There are plenty of things that HTM is not aligned with in terms of biology. For example global inhibition I mentioned earlier. The only reasoning behind global and local inhibition that I have seen so far is that ‘there is inhibition so we inhibit in A way’. If that weren’t the case there would only be the one choice and it would be closely related to the reasoning and results of biology. Which that is completely fine, I’m not saying that you need to know everything to start working on a theory. That is by definition what a theory is, you don’t know everything and you are trying to work it out. But as scientists, if you start assuming “the way we are doing it is getting results so lets just assume that’s the way biology does it until someone tells us different” then honestly that’s only slightly different than the current AI community.
It maybe the case that things like inhibition method, biasing local spatial processing before temporal, ignoring minicolumn functionality for the overall hypercolumn results, resetting, etc., might not actually affect the overall effect that cortical columns create. My point is that there are things that have been done that exclude key components, like a neurons connection to higher and horizontal neighbors, that make the assumption will give the same results. A layers inhibition methodology is the replacement for lateral connections and interneurons. And as scientists, you can’t possibly comfortably say that that method its neurally confirmed rather than neural plausible.
That’s my point, really that it’s a step toward proving but design choices have made the theory much different than biology’s methods but still trying to stay true to the end result. Hopefully with no unintended consequences of biasing the learning in certain ways.