Reviewer B says the paper is "very ambitious but ultimately
unsatisfactory", but "the author never gets beyond the
metaphor stage". That issue was discussed in the general section
in the response to Reviewer A above. He continues that although
standing waves appear to bear some interesting relations to Gestalt
phenomena,
In the first place, the observation leads to very interesting and significant theoretical work. For if harmonic resonance were indeed identified as a major mode of neural computation and representation, this would offer a unique computational mechanism that would automatically account for Emergence, Reification, Invariance, and Multistability in perception as fundamental properties of the representation itself, rather than factors that must be accounted for by specific neural mechanisms or architectures. Whether or not this reviewer is convinced by the arguments of this paper, surely he must admit that should the theory be true, that would be of great theoretical interest for both neurophysiologists and for computational theorists.
As for the criticism that no perceptual phenomena are explained and no predictions are derived or tested, this criticism would apply for a theory within the accepted paradigm. The present theory however is a general one, relating to general principles of computation rather than specific architectures to address specific perceptual phenomena. Every unique and original concept of neurocomputation deserves to be exposed to the community, to make it available to be judged on its merits by the larger community of scientists, many of whom have access to additional evidence not available to either the author or to the reviewers, which may help to either support or refute the proposed theory.
Reviewer B notes: "There are some odd sentences in the very beginning of the paper that might be construed as indicating that the author intends to constrain the Neuron Doctrine to feed-forward architectures. If so, then he is setting up a straw man, because nobody really believes in strict feed-forward models of vision".
Yes, that is true. However there is general consensus that the feedback is limited by the time delays inherent in the spiking neuron and chemical synapse, which sets an upper bound on the number of cycles per second possible in a feedback loop composed of classical neurons and chemical synapses that varies as a function of the number of synapses within the feedback loop. In any case this limitation would preclude feedback cycles that involve the entire cortex at the 40 Hz oscillations observed in the EEG signal. The fact that such oscillations are observed in the cortex is a major challenge to the Neuron Doctrine paradigm. This issue will be elaborated in the next version of the paper.
Reviewer B concludes: "For a paper on this topic to be acceptable for publication in Psychological Review, it would have to fill in a lot of the details that are so obviously missing here. Important phenomena would have to be explained in a concrete, detailed way, predictions of new effects would have to be derived and tested, and the results would have to be compared to alternative theoretical approaches. Unfortunately, none of this crucial work has been reported in this manuscript."
Again, this criticism might apply to a paper that professes to prove with evidence the validity of one theory of neurocomputation over another. The present paper does not presume to prove that harmonic resonance is the principle form of computation in the brain, but merely to introduce this novel and unique phenomenon as a possible candidate mechanism in the brain, to be given equal consideration with the existing paradigm of the Neuron Doctrine. The present theory is a trans-paradigmatic one, that cannot yet be proven by the methods of "normal science". However if the idea is rejected for publication even as a possible alternative paradigm of neurocomputation, then those rigorous definitive tests will never be conducted because those scientists with access to the tools and facilities to conduct those tests will not be aware of the need to test it. The only valid grounds for rejecting a proposed paradigm of neurocomputation would be if the idea were not original or unique, or fatally flawed in principle. These criticisms have not been raised in the present case.