alt Hacker NewsNick's claim is that that's the fundamental misinterpretation. Each neuron eventually ends up mostly doing one main thing (and the rare case that some neurons do several related things). Neurons compose to embed ideas which is a starkly different interpretation than them being holograms and fractional encodings.
Yes, I understand the claim. But it rests on the assumption that conflates multiple concepts that to me are substantially non-overlapping are one and the same thing. I would at least expect an explanation of why that is the case and so far I have not found it (at least not in the article).
If neurons do 'one thing' then their position encodes the relationships then snipping out that one weight would make the net forget that one thing. And we already know from many practical experiments that this is not the case. So I really wonder what the underlying mechanism is for that claim to be true.