexity when it comes to smell, which refers simply to the fact that with smells, the part whole relationship gets really complicated and indiscernible. And so given that we have this problem of complexity when it comes to olfactory experience, how does our understanding of consciousness have to change if we begin our theory of consciousness from smell rather than vision?

Benjamin: 43:07

So consciousness is another big one. When I first started out, my first paper was called "Stinking Consciousness," and, and it was kind of like exactly that. It was like a punch in the nose.

Ellie: 43:17

Stinking. Oh, I, I heard thinking consciousness, "Stinking Consciousness." A lot juicier.

David: 43:22

No, it was the, it was the buildup to that book up, uh, Stinking Philosophy.

Benjamin: 43:28

And, and it was meant in a very aggressive fashion. It was kind of like you guys who are doing consciousness, right? You stink. And it was a very simple premise.

Ellie: 43:37

Yeah. Oh, we know we're, we're phenomenologists. We think most people who work on consciousness stink too.

Benjamin: 43:43

So there's this really cool thing about the olfactory system, neurologically, it just doesn't go via the thalamus. Within one kind of length of a neuron. You get from the olfactory bulb here in your nose, to the cortex. It doesn't go via the thalamus, which is like a way station in some senses for neuroscience. And so there are all these theories of consciousness that said the thalamus is necessary for consciousness. And I went that, that can't be right because I'm conscious of smells all the time, but it doesn't have to go by the thalmus. So it seems like a, a low hanging fruit of a paper to write, right? Which is the perfect one that you need at graduate school level, right? Just get that paper out. You're like, you're all wrong. it turns out to be that some people actually just went all in and would go like, oh, so since smell doesn't go by thalamus and must mean we're not conscious of smells. No, that can't be right. Cause I had phenomenology of smell all the time. One thing that you might point out is just if the system works differently and the anatomy's different, then our theory's going to have to be different. And there's now a new debate going out whether or not consciousness is in the front of the cortex or in the back of the cortex. But that whole framework only makes sense if you're a vision scientist, because vision's at the back from the occipital cortex and you the frontal cortex, which does things like cognition. And I will say consciousness because smells in the front, but that doesn't make sense for a smell, right? Cause smell would never happen in the back of your brain unless something really wrong happened In terms of neural atypical structures.

Ellie: 45:13

I mean, I also think people who want to locate consciousness in the, in anywhere in the brain should probably reread Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and Princess Elizabeth the Bohemia's letters to Descartes. But in any case, back to what you were saying,

Benjamin: 45:25

In any case, we're not going to put it in the pineal gland at least. And I mean, some people have put the consciousness of smell actually in the olfactory ball based upon some theories of physics, wherever it might occur, right? It's going to be clear that at least to me, that vision's going to work one way, smell's going to work another way. And if we want like a uniform account of the manifold of experience, right, of our everyday occurrence is a phenomenology and qualitative character, then we're going to have to take in these weirdness about smell as well. I can even list off some examples. So you choose sexual mates based on smell, and there was the extent that people used to have, um, dirty T-shirt, uh, speed dating. So they would have men wear a t-shirt for a few days and get it all stinky

Ellie: 46:12

I think I heard about this. Yeah.

Benjamin: 46:14

and then they would send it around to the other cohort and they would sniff it and they would, without seeing, they would select which numbers smelled best to them. And it turns out to be, there's something to this that it turns out to be that your body gives off certain compounds, which are part of the immune system, and that complimentary immune system smell better to you than the same immune system. Unclear why this is the case, right? Some people theorize it so that you don't have inbreeding. So here's the weird thing though. When was the last time you sniffed someone? I mean, I tell my students I smell them, right? And they find that to be like really aggressive. They're like, what you mean you smell me? Like, how did you invade my personal space? I'm like, no, no. I don't mean like, I'm like, here, come in. I'm a hugger.

David: 46:56

I inhabit your smell, which sounds maybe even worse.

Benjamin: 47:00

Like if I, if you tell your students or you see them, right? That's a compliment. Like, I saw you, right? You tell your student, I smell you, turns out to be weird.

David: 47:09

Uh, yeah. Other says, this could be worse.

Benjamin: 47:11

Right. And so we current certain don't consciously do that, right? And we might say like, we love someone's smell, right? But it's not like as part of the dating ritual, you have to sniff someone. And if you did, that would be really awkward. But it's very clear that we're tracking this information unconsciously. Yep. Here's where this gets really weird. So Anosmia, right? So you might go like, how could you even prove this. Right?

