I sincerely hope that this reviewer did not allow his irritation due to stylistic trivialities to color his judgement of the scientific merits of the ideas presented in this paper. While such a reaction would be perfectly understandable at a human level, if such were the case, this would not only seem unfair to the author, but would actually be unfair on the part of the reviewer. Stylistic irregularities can be corrected in later drafts, and should not in any way influence the judgement of the merits of the paper. This is not an exercise in penmanship, but a serious scientific proposal, on which my very career and livelihood depend. Judgement of it on any other basis is tantamount to discrimination as serious as if on the basis of race, gender, religion, or ethnic origin. If the reviewer feels that his experimental background would bias his judgement of a theoretical paper, then he should disqualify himself as a reviewer of such a paper.

Nevertheless, the point is well taken, and I have made every effort to attend to all objections great and small. For my own part, I am far more irritated, when reviewing a paper, if it is the subject matter that is trivial or of minor significance. I thought the reviewer would find it refreshing that these ideas, whether right or wrong, are at the very least thought provoking and intellectually stimulating, which in my experience is a rare occurence when reviewing a paper.

Figures 21 and 15 (B) have been eliminated from the latest draft, although I maintain that especially Figure 21 offers an intriguing insight into the interactions between form and brightness perception, which poses a fundamental challenge to simplistic models of the perception of those quantities. Unfortunately the phenomenon is more complex than I had thought, as the reviewer points out, and therefore it poses a challenge to the Gestalt Bubble model also, at least in the current formulation. Furthermore I have been unable to locate the original reference to this figure, which I found in a paper many years ago, of which I have lost track, so I cannot even quote the original author's observations on this illusion.

As for Figure 1 (A), this objection is addressed in response to Point 7. I hope it was clear from that explanation that sometimes the "plain facts" of subjective experience are not as plain as they might seem, and that there are usually several equally valid perceptual experiences possible from a single visual stimulus. Furthermore, that a person's theoretical bias can influence the aspect of a percept that they choose to report. A Gestaltist perceives a square as a figure in depth before a background, while an Introspectionist, and a modern Neuroreductionist, tend to see only a black perimeter on a white surface. As with the original Gestalt theory therefore, part of the message of this paper is an appeal to reevaluate the subjective experience of perception, and to identify those aspects of the percept that possess the characteristics of a lower-level rather than higher-level or cognitive process using the criteria described in the section on high level v.s. low level representation. If the reviewer remains unconvinced of this, I hope at least that he recognizes that I have made a cogent case for this alternative view, that it does not contain "trivial mistakes", as he suggests in his opening remarks, and that these ideas have been thought out to much greater depth than is presented in this paper. As such, this paper represents a serious theoretical alternative to the conventional concept of visual processing, and as such, it deserves exposure to the scientific community, to allow them to make their own judgement on the matter.