Bad apples

This from the same stable as the Swampman of reference 3. A digression from reference 2, where reference 2 cropped up in reference 1, where reference 1 is a chance find turned up by Bing when I was on some errand or other – and which has been keeping me busy for the past few weeks.

Another thought experiment

What about if I lose or don’t have the ability to consciously smell some particular smell – while keeping the ability to detect it unconsciously? A smelly, if limited, version of the blindsight of reference 4. What is consciousness bringing to this party? Does this experiment offer any clues as to what consciousness is for?

Let us suppose that:

We humans have evolved enough to have language. We can talk about stuff.

All talk is conscious, with subjective experience. Which is a bit of a simplification.

A lot of thought uses language; a sort of suppressed speech, speech which does not seen the light of day.

Smells arise from things – often wet things – giving off volatile chemicals which can be detected by the human nose. We might allow a many-to-many relationship between chemicals and smells, rather than the simpler one-to-one.

The nose works by having lots of surface detectors, each of which is tuned to a particular chemical. The repertoire of detectors is genetically determined and varies, usually slightly, from person to person.

The experience of smell is the product of the signal from the nose combined with context and memory. Some smells usually have a negative valence, possibly disgust, and other smells have a positive valence, often pleasure. The former is presumably, inter alia, a way of stopping us eating decayed or rotten food. Or at least of slowing us down while we think about it.

Smells are used for a variety of signalling purposes. Some of these are to do with food and drink, some are to do with sex and some are to do with other aspects of behaviour.

Sometimes I might give out smells unwanted, perhaps the smell of fear. At other times I might be able, I might choose, to disguise the way I smell with perfumes or whatever.

Let us further suppose that:

Apples are an important part of the diet of the group in which I am living.

One day something happens, with some apples becoming poisonous and being reliably marked by a particular smell. Not poisonous as in fatal, just poisonous in the sense of causing serious stomach upsets or indigestion. Not the same as the smell of over-ripe or rotten apples. Loosely, in what follows, the smell of bad apples.

Being poisonous is not a property of an individual apple tree, rather of an individual apple. Previous apples from a tree do not reliably predict the next apple from that same tree.

This smell survives preparing the apple, cutting it up and peeling it, but does not survive cooking. Although the poison does so survive.

My nose can detect this smell and pass the necessary information to the brain, but for some reason the smell does not become conscious. Option 1: this smell does not make it to consciousness at all; as far as that is concerned the apple is odourless. Option 2: this smell is assimilated to some other smell. We stick with option 1.

Contexts in which I might want to be able to smell:

Apples on the tree, perhaps in an orchard. Which ones do I pick, which ones do I leave or discard?

Apples in store, perhaps in an apple loft.

Apples on a belt in a packing station.

Apples exhibited for sale, loose in a box or basket.

Apples exhibited for sale in a more or less sealed packet.

Apples in a bowl in someone’s house, or in a hotel or restaurant.

Cooked apples in a prepared dish in someone’s house or in a hotel or restaurant.

The question:

Given all this, the question is: what do I lose by not being able to smell this particular smell of bad apples? In what follows I address this question under various heads.

Missing out

I might well know about this smell, but I would not be experiencing it. I would be missing out on an experience which most people had. But then, there are lots of experiences out there which I am not going to have. To take a rather extreme example, if I am a man, I can’t experience being a mother. Less extreme, if I don’t work on an in-door building site, I am never going to experience their distinctive smell of dust, cement and concrete.

I might know about these experiences, but I can’t or don’t actually have them. A distinction that I shall be coming back to in a post to come about what I call the ‘Mary knew’ story, another thought experiment, not of my own manufacture, rather to be found at reference 2.

But missing out on one or two minor experiences is not really that important, not really a problem in itself – unless, perhaps, in this case, I wanted to be a serious player in the apple business.

Then there is the other sort of missing out, possibly more important to me, of not being able to do things the way that everyone else does them. Not being part of the group, at least in so as far as this is concerned. And quite apart from my feelings about it, there is a loss of efficiency, a loss of biological fitness: things work much better if we all have more or less the same equipment.

Vague feelings and their problems

Given that the bad smell is reaching my brain, I might well have vague feelings about bad apples, even though I was not conscious of their bad smell. In the absence of smell, I might act on these feelings, perhaps getting lots of false positives and lots of false negatives along the way - but still doing a lot better than chance on a blind trial.

Vague feelings could be caused by all sorts of things and I might never know which. But would this matter? I just went with my gut feeling (as they say in detective soaps) and hoped for the best. It is not as if this apple business is that important.

Conscious smell is fast and reliable: one could work on an apple sorting and packing line on the basis of smell – but not on the basis of vague feelings of aversion – which are neither fast nor reliable.

The suggestion above is that unconscious action is going to be inferior to conscious action. Which is plausible, but where is the evidence? There is evidence that some complex actions, such as hitting a golf ball into a distant hole, are better performed more or less unconsciously – to which one might respond that conscious learning has to precede such unconscious action. 

And it might well be that the ladies on the packing line, the ones who have the smell, do sort their apples more or less unconsciously, with the work only rising to consciousness when there is some problem, some interrupt – while most of the time gossiping about more important matters with the ladies on either side.