Ellie: 47:35

And Anosmia is absence of smell, right?

Benjamin: 47:37

Absence of smell, right. So there unfortunate group of individuals it's up to 12% of the US population as of 2020 that develop either smell loss or partial smell loss. I don't know that the, uh, numbers when it comes to congenital Anosmia people born without a strength of smell. But Marta Tafalla has this great paper, she's a congenital Anosmic um, trying to explain what it's like growing up without a sense of smell and people around you are talking about this invisible thing that you can't see and you can't touch. But is there? So with Anosmic people that are not congenital Anosmic, when they develop a sense of smell loss, this is tied to anhedonia, a general feeling that things are worse all, so not depression, but just that your quality of life is not as as enjoyable anymore. Now, in addition to that, there is an increase in depressive rates amongst people who lose their sense of smell. This is then directly tied to increases in rates, in suicide attempts. And it turns out to be that your general quality of life score goes drastically down when you lose your sense of smell. So here's my pontification on this, and I call it the argument from absence. Smell provides this background phenomenology, this qualitative character to our daily lives that we don't attend to. That's just there. And then when we lose it, it's like there's a note from the quality of our life that's gone missing. Something has dropped out. Now, a friend of mine who in the end got Anosmia from Covid, um, about a year ago, described it as feeling like he was a robot in his body. he would go into the shower and he would have, you know, the usual like soap up your hair experience and you get the tactile experience, but you don't get the smells of the shampoo. And so there's something that's missing from your life, something qualitative that doesn't seem to be there. So the really cool thing I think about the consciousness of smell is that makes us rethink how we can have different kinds of consciousness and the relations between them. Whenever we're aware of smell, there's always going to be a phenomenology. But even when we're unaware and not attending, there's this qualitative character of smells pervading our lives. And this is one way it comes out when it comes to thinking about Anosmia. When you have Anosmia, you have difficulty in living. I mean, obviously it's not anything that anyone wants to suffer through, but the difficulty in living kind of comes out in your daily occurrences of affairs is that you would imagine would be simple things like whether or not you did your laundry. People who have Anosmia every now and then worried that maybe they put their laundry in the load and then they let it sit for a little bit too long, and then it kind of got that moldy smell and they'll never know.

David: 50:23

I also wonder if we all have our own particular smell that we are habituated into carrying with us as part of our lived experience. The moment that you can't smell, you can't recognize yourself any longer, uh, or you feel like there's something off about yourself. Because when thinking about self recognition, we often think about the mirror stage, right? We recognize ourselves by, by image tapping into that history of privileging vision that you're talking about, Ben. But I suspect we might, unconsciously, I wouldn't be able to articulate it, have an implicit tacit understanding of our own smell. And once that's knocked out, then there is a mis recognition potentially of the self that's very primal and very basic.

Benjamin: 51:08

Yeah, so that's actually what I'm working on right now. So I don't know is the actual answer. That's exactly kind of the way I want to go with this, right? So we do track our own body odor. It doesn't seem like we do it consciously. But if it turns out to be that you're worried whether or not you have the right hygiene before you leave the house, you could at least sniff yourself, right? And attend to it. Anosmics can't do that, right? So they're worried that maybe they're giving off a lot of odor. There's a really cool thing with perfumes where it turns out to be that for a while we thought perfumes were worn to like mask your body odor, but it turns out to be that they actually boost your, um, immune signature of smells such that you buy a perfume that compliments your immune smell, which is explains why when you buy your own perfumes, you usually loves them, but when someone else buys a perfume to you, even if it's the same brand that you usually like, or similar smells, it doesn't usually in the end have the same uptake. Right? So for a while when I said I was working on smell, people thought it'd be really fun as like gifts to buy me perfumes, right? And every now and then you'd pick one up and you'd be like, that's not me at all. Like, why would you do that?

David: 52:14

One of the other people that we are interviewing, connection to smell is a, is an expert on perfumery. So this, this has a really rich discussion of the philosophy and science of smell.

Ellie: 52:27

Yeah, we're so grateful. Ben, thank you so much. This has just been, been really enlightening and you've covered so many fascinating topics in this, in this philosophy of smell.

David: 52:37

Yeah. And although we, we don't smell you now, since an online interview, we do see you, uh, and we, we encourage our readers to look at Ben Young's work on the cognition, consciousness, and perception of smells.

Ellie: 52:55

Yes, including your exciting, forthcoming book. All right. Thank you so much Ben, and thanks to our listeners.

