Olfactory Origins and Cognitive Hardening: Qualitative Experience, History-Dependent Cognitive Asymmetry, Pre-Reflective Perception, and Artificial Cognition

This paper proposes a theoretical framework for understanding odor-evoked recollection not as the retrieval of a single memory from a single sensory stimulus, but as a history-dependent cognitive process in which qualitative experience, affect, autobiographical memory, scene reconstruction, embodied knowledge, experiential rules, and learned knowledge become successively and reciprocally activated. The paper introduces the term associative origin for an event in which a sensory input encounters an individual's experiential history and thereby establishes asymmetric initial conditions for subsequent cognitive transitions. It further introduces cognitive hardening to describe the process by which repeated experience makes particular transitions toward perception, association, evaluation, or action relatively dominant while reducing susceptibility to alternative updates. Hardening, however, does not imply irreversible fixation or pathology. It is proposed as a cross-domain concept for describing history-dependent cognitive asymmetries that may appear as expertise, habit, individuality, embodied knowledge, aversion, or other stable cognitive tendencies. This framework partially overlaps with existing accounts of predictive processing, habit formation, entrenchment, canalization, and attractor dynamics. Its aim is therefore not to claim the novelty of history dependence itself. Rather, the paper connects three structures within a single model: associative sequences initiated by sensory-bodily events, changes in updateability produced through repeated transitions, and the temporal delay through which reflective consciousness approaches the pre-reflective events that have already oriented it. With reference to Merleau-Ponty's account of pre-reflective embodiment, the paper argues that reflection may not recover the original perceptual event itself, but rather the traces that event has left in bodily orientation, affect, attention, memory, and subsequent cognition. This phenomenally accessible remainder is termed the shadow of pure perception. Finally, the paper considers possible extensions of the model to artificial intelligence. In medical care in particular, the humanization of AI need not be conceived solely as the imitation of human appearance or empathic language. Instead, it may involve forms of artificial cognitive hardening in which interaction history changes what an artificial system treats as salient and which possibilities for improvement it preferentially explores. The paper further proposes that multiple artificial agents with distinct but socially safe cognitive asymmetries may provide a way to model aspects of caregiver-patient compatibility as dynamic alignment between different cognitive gradients.