RE: Is God a logical contradiction?
February 15, 2020 at 9:50 pm
(This post was last modified: February 15, 2020 at 9:53 pm by John 6IX Breezy.)
I don't know too much about smell; I've mostly focused on vision. But if there's any overlap between the two you usually have receptors that pick up raw bits of information. That information undergoes different levels of processing as it heads downsteam. Where it gets more abstract is when it comes to your perception. The things you perceive and recognize begin to dissociate from individual neurons or even groups of neurons; meaning there's not a 1:1 reduction of perception to neurons.
In the visual system it used to be thought that there were "grandmother neurons" which had the exclusive role of recognizing your grandmother and nothing else; and so on for every object in the universe, one neuron for each object. This is a problem because there aren't enough neurons in the brain to recognize all the objects in existence.
So perhaps when it comes to smell such as pizza or foul odors, the sensations are activated by individual receptors, but the perception doesn't correspond to individual neurons. The information for pizza could be contained in the patterns of activation instead. But again, I'm just guessing.
In the visual system it used to be thought that there were "grandmother neurons" which had the exclusive role of recognizing your grandmother and nothing else; and so on for every object in the universe, one neuron for each object. This is a problem because there aren't enough neurons in the brain to recognize all the objects in existence.
So perhaps when it comes to smell such as pizza or foul odors, the sensations are activated by individual receptors, but the perception doesn't correspond to individual neurons. The information for pizza could be contained in the patterns of activation instead. But again, I'm just guessing.