More generally, one can argue that the unconscious brain manages everything quite happily without troubling the conscious brain, that consciousness is just a bit of froth on top of the real business. An epiphenomenon in the jargon of the trade. And that, in the case of the apples, I learn to let the unconscious brain get on with it, without attempting to interfere. For the present, we do not allow this possibility.

Instead, we suggest that it takes the power conferred by making this smell conscious to make it possible to link the smell to the notion of bad apple. It is not possible to link the diffuse pre-conscious smell activity in the brain to any notion, let alone this one.

A speculation

In this speculation, we use the convention that neural activation proceeds from upstream to downstream. From, for example, the eye to the subjective image of an apple. Roughly, from left to right in the snap above.

The smell of the bad apple, the bad apple smell, activates a whole lot of upstream neurons.

With the general drift of processing being to reduce the number of dimensions, to reduce the rather chaotic original input from the nose to something which more or less codes for a known smell: the smell itself (rather in the way of pointing out a colour in a colour chart from a paint manufacturer), its intensity and where it is coming from. Maybe other stuff.

Put another way, this activation works its way downstream to the bad apple smell location (SL). The brain has worked out that this in-bound smell is the bad apple smell that it already knows about.

The sight of the bad apple activates another lot of upstream neurons.

The activation works its way down to a bit of more transient memory which carries the image of this particular apple, the source of the smell, the bad apple location (AL). 

The first binding then ties these two up with negative valence (NV). Which implies we have got into the multi-modal part of the brain which can process input from all the senses.

The second binding then ties the bad apple location (AL), to the negative valence (NV) and avoidance action (AA). And from thence down the spinal cord for some actual action. The negative valence being a convenient, short-hand bridge between the two bindings. Rather as valence is a convenient short-hand generally: I register something out there as bad and so avoid it, without needing to trouble myself why – I just get on with the appropriate action. A short-hand widely used by parents the world over: it is often much easier and more effective to say that something is bad than to go to all the bother of explaining why something is bad. Widely used by Christian priests when they drum the ten commandments into children at Sunday school.

The present suggestion is that all this requires data integration of the same sort as that required to make a summary of that data conscious. So it is plausible that it is all bound up together.

Action in mitigation of this smell not being conscious

That is to say, various coping strategies which improve on both just avoiding apples altogether and having to rely on those vague feelings – which we suppose to be inferior to smell, to be less reliable than smell. If I really cared, I would work at the issue.

First, work at finding properties of the apple which amounted to smell and to which I did have access. Properties would include both properties of the apple itself and properties of its circumstances. Perhaps where it had been grown or where it had been packed and stored.

Second, work at the vague feelings, get them tuned up, perhaps working with heaps of apples which had been sorted by someone else into good and bad. Which work might, possibly, result in my being able to smell the bad apples after all. Maybe not as well as I ought, but better than not at all.

Work which would go better if I could talk about the whole business both with people who could smell the bad apples and people who could not. A point covered by the first supposition above. Consciousness good, consciousness plus language better.

If I were a Roman emperor, I could take a suitable slave about with me to smell out the bad apples for me. And I could do something of the sort without being an emperor, just taking someone with me when I went shopping for apples.

If I were very rich, I could persuade a medical instrument company to make me a gadget which could detect the smell by pointing it at a bad apple.

Dealing with cooked apples

If apples were offered in cooked form, either I have to be the cook and have taken appropriate precautions – or I would have to be able to trust the cook or restaurant. As would someone who could smell the bad apples before they were cooked – but at least they would be able to check apples in their own kitchens for themselves.

Other advantages of this smell being conscious

Conscious smell is a reason for doing something. A reason which can be talked about, perhaps put aside. A conscious smell gets into memory where I can likely get hold of and use the information.

An older person can teach a younger person about a conscious smell. And while this smell needs to be conscious, it doesn’t need to be labelled. The older person can just say: ‘do not eat apples which smell like this one’. A next step might be to call it the bad apple smell – leaving aside the complication that there might be more than one such smell

Summary

All a bit woolly, but the story seems to be that, other things being equal, I would be able to do better if I were conscious of the smell and able to talk about it than otherwise.

Perhaps one would be able to be more definite if one knew more about the details of smell processing within the brain and those of linking the results of that processing to action.

Maybe one of the functions of consciousness, is to make stuff available for communication with others? Communication which can be hugely productive, which can hugely improve our collective fitness. Which would be more convincing if one were to explain why speech needed to be conscious – which is clearly not the case with the sort of talking robot we have today.

References

Reference 1: The nature of qualia: a neurophilosophical analysis – Carlos E B de Sousa – 2009. 

Reference 2: Epiphenomenal qualia – Jackson F – 1982.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/09/swampman.html. 

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight. 

Reference 5: https://www.fastcompany.com/1822338/what-good-bosses-do-bad-apples. The source of the apple snap, turned up by Bing. I liked the snappy advice to management: ‘when in doubt, take it out’. The idea being that good bosses have a subtraction mindset and continually search for things to remove and simplify – and ways to make life less frustrating and annoying.