Echolocation and what it is like to be a dolphin

In the first episode of 'Inside the Animal Mind' Chris Packham discussed dolphins and their sense of echolocation. He claimed that, "...the dolphin's echolocation is an extremely powerful sensory tool which allows its mind to build up a picture of the world" and then posed the kind of questions that philosophers are often tempted to ask:
"...what does a dolphin actually do, mentally? What does it think with all of that echolocation? Does it turn it into a visual image? We don't know. We may never know."
-- What is it like to be a dolphin?

There is something peculiar about these claims and questions. Packham suggests that perception is something that the mind does and that it involves forming mental pictures. But these presuppositions are questionable. The human sense of sight is not a sense that essentially involves forming 'visual' pictures in our mind. It is the sense which allows us to see things. It is possible to form mental images of things, and we might be prompted to form mental images of things by what we see, but then again we might not. Seeing things does not involve mental pictures at all.
Similarly the dolphin's sense of echolocation is the sense which allows it to echolocate things. It does not involve mental pictures of any sort - whether 'visual' or otherwise.
My mind does not perceive things and I do not use my mind to perceive things. I perceive things. - Similarly with dolphins.

If someone were to ask me 'what is it like for you to see things?' I would be a bit baffled and 'what is it like for a dolphin to echolocate things?' is similarly baffling.
 http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b03tcpjv/Inside_the_Animal_Mind_You_Are_What_You_Sense/

John Gray's review of Sperber's *Karl Marx: A Nineteenth Century Life* in the New York Review of Books

In his review of Jonathan Sperber’s book, Karl Marx: a Nineteenth-Century Life, (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/may/09/real-karl-marx/)  John Gray claims that Marx’s ideas regarding communism vacillated dramatically in 1848 in that his speech to the Cologne Democratic Society (August 1848) was, “…strikingly at odds” with views expressed in the Communist Manifesto (published earlier in 1848). Gray claims that Marx rejected revolutionary dictatorship by a single class as ‘nonsense’ in his speech in August. Given that Gray thinks that this is seriously in conflict with the Communist Manifesto he presumably thinks that the Communist Manifesto argues for revolutionary dictatorship by a single class. Gray reveals such serious misunderstandings of Marx’s work in these claims and in others made in the article that you have to wonder whether the misunderstandings are wilful.

In his speech to the Cologne Democratic Society Marx was responding to Wilhelm Weitling’s desire for a small dictatorial government in the wake of the German revolution of 1848. Marx argued that Weitling had failed to recognise the revolution as a bourgeois one and suggested that the vital task of the German revolution was to eliminate the remnants of feudalism. In opposition to Weitling’s proposal of trying to achieve a dictatorship by a few (ref: Notes from the editors in Marx and Engels’ Collected Works 7 p.650) Marx argued for a more democratic solution. What Marx rejected as nonsense was, “…the intention to carry on a dictatorship in accordance with a system devised by a single brain” (ref: ‘Report of the Speeches made by Marx and Engels at the General Meeting of the Democratic Society in Cologne, August 4^th 1848’ in Marx and Engels Collected Works 7 p.556)– i.e. Weitling’s proposal in the context of the German revolution of 1848. So Marx was not rejecting his own communist views from the Communist Manifesto at this meeting.

There is then the further issue of whether Marx argued for a revolutionary dictatorship by a single class in the Communist Manifesto. Marx did argue for ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ in the Communist Manifesto but only as a phase immediately after the revolution:

“…the first stage in the revolution of the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling as to win the battle of democracy”.

But this was only the first stage in the battle of democracy. The goal was to achieve democracy and a classless society – where no single class rules because there are no classes.

“In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”

The first stage would be necessary because the bourgeoisie would not be likely to give up their dominant position willingly and a workers’ state would be needed to fill the vacuum left by the overthrow of the capitalist state.

This may sound unjust, especially to the ears of the bourgeois class. But as Marx points out in the Communist Manifesto,

“Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society. All that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriation.”

--It is the injustice of capitalism, the subjugation of labourers that it inevitably involves, that means that its overthrow is for the good of the majority of humankind.

So, Gray is entirely mistaken about Marx’s supposed vacillations. Opposing dictatorship by a few in the context of the German revolution of 1848 is perfectly consistent with Marx’s arguments in the Communist Manifesto for a 'dictatorship' by the majority as a means to democracy and freedom for all.