What strikes me as unconvincing about interpreting vision as operating on the frequency domain is that anyone can look as a sound wave's spectrogram and underst

What strikes me as unconvincing about interpreting vision as operating on the frequency domain is that anyone can look as a sound wave's spectrogram and understand what it's representing, even if they're totally unfamiliar with graphs in general. I've looked at spectrograms and noticed sounds that I was missing, then looked for them at the right times and frequencies and found them. You may not be able to understand the sound from a spectrogram (e.g. understand words, or melody), but you can understand what it's representing. If you look at the 2D FFT of a bitmap, the result is completely incomprehensible. You could look at two videos and their corresponding 2D spectrograms side-by-side and not know which corresponds to which.