In order to build an artificial visual system, humans must grasp what their own visual system does. In order to describe what the human visual system does we u

In order to build an artificial visual system, humans must grasp what their own visual system does. In order to describe what the human visual system does we use words like "dog" -- and I would agree with you, "big four-legged furry mammal" might be better, but artificial visual systems work more at the level of "80% probability of dog," "2% probability of brick," "90% probability of chihuahua," and they don't really know that chihuahua must always imply dog. In order to describe the function of the visual system, a fundamental change really must happen in the way the system's output is described. Using plain written words as output may work as a system but it is not an exact replica of a human visual system. It is more of a trained animal act: when you see dog-like images, press the button labelled "dog" (does the animal even comprehend what a dog is?) In order to rethink the way we describe output, we will have to come up with a very precise description of the inside potentials and activations in mammalian brains. We are just barely creating tools to describe what an artificial neural net "is thinking." So I guess we're starting to look in that direction.