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Notes -
You’re kind of touching on two questions.
The thing about images is that the map is not the territory. Concerns like pixels—resolution—only sneak in to quantify the limits of that map.
A mathematical construct like the Fourier transform doesn’t have that problem. The transform of a pure sine wave is the Platonic ideal of a pair of points. But you can’t make such a pair out of samples. You’re forced to approximate, which gives you a resolution.
So question 1 is “do we have a map to quantify smell?” The answer is yes, but no one can agree which is best. Here’s a more recent study which has a bunch of cool charts showing the perceptual space. There’s also the classic OChem Smells Chart.
Question 2 is how good the resolution is for any of these models. For sound and sight, we’ve done experiments to identify how small of a difference can be recognized. Presumably, something similar has been tried in the smell literature. In theory, you could use one of the Question 1 schema to choose several components of smell. Say “edibility,” “temperature,” and “irritation.” Then test different substances on each axis to estimate resolution. That’d give you a map of possible, distinguishable smells.
I’m going to be lazy and assume the same is true for taste.
I’m also lazy. I agree with everything you said, my argument with him was that the difficulty of simulating taste and smell meant that anything short of direct neurostimulation was likely to be uneconomical.
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