(Note: Items in bold font indicate sections highlighted by the editor as particularly important to address.)

The present article is quite a difficult one to review. I suspect that referees with expertise in philosophy have already been contacted, but I would strongly encourage you to contact experts in space/form perception, such as Jan Konderink, James Todd, or Ennio Mingolla. Researchers in these fields could more adequately evaluate the theory advanced by the author. I provide my own review below.

Lehar's manuscript has great potential to become a bbs target article. In it's present form, however, I find it inadequate for publication. Below I outline some of the reasons.

It seems to me that the author is attempting to do "too much". On the one hand the author seems to engage in a philosophical battle with several century-old issues. At the same time, the author proposes a novel, original theory of space perception. It seems to me that the greatest contribution is by far the latter. The philosophical arguments should take part of background material, or discussion, but in a much more summarized manner. They serve to motivate his theory. I find the present "aggressive tone" inadequate, and to be frank, not very persuasive.

An explicit section on how the model deals with important findings in the psychophysics of form perception is required. I find the present discussion section inadequate. Some of the discussion is indeed suggestive (e.g., mental imagery), but some is too tangential. For example, the hemi-neglect arguments are weak, they hardly helps us understand the nature of this important condition. The discussion of the literature should be both more comprehensive and in-depth.

The author must provide a more structured comparison of his proposal with other theories of space/form perception. It is only against the background of existing proposals that his contribution can be assessed. And here I mean not general lines of investigation, such as neural network models, but specific *perceptual* theories.

The set of predictions presented should concern perceptual facts. After all this is a perceptual theory, not a theory of consciousness. For example, the last two predictions concern the nature of subjective experience, and are hardly predictions of the model.

In summary, the paper has novel, interesting elements that have great potential to become a BBS paper. Nevertheless, the author needs to reorganize the paper so as to highlight the actual contributions in a more structured manner.