Thank you for sending the third revisions of your papers Gestalt Isomorphism I and II. Enclosed are two sets of comments by the original reviewers.
Although the reviewers still have criticisms of it, it seems to me that Paper 1 may be close to being acceptable for publication. Reviewer 2's remarks suggest that you need to be more careful to get right what Köhler (and Adelson) actually said, and to clarify how your views differ from and go beyond theirs. Reviewer 1's comments on Paper 1 seem potentially more serious. First, it seems that your criticisms of the BCS/FCS model may not apply to a recent version of the model. Secondly, your attempt to solve the edge classification problem does not work for many common situations. The worry here is that your new approach may not only be less comprehensive than an existing approach, but may give the wrong outcomes in many situations.
Paper 2 (including the new sections) is still open to a range of objections. Reviewer 1 lists a number of problems which can be summarised by saying that your approach may work for particular examples of simple scenes, but that one can easily think of equally likely scenes which would be wrongly perceived. In addition, he questions the psychological plausibility of some of your assumptions, such as those of dark illuminants and ray-tracing algorithms.
When I read the reviews of these latest revisions, I confess that I was disappointed: it did not seem to me that much progress had been made in producing acceptable versions of the papers. What the reviewers and I like about the work is that it tries to identify (sometimes for the first time) serious problems which visual systems need to solve. Unfortunately, the work is less successful in producing robust solutions to these problems. There is no shame in this (they are just very hard problems) but the worrying thing from my point of view is that successive versions of the papers seem to contain increasingly ad hoc and unsuccessful postulates. Although the review process is a negotiation between authors, reviewers, and editors, it does not seem to me that progress is being made: the new problems seem just as severe as the old ones. Although you (I think) and I (certainly) appreciate the efforts of the reviewers, I think that it would not be fair to ask more of them.
I think that I should reject Paper 2 - there seem to be just too many problems with it. Please consider whether you can really address the two criticisms by Reviewer 1 of Paper 1. If so, please revise and resubmit the paper, taking into account also the suggestions of Reviewer 2.
Yours sincerely,