>>44
I was trying to say that his claim is anything not done by the generalized regions is unimportant. An exception to that "anything" seems to be the thalamus which he was never clear about.
I think he might be claiming that a working model of the cortex/hippocampus and the thalamus is most important and if we have that we could build "thinking" machines based upon this model and that the filtering/default behaviour/processing performed by lower non-cortical areas (cerebellum, brainstem, spinal cord, basal ganglia, motor cells, various sensor cells, etc) is specific to biological organisms and could be implemented in other ways in a "thinking" machine.
I do believe his model is incomplete in the way it treats attention (thalamus) and motor function (how do the lower-level patterns in M1 form/are learned? do they form entirely by feedback?), however I do hope to see him revise it to include those in the future (He did treat them in his "On Intelligence" book to a certain degree, but they're not present in his memory-prediction framework implementation which he calls HTM).