Benjamin: 53:01

I'll have to smell you both later.

Ellie: 53:03

Yes, smell you later.

David: 53:12

If you're enjoying Overthink, please consider supporting the podcast by joining our Patreon. We are an independent, self-supporting podcast, and as a subscriber, you can help us cover our key production costs, gain access to our exclusive digital library of bonus content and more.

Ellie: 53:32

Wow, David, that interview with Ben was so rich, lots to think about with the history of philosophy, of smell, and different approaches to it. What is sticking with you? What is, what is lingering as an odor on your body after that interview?

David: 53:45

As a gaseous cloud of um, no. I mean, the thing that stands out for me the most is this tension between non-cognitive and cognitive ways of thinking about smell. Because I think for a long time I really have thought about smell as bordering on the non-cognitive or the pre-cognitive, this, this raw experience that we don't about very much and that doesn't have a lot of cognitive content associated with it, but, Ben's work here is really putting pressure on that idea by suggesting that it's not that smells are non-cognitive brute experiences, but rather that we have to think about how we think about cognition in order to grasp the ways in which we do think about and through smells. So that's really a sticking point for me, especially because I knew from before that smells are unique relative to the other senses, in that they don't go through the thalamus, which is this associative part of the brain where a lot of information from different sensory modalities gets bounded into a coherent hole. And so a number of people have made the claim that because smells just go directly in bypassing this relay station, that they're somehow more primitive, evolutionarily speaking. And again, I think if we keep thinking about smell as non-cognitive, primitive and basic, we just lose an entire dimension really, of our conscious life. And what about you? What are you thinking in connection to smell?

Ellie: 55:24

I was struck by his comment that we don't usually tell each other that we smell each other and doing, so it seems kind of weird, like point that he tells his students, I smell you, uh, creepy and so that, that's encouraged me to think a little bit about why that is. Right. To say I see you or I hear you both in a literal sense, is inoffensive and in a metaphorical sense is actually a positive thing. Whereas to say, I smell you seems odd, and I touch you, seems obvious. We don't even need to say that. And I taste you. Sounds creepy, but maybe a compliment. I don't know. So, , my, my, my thought on this is, I think we associate smell with intimacy in a particular way. A lot of sense have the allure of romance or of lust, right? The smell of roses or the smell of ambergris back in the day. Even the smell of BO I, I think people can find to have something evocative about it in an intimate and appealing way. So I, I think there's a sense in which polite norms encourage us not to address smells. Also, I mean, sorry to be crude here, but like, if you're in a public space and you smell a fart, like you're probably going to pretend you don't, unless with people you're comfortable with. Um, you know who, who you can be like, oh, do you smell that? Or something like that.

David: 56:53

Yes. No, but I think, I think there's something about it where it's not just the sense of proximity, whether that's physical proximity or romantic intimacy, but in some ways we tend to associate smells with secretions of the body, you know, like farting with peeing, with pooping, with sweating, and those are all the things that we still try to mask.

Ellie: 57:16

With breath, perhaps even not a, not a liquid secretion, but yeah.

David: 57:20

Yeah, but I mean, I, I went out a couple of weeks ago and I had to save a, a friend of mine, uh, this woman from a guy that wanted to make out with her. And the reason that she gave me as to why she did not want to hang out with this guy is because his breath smelled bad. Um, so she was attracted, but it was just this, the breath was a deal breaker. So there is this very close connection between the interior of the body becoming exterior and social norms that indicate that that should happen only in private settings away from the public eye.

Ellie: 57:56

Yeah. Which I think as we're thinking about this, series on the senses is quite interesting the, the way that smell has a particular sort of intimacy to it.

David: 58:07

Yeah. In a, in a politics associated with it. Right? Um, because what we saw with the 19th century is that then there are these judgments about different groups of people being more smelly than others, whether that's poor people or people of color, or there also are all sorts of misogynistic discourses about women's smells. Um, and that get mobilized as ways of justifying existing social orders. We hope you enjoy today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Ellie: 58:43

You can subscribe to our Patreon for exclusive access to bonus videos, Live Q and As, and more.

David: 58:48

To reach out to us and find episode info, go to overthinkpodcast.com and connect with us on Twitter and Instagram @overthink_pod.

Ellie: 58:58

We'd like to thank our audio editor, Aaron Morgan, our production assistant, Clare A'Hearn, and Samuel PK Smith for the original music.

David: 59:05

And to our listeners, thanks so much for overthinking with us.