So not exactly. The distal context will still cause cells to become predictive, just like in the TM. It’s just that the HTM neurons in the layer are no longer connecting to each other’s distal dendrites. They are all getting their distal input from outside the layer. The layer doesn’t know where it’s getting the input, or what it represents. This is one of the problems the layer solves. It must learn the patterns from scratch.
So we can call this “the location signal” and ignore the fact that we don’t know where it comes from or how it is encoded. There is a section about this in the paper.
That being said, we’re trying to figure out how and where this location signal is generated.