From Iain Petrie
Your recent cover line “Inside Animal Minds: How other creatures see our world” (20 August) would have been better put as “Inside Animals’ Brains: Some speculation as to what it might or might not be like to be another creature”.
The writer of the article suggests a bee sees through the “pixellated window of mosaic vision”. We cannot make the leap from a creature’s sensory equipment to knowing what that creature experiences subjectively.
I have two eyes but see only one image because I have a unified sense of consciousness. I just picked up a cup of coffee which was far too hot. I didn’t feel five separate pains, one for each finger, but a single pain. Maybe it makes no sense to talk about the subjective experience of a different life form.
Perhaps there is nothing like being a bee; perhaps it has no consciousness and lives “in the dark”. Surely this also holds for the other creatures that were discussed: turtles, bats, dogs and snakes.
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Hatfield, Hertfordshire, UK
