[scott_s]

Perhaps a way of stating it is that you want to create computer programs which do the same image processing that our brains do. That, I think, is what you're getting at: we don't see "reality", we see images processed by our brain, from signals received by our eye, mixed with a bunch of learned and instinctual models already existing in our brain. Accurately modeling the signals entering our eye is not enough. We also need to perform - at least approximately - the some processing that our brain does.