I would go further and say that the visual cortex and the rest of the brain are really just feature extractors for the body to use. And without a lifetime of embodied experience, neither can "vision" be solved nor can "general AI" be realized.

It's impossible to really see something unless you have the opportunity to interact with it (or things like it). It's impossible to understand something unless you have the opportunity to interact with it (or things like it). Without interaction there can be no intelligence. The best you can do is have an intelligent being (the human researcher) train a computer to mimic intelligent action in a constrained environment. But there is no path from there to general intelligence without interaction.

And there is no interaction without a body of some shape. The body can be virtual, and needn't look like a human body, but there needs to be a set of actuators which cause realtime changes in the input space.