The representation is the distillation of pattern matching. They are isomorphic.
If you reverse the output of a CNN "hand" classification, it'll give you images that resemble the geometry and shading of fingers, palms, nails, knuckles, etc. -- these, I submit, are the distillation pattern matching for the actuality of "hands". Under no circumstances will it give you the five widely-separated fingers which a child draws. That's because the child-drawn hand is based on literal visual stimuli, but rather on an abstract logical model of a hand. That logical model is fully integrated with a similarly abstract model of the world, and includes functional relationships between abstractions, like the knowledge that "hands" can open "jars". The value of these being logical models rather than matched patterns is that they can then be extended to include never-before-seen objects. Confronted with a strange but roughly jar-sized object, a child can surmise that maybe it, too, can be opened with hands. That isn't pattern-matching: it's algebra.
Those activations are a representation of the matched patterns at a similar level of abstraction as the compositional model humans might come up with. They are not exactly the same as what a child would draw, but mostly because the neural network isn't trained to draw with hands. With a bit of work, I'm sure a bunch of PhDs could make a neural network model generate child-like drawings from realistic images.
See, that seems to me like a statement of faith which I just don't share. I think that building relational models of the world via abstract inductive reasoning is qualitatively different than pattern matching. I don't think there's some magic tonnage of pattern matching at which abstract inductive reasoning will suddenly emerge. I don't think that they're isomorphic. I think the AI toolkit still has a few missing pieces.
You talk about representations and reasoning but are not assessing the fact that the human brain is literally a decision maker, acting on stored procedures and memory. Any representations and any reasoning will only apply to a select scenario or select objects, regardless to how you wish to define the pattern, the fact that a subset of abstractness/generality out of the whole of existence is specified, implies a pattern that is coded for implicitly or explicitly.
My God, the level of hubris expressed by members of the cult of AI has reached a fever-pitch.
Stored procedures and memory?
Newton, in the age of clocks, managed to present the universe in the image of a clock. Is it any wonder that computer programmers present the universe in the image of the computer?