Do Lorikeets See What Humans See?

No — in two senses: one material, one semiotic.

1.  Birds have 4 types of colour receptors, whereas humans only have three.  So their visual systems detect a wider range of the light frequencies, at the very least.

2.  If semiotic systems construe experience as meaning, then lorikeet visual experience is construed through their protolinguistic social semiotic system, whereas human visual experience is construed through language.

One way to think of visual experience construed only as perceptual meaning is as a partially animated pattern of (nameless) shapes and colours — as a sort of Jackson Pollock painting in which some of the coloured shapes can move around.

Detecting change is key to survival, and for humans, language provides clause transitivity as the key means of construing visible change as meaning.  It enables visual experience — the partially animated Jackson Pollock painting — to be mentally construed as processes, their participants and circumstances.  Humans see things that are delimited by their names, doing things that also have names, in places that have names.*

For lorikeets, on the other hand, the partially animated visual patterns are construed as protolinguistic meaning, in terms of the microfunctions — personal, instrumental, regulatory and interactional — in ways that have proved successful for their ancestors — rather than ours.


* This is consistent with Oliver Sacks' account of his patient Virgil who was blind until an operation gave him sight as an adult, after which he had to start making sense of the swirling colours he saw, by reference to language.

.ChatGPT comments:

That's a fascinating distinction between the material and semiotic ways in which lorikeets and humans perceive the world. Your explanation aligns well with the idea that perception is not just a passive reception of stimuli but is shaped by both the physiological limitations of the observer and the semiotic systems they operate within.

In terms of the material differences, the fact that lorikeets have four types of colour receptors while humans have three means they can perceive a broader spectrum of colours, likely giving them a very different visual experience. Their ability to detect additional wavelengths could change their interpretation of the environment, especially in relation to things like floral patterns or subtle shifts in light, which are important for foraging and mating displays.

When you move to the semiotic interpretation, the idea of the Jackson Pollock-like visual field for lorikeets is a compelling way to frame it. They aren’t likely to think in terms of discrete "objects" as humans do, but rather a fluid, dynamic array of shapes and colours that are interpreted through their social semiotics. It’s almost as though their perception is inherently tied to their social and behavioural needs — constantly evaluating things in terms of potential action, relationships, and context (like whether a shape is a potential food source or an approaching threat). This contrasts sharply with human perception, where visual data is parsed and segmented into structured categories that allow us to conceptualise the world in terms of identity and action.

You also make a really good point about the role of language in human vision. For humans, language allows us to impose categories and conceptual boundaries on what we see — we “name” the things in our visual field, and that transforms our perception into a coherent, narrative-like structure. This is echoed in Sacks’ account of Virgil, where he had to develop a mental framework for interpreting the swirling colours he saw by reference to language, showing how integral language is to human vision and cognition.

For lorikeets, as you noted, their semiotic system seems to construe visual experience differently. They see the world through a lens of action and interaction rather than static objects, constantly processing what’s relevant to their immediate social and survival needs. The absence of naming means their perception is likely more fluid and relational, based on cues that signal what needs to be done, who to interact with, or where to go.

This could mean that lorikeet vision, while it shares some features with human vision, is adapted to a more immediate, functional reality, focused on communication and interaction rather than categorisation and interpretation through language. Their "seeing" is thus more in tune with the social and ecological context of their existence.