OK, I've been wanting to ask this question but didn't want to take up too
much time on the FML with it.  Still, it keeps coming up.  My question is,
How does one know what colors an aminal sees?  I presume that researchers
expose them to light of different wavelengths to see how they react.  But
does this really solve the problem of what they "see"?  Humans of different
cultures see colors very differently; what we think is orange is red to
someone else.  In fact, there are some cultures that identify only a few
colors, period, no matter what they look at.
 
In a book about evolution called "The Blind Watchmaker," author Richard
Dawkins devotes an entire chapter to describing the engineering feat
achieved by bats, which use sonar to find their way around.
 
"But a bat uses its sound information for very much the same kind of purpose
as we use our visual information.  It uses sound to perceive, and
continuously update its perception of, the position of objects in
three-dimensional space, just as we use light.  ...  My point is that the
form that an animal's subjective experience takes will be a property of the
internal computer model.  ...
    ...  Bats may even use the sensations that we call colour for their own
purposes, to represent differences in the world out there that have nothing
to do with the physics of wavelength, but which play a functional role, for
the bat, similar to the role that colours play to us.  Perhaps male bats
have body surfaces that are subtly textured so that the echoes that bounce
off them are perceived by females as gorgeously coloured, the sound
equivalent of the nuptial plumage of a bird of paradise.  ...
    ...  It is precisely because our own human senses are not capable of
doing what bats do that we find it hard to believe."
 
Now some of you make think this guy has a vivid imagination.  I think this
chapter on bats is one of the most beautiful passages about nature I've ever
read.  For all we know, perhaps a ferret that walks up to a fuzzy blanket
sees a gorgeously "colored" surface reminiscent of the fur of lots of other
ferrets in a pile and thinks something equivalent to, "Now this looks like a
great place to snuggle."
 
In other words, how do we really know what an animal "sees"?  It seems to me
to be virtually impossible to know what animals (including other people)
perceive without literally being able to recreate their brains and all the
other nerve endings in their bodies to begin to have some idea of how the
world appears to them.
 
        Linda and Lucky Charm (Angel's fur is a gorgeous color. I think
        I'll just chomp down on it.)
[Posted in FML issue 1451]