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Comment by JoeAltmaier | Hacker News Reader

This is all about chemistry and genetics. But nothing on 'why roses smell nice'.

It's really a puzzle. Why on earth should Homo Sapiens consider a rose's smell to be 'nice'? Dogs like roses' smell about the same as shit. They don't give a damn.

Further, why are rainbows pretty? Why is a waterfall inspiring? And on and on.

You have to have some kind of special model to explain this, I think. Something beyond simple reproductive survival. But I don't know what.

Anyway, interesting that we all smell slightly differently! So indeed qualia is a bigger issue than we may have thought.

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Not all rose types smell as nice as others. There are countless types, all bred for specific characteristics over hundreds of years.

If one such characteristic is pleasant smell (and why would it not be), then the answer is obvious. By and large, roses smell nice because human bred them to.

> By and large, roses smell nice because human bred them to.

That theory seems unlikely to me since wild roses smell good.

I would say that the modern roses that don't smell good have instead lost their smell because they were selected on other criteria.

That may explain why roses smell nice, but many wildflowers smell nice too.

I've seen the argument before that humans find flowers pretty because they indicate fertile land, where there are flowers there will be animals, etc. Impossible to really know, I suppose.

Anyone who's done any gardening would find that fertilizer - both natural and otherwise - do not smell pleasant.

Fertile land exists naturally without the manual addition of manure fertiliser.

...and smells much the same!

our monkey brain this mean fruits later, maybe.

It could possibly be ancestral from some specie that relied on flowers in a more direct way.

Rainbows then? A pretty rock? A lone tree on a remote hilltop illuminated by a sunrise?

These are definitely higher order experiences (requiring perhaps consciousness) that have nothing to do how your olfactory nerves were once wired.

Dogs actually are quite interested in the smell of shit.

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