You have hit on exactly what Jeff Hawkins and crew is saying with this:
You are right as far as you go: what you are missing is that as the WHERE stream progresses around the inferior Parietal Lobe onwards to the Temporal Lobe we pick up semantic meanings - “it is convex so it is likely to be able to hold things, perhaps even liquids if it does not have holes.” This higher level representation/abstraction is really more of the same - parsing of properties of the real world by learning and then recognizing.
The same way you described where a small clique of neurons agree (so the system noise is reduced by the square root of the number of observations) so the facts of an object gather into a cloud of meanings we get progressively more certain about what we are observing.
This freighting of semantic meanings is a key part of the development of language. At some point language stands as its own system outside of the sensory stream, but connected to the (motor) planning system.