The reviewer is mistaken when he suggests that "the most significant point of departure from Grossberg's approach" is the disavowal of specific neurophysiological modeling in favor of a perceptual modeling approach. It is clearly stated in the paper that the central message of the paper is the issue of coupling the different levels of a hierarchical representation by way of bi-directional forward and inverse transformations between those levels, in order to resolve the concept of a hierarhchical representation with the emergence identified by Gestalt theory. The perceptual modeling approach is used merely as the simplest description of the computational transformations evident in perceptual phenomena.

The reviewer then suggests that this mathematical description of visual processing in terms of filtering and feedback operations is itself a specific neurophysiological hypothesis, because he claims that accepting this description of perceptual processing would exclude a neurophysiological explanation such as Köhler's electrostatic field theory. The reviewer obviously misses the whole point of the perceptual modeling approach, which is that it is expressed in terms which are agnostic to any particular theory of neurophysiology. The types of filtering and feedback proposed in the model could be expressed in a physical system as either standard neural network receptive fields, optical processes performed by lenses, harmonic resonance standing waves, Fourier filtering algorithms, or even Köhler's electrostatic fields. All of those systems (and many more) can be contrived to perform the equivalent computational function. However that function is most simply and clearly expressed in mathematical form as spatial convolution operations, rather than by specific mechanisms which approximate those pure mathematical transformations.

It is small wonder that this reviewer fails to recognize the merits of the paper if he fails to grasp its central message! There are altogether too many researchers in the field who have a quick facility with details and specifics, but have difficulty grasping the larger issues of perception and consciousness!