What does a Banana Smell like?

You gain that knowledge through experience! How do you know what a banana tastes or smells like if you have never eaten one? Exactly!
So in order to know you must have experienced - this goes for just about anything in life, not only bananas :-)

my banana has no nose

I don't know, but when I smell a banana, I know it's one.
(those artifiicial candies never quite get it right)

How about banana algorithm?
...must be something like that...a path of relations between functions...an equation.
The terms "sweet" or other like are all relative to a certain pathway stabilitty between those functions in a systemic choerent pattern.
...I rather wonder how would translate the banana algorithm onto a music sheed? A far more interesting question...
How would be the Banana Opera?

How does it smell?

There are conceptual components to even the experience of pain. People with the condition "pain asymbolia" feel pain minus its classification of being painful, and without either the behavioral responses or "inner agony" that usually follow such identifications. It's possible that any general manifestation of perception (odor, image, sound, etc.) is itself a more primal kind of concept systemically assigned to received information patterns in the course of their processing, prior to the linguistic-based recognitions that make humans unique (supposedly). Those "presentations" in turn being a bundle of pre-lingual subclasses: Color, for instance, is sorted separately from information about the shape of an object -- so that even the apparent unity of a visual manifestation results from multiple sub-discriminations that may occasionally escape integration:

The research shows that the brain processes the shape of an object and its color in two separate pathways and, though the object's shape and color normally are linked, the neural representation of the color can survive alone. When that happens, the brain establishes a new link that binds the color to another visible shape.
http://www.physorg.com/news173626469.html

Get real, Fil, that guy is talking about a banana and not a dissertation.

I would love to take a stab at your question, but first, I think you need to be more specific. First of all, is the banana ripe? Because if a banana is going rotten it starts to smell a little different. And have pesticides been used on the bananas? This also could affect the taste. Also, are we talking about the inside or the outside of the banana? Because the inside smells like banana, but the peel could smell like anything. For instance, this one time, at band camp, I stuck a banana up my ass, and it didn't smell like a banana at all.

I await your clarification.

Did n´t you liked the "banana opera" suggestion ?
Could n´t get a better joke at hand...probably my humour sucks...
Nevertheless you´re absolutely right !

It's difficult to detect if someone is joking or not, Fil.
An emoticon would have helped - but on second thought this banana
thread does slowly become an opera

Again, you are absolutely right, my fault...an emotion would have helped my unfortunate sense of humour...

Bent

What I mean is how do we distinguish between different things. It doesn't mater whether the banana ripe or not but how do we know it is a banana if we close our eyes and smell it. Or say the color blue, how do we know what the color blue looks like, regardless what name we give it, that type of color is distinct some how from others. What I'm trying to get at is that we know only because we can compare to something it's not or something that is different from it, that's how we know it is distinct because looking at another color we know it's not blue therefore whenever we look at something blue-like we know it's blue. Just as with the banana, we know what it smells like compared to something it is not.

Are you asking for the banana function ?
I don´t know...normally what do you do with it ?

You're comparing apples to oranges here (to stay within the fruit group).
The color blue is blue because you're taught it's blue - you'll draw from your memory when you see something blue, or any other color for that matter.
If your mother would have taught you that blue is actually called yellow, you'd assume the name for blue is "yellow".

As with food items (banana) you will know when you've eaten a banana before. Lets say, we blindfold you and let you taste a banana - you'll know right away what it is because you've eaten it before. Now keep your blindfold on longer and we'll let you taste an exotic fruit that you haven't tasted before - you will not know what it is, nor will you be able to tell from smelling it.

Now you can take your blindfold off and realize that your senses teach you what's what.

...was his confusion only upon the names ? or from there he meant what a banana is suppose to be or do in a larger spectrum ? not as a "fruit" but as a meta-object subjected to interpretation...

I think so, Fil. He wants to know why we call blue "blue" and why we know
what a banana tastes/smell like. He's looking for the connection in our brain
that tells us what is what. Well it's simply called memory

Yes! but what about the first experience? How would you know if it was good or bad or supposed to be good or bad if you don't compare to something else. What I'm saying is that we can't recognize the smell of a banana unless we smell something else too. Let's say the banana was the first thing you ever smelled, you don't know if it is a good smell or not but you know it's something, then when you go smell something else and come back to the banana you can then judge if the banana smelled good or not.

Of course. But what I'm saying is that we only know it was a banana regardless of the name because we compared it something else and from that we recognize the fruit.