Gary Marcus

But invariance should be learned, not imposed as a prior. That is the point. Different signals have different invariances. Translation is just one of many...

why learned?

Because I don't think we can easily tell what the invariances are that we'd like to put in (particularly higher up in the sensory hierarchy). The system needs to be constructed in a way that would allow for it to pick them up. See ferret cortical rewiring experiment.

I would think that we need some invariances innately, others to be acquired. If you are talking about Sur’s rewiring experiments, I don’t see the relevance

There could be some innate invariances. But my guess is that majority are learned. Rewiring shows that the cortex can interpret completely different modality. Either these signals have the same invariances (doubt that) or cortex is able to accommodate many.