When I started this project, I thought the invariance comes from the properties of complex cells, to respond to multiple similar signals (for example to respond to all vertical lines from their respective receptive fields)… I tried to simulate how this would work but my final conclusion was not that final… It seemed that it would not work, but I could never do a good enough simulation to say for sure.
Another way of obtaining invariance might be the movement of the eye, focus, so the invariance would not be created in the brain but in the eye itself.. This still may be the case, I have not explored this option at all.
But from my latest blunders it seems the mechanism of invariance might be something very peculiar… It may come from inhibition.. While small patterns behave more or less predictable, bigger patterns have become totally unpredictable due to multiple overlapping inhibitions.. The number of neurons activating is not proportional to the input signal.. One might see more firing for smaller patterns than from bigger patterns.. Very strange indeed..