Hopefully my comments are not too annoying given my ignorance of neuroscience, but from a naive perspective, I had a thought on how a boss and advisor system could work.
First, the boss wouldn’t need to understand anything about a particular representation, but could have its own temporal memory of outcomes. The advisor could provide a relatively dense representation of everything it could try (this representation would also need to encode contextual information).
The boss could then use its own temporal memory of outcomes to rank and output a sparser representation containing the cells which it remembers to have the best outcomes. The others cells could be inhibited. This output SDR could then be translated into specific actions.