Although primitive at the time, the sense of sight evolved in animals around 700,000,000 years ago. As humans, it's our primary sense, and around half of all of our mental processing power at any given time goes to visual perception—you may have realized this about your dreams, too!
While it may seem very simple, our sense of sight is actually a lot more complex than we thought! As humans, we gain a great understanding of the world around us through our sense of sight.
What's really interesting, however, is how we humans can recognize the objects around us. For example, if you were to look at a car, how does your brain know that you're looking at a car, and therefore create a conscious perception of a car?
It seems like a simple question, but the amount of learning and logic that goes into recognizing objects is truly remarkable. Even more noteworthy is that we can recognize objects with very little data, as well! Say you were shown a lawnmower...