But the serious part of my point is that the eye didn't evolve in a vacuum. It isn't "just a sensor" in an evolutionary sense because it evolved along with the brain and other senses as part of the holistic vision system. It's not like the brain is born with a blank slate and the eye as a sensor. It comes prebuilt with firmware and drivers, so to speak. That's then catalyzed by experience.

I think this is part of the problem in computer vision. Everyone just takes cameras and stitches them into a computer, hoping to be able to figure it out. It basically doesn't work. I think there needs to be embodied vision. I'd love to see any research that explores this. I have an intuitive suspicion that our vision system and processing is tightly bound to our body, in particular our neck and hands and legs. (This is unfounded, since I'm not a biologist or cognitive scientist, and is just my naive hunch. I'd be surprised if it's far off though.)

I have some recollection of a study I once came across (as a warning, it was somewhat disturbing) about the cognitive development of dogs, where the researchers took a number of puppies and somehow arranged things so that the puppies wouldn't see any changes in their vision while moving. Something like they were kept in a box with their heads secured facing one side of the box, with a treadmill that would occasionally run so that their muscles still developed. And what they found was that the puppies were rather severely non-functional when they were finally removed from their boxes. I think it was along the lines of functional blindness and a lack of normal canine volition to move around and do things, and the puppies weren't able to go on and develop normally afterwards. The conclusion was something about the importance of the visual field changing in response to their bodies trying to move around. Frankly it seems like a "no shit, Sherlock, was such an unpleasant experiment really necessary?" kind of conclusion, but it seems in line with your intuition about the crucial binding between vision and the motion of various limbs (and implicitly, that the environment actually produces different -- and to our visual networks, useful in some particular ways -- inputs as we move our limbs and neck around).

By the way, if anyone happens to know of the study I'm thinking of, I'd love to have a link. The last time I tried searching on Google / DDG, the results were drowned by unhelpful articles for dog articles.

That makes a lot of sense, yes.

Related to your hunch, I'm also speculating, but I'd think at the very least our eye muscles are an integral part of our vision system, it's not just the retina itself.

There is also some compression logic in the retina afaik , visual cortex is only interested in changes not a continual feed.