This is at most a philosophical difference. I&#x27;d say that being able to react to something is already processing it.<p>Maybe you&#x27;re falling for the homunculus fallacy in case of humans. But actually there is no little guy watching some screen in our brains, &quot;processing the images&quot;.<p>There&#x27;s no sharp distinction between reflex-like reactions and &quot;image recognition&quot;. It&#x27;s not even the case that our vision is &quot;full&quot; or &quot;perfect&quot; image processing. There might be all sorts of more complex ways that our vision could work but it doesn&#x27;t.<p>If you mean it&#x27;s misleading because the bacterium doesn&#x27;t have an inner first-person experience of looking at something, then again this is a philosophical thing, it&#x27;s not really observable science.