Quote - > Quote - Interesting. Are we trying to emulate the camera lens, or human vision? Would they be the same?

You cant Emulate human vision... its impossible.

Actually so called
photorealistic 3Drenderers  are just Emulation what the scene would look like if a professional photographer took a picture and handed it  to you
if you  use a  truly "highend"
render engine that used a "physicaly correct" workflow you can recognize this right away in your settings ( see pic)
but these of course are way more $$Expensive$$$ than poser

I think that is an interesting question that deserves a more accurate answer. Much of The Renaissance was about artists recreating what they actually saw on paper and canvas rather than caricatured and stereotypical shapes previous generations used.

Take a look a Durer's perspective device, the second image down. You can see how artists in the days of the old masters were taught perspective and foreshortening. This method is still used to teach art students today, though using clear plexiglass plates rather than a bulky table.

Actually, take a look at some old master paintings and how good they were at capturing realistic behaving light and shadow. They had many of the techniques of photorealism down centuries before photography was invented! In fact, to this day, photography owes more to painting (which is also the style of much 3D art) than vice versa.

If you are interested, take a look at this fascinating -certainly in the context of this discussion- article from a few years ago, the "White's Illusion" that plagues the human brain can also occur in "any system that tries to emulate human vision." (quote from the article, emphasis mine)

In fact the camera is a machine that emulates human vision.

But for the original question, no a camera and human vision are not the same. 3D software imitates a real world lens with many of the same controls, but not the human eye. Generally speaking artists try to capture a mix of what they see and imagine on their medium, and of course there are extremes in either direction.