Digital Epistemologies of the Phygital World or Regeneration of the Humanity’s Olfactory Sense Lost for the Cognition of Anthropocene Injustices

Whatever we postulate about digital technologies’ capacities to “extend the mind,” there is still an insurmountable wall separating them from the past and present physical world. A thinking person is always localised despite the possibility of experiencing many times at once in different places thanks to the encompassing of space by its technological virtualisation. A specific mindset uniquely indents everyone’s cognition through the olfactory sense of the earliest relatedness experiences to one's locality. This olfactory sense defies, for now, datafication. Thus, digital cognition, which tends to imprint the eternal, infinite, undying mind into silicon, is stripped of the ubiquity of its dehumanising power since it lacks olfactory immersion. We argue that this lack keeps humanity safe from the command, control and computability of its diverse localisations hyperconnected by digital devices algorithmically dictating how the local scent of injustice is to be overwritten with the codes of the artificialised delusional scents.

Digital epistemology does not come to be dissolvable into representations or experiences, substances or relationships, causations or relations, exogenous or endogenous qualities or quantities. It stands firmly in the plural and on the absence or presence of conditions for knowing justice from injustice in the existing phygital world. Preserving the cognition of the natural odours of human injustices done to nature in the concrete locality is necessary for reconstructing the augmented reality and virtualised life of the Anthropocene to regenerate virtuously creative knowledge of humans’ just reconciliation with nature. This research will offer insights into a rebellious relationship within digital epistemologies of humanist naturalness of justice for cognition of nature and humanity's relationship of mutuality against the reductionist digital epistemology of the Anthropocene lacking olfactory immersion although pretending to offer the last word on what and how humans know and what knowledge is in the digitally distributed memories and senses.