Seeing and Believing

I remember how struck I was the first time I read these lines in Will Durant’s book, The Story of Philosophy:

“All our knowledge of anything is merely our sensations of it, and the ideas derived from these sensations. A "thing" is merely a bundle of perceptions i.e., classified and interpreted sensations.”

How different the same flower appears to a bee and us humans gets driven home by pics like these (Left = human vision; Right = bee vision):

Ok, you say, but that’s two different species we are talking about.

Then let’s take this pic which different humans see differently:

Some see a young woman with flowing hair and a nice dress; others see an old woman with a wart on her large nose! Ashvin B. Chhabra makes an interesting observation about this pic in his book, The Aspirational Investor:

“What is interesting about this illusion is that our brains instantly decide what image we are looking at, based on our first glance. If your initial glance was toward the vertical profile on the left-hand side, you were all but destined to see the image of the elegant young woman: it was just a matter of your brain interpreting every line in the picture according to the mental image that you already formed, even though each line can be interpreted in two different ways. Conversely, if your first glance fell on the central dark horizontal line that emphasizes the mouth and chin, your brain quickly formed an image of the older woman.”

Daniel Kahneman made a very interesting remark in his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, that applies here:

“Only one interpretation came to mind, and you were never aware of the ambiguity.”

But at least once you were told of the two interpretations of the pic, you can see both. Strangely, in some cases, we can’t see both interpretations even when we are told about it! Take this famous pic that went viral on the Net earlier this year:

The question: What is the color of the dress in the pic in the center?

Believe it or not, half the Internet sees white-gold and the other half sees blue-black! And unlike the old woman/young girl pic, nobody can see both colors of the dress by looking at the central pic even after being told about the two interpretations! Which is why Wired website came up with the pic above with the caption:

“The original image is in the middle. At left, white-balanced as if the dress is white-gold. At right, white-balanced to blue-black.”

But why can’t we see the two interpretations of the dress even after being told about it? Here’s Wired’s explanation:

“That might be because of how people are wired. Human beings evolved to see in daylight, but daylight changes color. That chromatic axis varies from the pinkish red of dawn, up through the blue-white of noontime, and then back down to reddish twilight. “What’s happening here is your visual system is looking at this thing, and you’re trying to discount the chromatic bias of the daylight axis,” says Bevil Conway, a neuroscientist who studies color and vision at Wellesley College. “So people either discount the blue side, in which case they end up seeing white and gold, or discount the gold side, in which case they end up with blue and black.””

So please stop saying “Seeing is believing”. And start believing in maya!