Thank you for the thoughtful answer.
I see that we agree on several points and perhaps some of the quibbles are due to how we frame concepts.
On the vision issue almost nobody seems to pay any attention to the fact that as the eye darts around with wildly different images being fed into V1. I do and have been thinking about how the resulting palimpsest must be parsed to make any sense of this. I certainly do NOT think of some pretty image forming as the data is parsed.
Your parting line begs for some further detailing - how is the object passed up the hierarchy?
I have been thinking about this exact thing for a long time and suggest a line for you to consider.
This may be totally alien to how you are thinking about what happens in the association regions but I see this as a stew of extracted features with as many interpretations of the sensory stream extracted as the maps are able to provide, mixed together with the rough local topology preserved.
I see that the next step is my proposed columns to Hex-grids mechanism extracting the underlying pattern with a voting mechanism. This ends up looking like the same grid pattern that has been observed in these areas.
Thinking about this and the visual palimpsest is a juxtaposition of parts of each fixation overlayed on the next as a sequence - a neural 20-questions game that results in image identification. HTM is all about sequences and each local area is doing its own sequence matching with the tiny patch it can see. Of all the possible images that could be recognized the parallel recognition and voting with neighboring columns would converge on some learned pattern. With the voting mechanism this results in a stable high-level pattern that represents the object being recognized. This is a distributed representation across the cortical extent of the object being recognized.
Since this patch of recognition is being accompanied by the thalamus running in tonic mode - the patch of thalamus tonic mode can be a signal to the rest of the subcortical structures that whatever pattern has formed on the cortical sheet is a learned/recognized object.
I assert that the association regions form a stable hex-grid pattern that stands for the recognized object with the spatially aligned tonic mode thalamus signalling a “data available here” flag. The phase/scaling/rotation of the hex-grid are the unique signature of the object in this part of the cortex.
There is much more to this but this is the central idea of what I see happening in the association regions.