The Olfactory Determinants of Culture

First direct evidence that babies react to taste and smell in the womb

Oct 2022, phys.org

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-09-evidence-babies-react-womb.html

4D ultrasound -- Fetuses exposed to carrot showed more "laughter-face" responses while those exposed to kale showed more "cry-face" responses.

via Durham University: Flavour Sensing in Utero and Emerging Discriminative Behaviours in the Human Fetus, Psychological Science (2022). DOI: 10.1177/09567976221105460

https://dx.doi.org/10.1177/09567976221105460

Ancient humans had same sense of smell, but different sensitivities

Jan 2023, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2023-01-ancient-humans-sensitivities.html

"We had the odorant receptor genomes from Neanderthal and Denisovan individuals and we could compare them with today's humans and determine if they resulted in a different protein."

So then they tested the responses of 30 lab-grown olfactory receptors from each hominin against a battery of smells to measure how sensitive each kind of receptor was to a particular fragrance.

The laboratory tests showed the modern and ancient human receptors were essentially detecting the same odors, but their sensitivities differed.

Denisovans -- less sensitive to floral, better at sulfur, balsamic, and honey

Neanderthals -- less responsive to green, floral and spicy scents

via Duke University: Claire A. de March et al, Genetic and functional odorant receptor variation in the Homo lineage, iScience (2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.isci.2022.105908

https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2022.105908

Image credit: AI Art - Photograph of a Neanderthal Nikon 85mm DSLR - 2023.jpeg

Reminder that "mummy fever" was a thing back in the 1800's and it was a big deal to break out the mummy meat for your esteemed guests, because nothing identifies the top tier of society like eating small fragrant bits of ancient humans:

Teasing out the secret recipes for mummification in ancient Egypt

Feb 2023, Ars Technica

https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/02/teasing-out-the-secret-recipes-for-mummification-in-ancient-egypt/

The results: “We could identify a large diversity of substances which were used by the embalmers,” co-author Maxime Rageot of the University of Tübingen told New Scientist. Those substances included oils or tars from juniper, cypress, or cedar; various resins, including some from Pistacia trees; and animal fats, beeswax, and plant oils. Most of those have been found before in mummies, but two resins—dammar and elemi—have not been previously identified anywhere in Egypt before. They also found bitumen from the Dead Sea. -via New Scientist

Gut Buster

Reading Two Books, by William Wegman, 1971

The Limits of Explainability - Why Artificial Intelligence Needs To Learn How To Follow Its Gut

Mar 2018, Joi Ito for WIRED

link

Researchers at MIT led by Josh Tenenbaum hypothesize that our brains have what you might call an intuitive physics engine, a noisy Newtonian system. And that system will need to be better understood if we are to make the robots more like us. (Is that the point? I think sometimes it is, yes.)

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After reading this article, I'm not really sure what's meant by "giving AI its gut" (maybe it's because I've been listening to so much panel discussions on AI from people who are really specific about these things?).

I will assume that to give AI its gut means to give it the ability to solve problems intuitively. The same argument I would use here to express the difficulty in achieving this is the one used to show that we can never create a robot that can smell.

To smell, by the full definition of what it means to smell something as a human, requires a lifetime of experience (at least a childhood's worth). We do not "know" that shit smells bad; we are taught, either actively or passively. And every smell we recognize is done so against a massive memoryplex accumulated and constructed over our lifetime.

We also do not understand the way our olfactory circuitry works, not well enough to reverse engineer it into a robot. For each person, the circuits work differently, or at least differently enough that we have no model for it.

Intuition is difficult to put into an algorithm for similar reasons. It is distilled from experience, and the rich, multi-sensory, emotionally-laden, and socially-mediated experience that comes from human existence. To write a line of code for every 'experience' is ridiculous. But how do you get intuition without the experience? That's going to be a hard problem to solve, and there are many other problems that will need to be addressed before we get there.

The hardwiring problem is similar between olfaction and intuition in that we don't know how intuition works in the brain. We don't know 'where' consciousness is in the brain. We don't get the models so how could we design such a system?

I'm not saying this is the solution, just that it seems to be the obvious extension of the endeavor - to get robots that do all the things that we do, we need those robots to first be born and to live. In a simulated world? Sure, maybe, if that comes first.

Post Script

On the topic of Artificial Intelligence, check out a couple of these recent discussions:

Parliamentary Debate on the Future of Artificial Intelligence

Hosted by Steven Pinker, 2017

video link

2018 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate - Artificial Intelligence

Hosted by Neil DeGrasse Tyson, 2018

video link