Perception in animals changes the structure of their bodies as they are coordinating with their environment, such that they acquire motor techniques and hence new ways of structuring their perceptions.
Perceiving the world isnt a passive activity in which facts strike your eyes. The world doesnt have these facts, there is no data, and nothing from which to simply "average to a template".
When light strikes your eye, there is no "keyboard" in it. Nothing in it from which derive even a template of a keyboard.
There are only templates in datasets we prepare -- and we dont prepare them by actually "encountering datasets in reality". Rather, we arrange reality and measure it so-as-to-be-templateable.
What animals have is the ability, with effort, to engage in this dynamic -- to arrange the world to make it knowable. It is this process of arrangement which requires intelligence; not "taking the average after it has happened".
There is nothing in the world to be "percieved" in the ML sense, as in: ready for analysis. That's an illusion we construct: we make "perceiable data".
It is our bodies, and our concerns, which make the world itself perceivable. The world itself is infinitely dense with infinities stacked on infinities. There isnt "data" to be templated.
And this isnt theorertical: no ML system will ever work. All that works is our data preparation.