Yeah, all they want is a simple mechanism of how to jump from a mere "blind", mechanistic feature extraction to the notion that creatures of this Nature usually have two eys and make a hard-wired heuristic, a short-cut which improves pattern recognition in orders of magnitude with less computational cost.

Every child will tell you that cars have eyes, and even a crow could track the direction of your gaze.

Well, I would also give away some govt. printed money to know how to make this kind of a jump from raw pixels to high-level shapes.)

The answer, by the way, is that the code (which is data) should be evolved too, not just weights of a model. This is an old fundamental idea from the glorious times of using Lisp as AI language - everything in the brain is a structure made out of conses^W neurons.

And feature extraction and heuristics should be "guided". In the process of evolution it is guided by way too many iterations of training and random selection of emerging features. Eventually a short-cut "creatures have eyes" will be found and selected as much more efficient. We need just a few millions of years or so of brute forcing.

Hey, Darpa, do you fund lone gunmen?)