Response to Misty's Post on Scent

This is a response to a response about how smells are affective to people based on their being raised in different surroundings. Question: Do you think we would react differently to certain smells, if we werent raised to like or dislike them?

First, I personally think that your surroundings actually do not affect how you interpret a smell. To me it is more about the situation to which a smell has come into your life that determines how you are going to like or dislike that smell. For example, if you are attracted to someone and they are wearing a noticeable scent, then you are going to remember that smell very vividly as a good smell. Where alternatively if you disliked someone who wore a specific scent, then came across someone else who wore the same scent, it would have a negative effect towards you.

Secondly, I think that scent is sometimes based on what the body interprets as healthy or harmful to the body. As an example here, no one tells you that the smell of diarrhea is bad, but when you smell it you will know... I think that the reason is that your brain interprets that smell as something that is harmful to the body. Thus the nose explains that danger to the brain by making it smell bad.

Do you agree?

Limitless Knowledge

While we were in class this week, there was a question that was brought up that is undeniably one of the more or less frustrating things that has been on my mind this week. The question was: "What would it be like to know something that you could not possibly know?" When it was said it was something that I knew would bother me immediately (which is why I wrote it down) but has since become something that I cannot get out of my mind. After imagining a whole collection of things that seemed supernaturally amazing and what it would be like to know how to harness such abilities, my overly active imagination was getting the better hand and I needed to submit some logic to this problem.

My first instinct was to shun the idea of being able to learn about something that is not possible to learn about. That there just isn't anything out there anymore that is really a mystery towards the human race. That when it really comes down to it, there is not really much concern that should be put towards this curiosity, for in the end, is there really anything out there that we can learn and discover which has not yet been learned and discovered?

But then I began to think of this from a slightly different perspective, give my own creativity a shot at this logic, and this has lead to some reasonable change in thought. For now that I have pondered this, I have come to the conclusion that no matter what humans have learned collectively as a race, there is always something new that you can personally take away from life everyday in your own study. That just because someone else discovered something doesn't mean you can't discover the same thing in your own way to get some experiential knowledge from it. Thus my real conclusion is that since there is no real limit to what we can learn and know, in practice you will come to understand that learning something that you could not possibly know would be incredible.