Video: Stimulus Problems and Sensory Shenanigans in Daredevil Born Again Ep 7

I mentioned in my post from yesterday that I'd return with a longer video on where exactly Daredevil: Born Again went wrong in that peculiar scene from episode seven. This video covers quite a bit more as I go on a little detour into the concept of the "stimulus problem" (a term I crafted for my book), and how stimulus problems have arisen in other contexts as well. I also delve into the concept of an image as a visual concept, and what differentiates Matt's "3D world" from our own "2D to 3D world" and even include a rendition of what this might look like that is still only conceptual but, in my view, sure beats the "world on fire" from season one of the original show.

(Note: I had to reupload a slightly edited version due to first a copyright strike against the scene from the 2003 Daredevil movie – fair – and then a rather bizarre strike against the audio of the art touching scene. That clip is now muted.)

More context on that scene from the comics

In the video, I also refer back to this post for more background on what's wrong with the scene of Matt smelling the exact number of murder victims in Muse's painting from the comics and include the scene below, from Daredevil #10 (2015), by Charles Soule and Ron Garney. And so, below this page from the comics is my longer text about it from my book.

Excerpt from my book about the scene above

In Daredevil #10 (2015), by Charles Soule and Ron Garney, Matt comes face to face with a morbid piece of art created by the serial killer Muse. The piece is a vast painting made with the blood of Muse’s victims. While Matt obviously cannot see the painting, he notes with some confidence that the blood came from “at least one hundred and thirteen” different victims!

 

There are two major problems with this scene. Which one is the bigger one depends on what assumptions you make about what has happened here. In the first scenario, let us assume that Muse has pooled all of the blood from his different victims into one bucket so that they are all blended together before being used for his painting. How would you then identify the constituent parts (except with a DNA test), the way Matt apparently does in this scene?

You might assume that since we are all unique there must be some secret ingredient in each of our bloodstreams that might function as a signal of our unique biochemistry. We all have a unique scent, right? In this scene, Matt mentions “body chemistry, diet, background… all sorts of factors.” While this is true, what is unique about each person’s scent isn’t typically any single “ingredient.” What is unique is the pattern of the constituent scents. These constituent scents derive mostly from a common pool of biochemical compounds that are not infinitely variable on a molecular level. To the extent that they differ, they would do so unpredictably.

 

What Soule is asking of Daredevil in this situation is similar to any one of us performing a taste test of a tomato sauce mixed from a dozen different brands of store-bought tomato sauce (sorry about the visual!). Each individual tomato sauce may be unique, even when its constituent parts are not. They tend to all contain tomatoes, vinegar, basil, onions, and another handful of ingredients, including maybe a couple of different kinds of preservatives. Maybe one of them is super heavy on the garlic, another one has added chili, and a third has its blend spiked with thyme or marjoram. How would you possibly know how many different brands of tomato sauce went into that one big vat, especially if you’ve only ever tasted two or three of them? It may be that the brand with the chili in it is your favorite and that you are able to correctly identify this brand as definitely being in the blend. Good for you, but no cigar.

 

What I’m getting at is that this is at its core a mathematical problem. You are trying to solve an equation with too many unknowns in it. It can’t be done. And, if any of this reminds you of the scene in the Daredevil television show where Stick and young Matt eat ice cream together and Stick lists how many dairies the milk came from, you are spot on.8 The faulty logic is the same.

For a slightly different take on the scenario with the blood painting scene, we are going with the assumption that all of the sources of blood were not mixed beforehand, but applied one at a time so that a couple of brush strokes in one corner came from one victim, and all the other ones were similarly spatially separated. This makes the math problem a little bit easier since sniffing one small patch of the painting would be different from sniffing another patch some distance away. It makes it possible, in theory, to separate the blends from each other, even though it would be a painstaking (and morbid) process. However, while Matt does go up to the painting and presumably gives it a sniff here and there, he is by no means doing any kind of grid search.

 

If scents behaved like light, and Matt’s nose had the image-forming properties of an eye, “scent-viewing” the whole painting could work in theory. (Of course, even those of us with sight probably wouldn’t be able to immediately look at a complex painting and deduce exactly how many different hues of paint contributed to its completion.) However, as should be clear at this point, scent isn’t light and shouldn’t be expected to behave as if it were. At even short distances from the painting, the spatial separation of the different brush strokes would be so blurred that they may as well have been painted from that one blended bucket of blood!

 

We do not smell “scent-images.” Again, this has as much to do with the nature of scents as it does any perceived inadequacy of our sense of smell. As mentioned earlier, Daredevil’s sense of smell still tends to be underused, and I can think of a number of truly cool things you could use this sense for. None of them need include treating scent as if it were something else entirely.