Does machine learning produce mental representations?

Over the last few months, I've been catching up more systematically on what's been happening in machine learning and AI research in the last 5 years or so and noticed that a lot of people are starting to talk about the neural net developing a'mental' representation of the problem at hand. As someone who's preoccupied with mental representations a lot, this struck me as odd because what was being described for the machine learning algorithms did not seem to match what else we know about mental representations. So I've been formulating this post when I was pointed to this interview with Judea Pearl. "That sounds like sacrilege, to say that all the impressive achievements of deep learning amount to just fitting a curve to data. From the point of view of the mathematical hierarchy, no matter how skillfully you manipulate the data and what you read into the data when you manipulate it, it's still a curve-fitting exercise, albeit complex and nontrivial."