Regarding the question posed at the beginning of this paper as to whether the same mechanisms underlie the same perceptual grouping laws in different modalities, our investigation suggests that the answer is ``yes'', but that the grouping laws themselves are largely illusory since they are epiphenomena of an underlying interplay between statistical structure and neural constraints. This conclusion is, however, in keeping with the more fundamental conception of the Gestalt approach of perception as a process of energy minimization parallel at the neural and mental levels. Energy minimization is now conceived of as proceeding on two separated timescales given by the dynamics of neural activity and neural plasticity respectively. Regarding the utility of the Gestalt framework in this revised form, the idea of statistical abstraction is highly compatible with the cognitive semantics proposal that conceptual structure develops as a result of embodied experience. Furthermore, since there appear to be no discontinuities in the underlying thalamocortical network that simultaneously subserves perception, mentation, and action, there is the hope of extending conceptual and mathematical machinery developed for understanding perceptual organization within the Gestalt framework to understand higher level cognitive functioning. Consideration of how this might be done reveals that there will probably be some new wrinkles, however...