Is there such a thing as odor in an objective sense? Olfaction is just the detection of chemical volatiles in the air/water going through an animal’s nose/gills. We “notice” smells that we’ve evolved chemosensors for; everything else just goes on through.
So, if you want to replicate smell, are you talking about replicating the particular suite of chemosensors all humans have in common? Some particular human? All animals? Or, are you not so much talking about odor (the thing that anythinghas evolved to detect) as chemical volatiles generally?
Even then, we need to manufacture something much like chemosensors to detect any particular chemical volatile—we have to be explicit about what we’re looking for, and won’t see anything we don’t know to look for. (You can use a mass spectrometer, but you’re not getting molecules from that, just atomic isotopes; and you’re not getting just volatiles, but the whole fluid containing the volatiles.)
> So, if you want to replicate smell, are you talking about replicating the particular suite of chemosensors all humans have in common? Some particular human? All animals? Or, are you not so much talking about odor (the thing that anythinghas evolved to detect) as chemical volatiles generally?
I guess, depending on context, you can answer these question like for the other senses. E.g. humans cannot hear above a certain frequency, where some animals can. Some humans have reduced ability to see "green" (the most common form of colorblindness), etc. That doesn't mean we can't measure or reproduce audio and video in a meaningful way, of course.
