Below is a link to the forthcoming BBS target article Gestalt Isomorphism and the Primacy of Subjective Conscious Experience: A Gestalt Bubble Model by Steven Lehar http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Lehar/Referees/ This article has been accepted for publication in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS), an international, interdisciplinary journal providing Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences. Commentators must be BBS Associates or suggested by a BBS Associate. To be considered as a commentator for this article, to suggest other appropriate commentators, or for information about how to become a BBS Associate, please reply by EMAIL within three (3) weeks to: calls(a)bbsonline.org The Calls are sent to 10,000 BBS Associates and BBSPrints Users, so there is no expectation (indeed, it would be calamitous) that each recipient should comment on every occasion! 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(In the meantime, your name, address and email address will be entered into our database as an unaffiliated investigator.) ======================================================================= IMPORTANT To help us put together a balanced list of commentators, please give some indication of the aspects of the topic on which you would bring your areas of expertise to bear if you were selected as a commentator. To help you decide whether you would be an appropriate commentator for this article, an electronic draft is retrievable from the online BBSPrints Archive, at the URL that follows the abstract below. _______________________________________________________________________ Gestalt Isomorphism and the Primacy of Subjective Conscious Experience: A Gestalt Bubble Model Steven Lehar Ph.D. Peli Lab The Schepens Eye Research Institute email: slehar(a)cns.bu.edu KEYWORDS: Brain-anchored, Cartesian theatre, consciousness, emergence, extrinsic constraints, filling-in, Gestalt, homunculus, indirect realism, intrinsic constraints, invariance, isomorphism, multistability, objective phenomenology, perceptual modeling, perspective, phenomenology, psychophysical parallelism, psychophysical postulate, qualia, reification, representationalism, structural coherence ABSTRACT: A serious crisis is identified in theories of neurocomputation marked by a persistent disparity between the phenomenological or experiential account of visual perception and the neurophysiological level of description of the visual system. In particular conventional concepts of neural processing offer no explanation for the holistic global aspects of perception identified by Gestalt theory. The problem is paradigmatic, and can be traced to contemporary concepts of the functional role of the neural cell, known as the Neuron Doctrine. In the absence of an alternative neurophysiologically plausible model, I propose a perceptual modeling approach, i.e. to model the percept as experienced subjectively, rather than the objective neurophysiological state of the visual system that supposedly subserves that experience. A Gestalt Bubble model is presented to demonstrate how the elusive Gestalt principles of emergence, reification, and invariance, can be expressed in a quantitative model of the subjective experience of visual consciousness. That model in turn reveals a unique computational strategy underlying visual processing, which is unlike any algorithm devised by man, and certainly unlike the atomistic feed-forward model of neurocomputation offered by the Neuron Doctrine paradigm. The perceptual modeling approach reveals the primary function of perception as that of generating a fully spatial virtual-reality replica of the external world in an internal representation. The common objections to this "picture-in-the-head" concept of perceptual representation are shown to be ill founded. http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Lehar/Referees/ ====================================================================== IMPORTANT Please DO NOT prepare a commentary yet. Just let us know, after having inspected it, what relevant expertise you feel you would bring to bear on what aspect of the article. 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