Duck/Rabbit

Choose one

The world as a visual illusion

There is always more than one way of looking at something. It’s natural to ask: what is the Right way of thinking about it? We expect, or demand, that there be a single answer to this question, but this is almost never the case. There are famous visual illusions that I will use to illustrate this point in general. Is it a duck or a rabbit? Is the cube convex or concave? In a very real sense, both interpretations are correct. With some effort, I can push myself back and forth between either interpretation with equal conviction.

Taking this same phenomenon to the realm of more serious questions: whether the universe is determined by the laws of physics or whether we have free will or the debate between individualism and collectivism. We can often find ourselves switching back and forth between these competing interpretations of reality. I feel free when I feel myself acting and experiencing consciousness, but when a physicist and neuroscientist go on about the laws of matter and how feelings are just correlates of dopamine, serotonin, and neurons firing photons, I start to see how I might really just be entirely a deterministic machine. Going between these interpretations, I cannot reconcile the two coherently.

Much like the illusions I started with, a singular reality lends itself to varying interpretations depending on ‘how the light hits it.’ The question of what is true here should be understood in this context, where every interpretation is colored by the particular way our light shines onto the world. There is an irreducible ambiguity that can sometimes be ignored but which inevitably allows conflicting interpretations.

The most interesting part about this is the incompatibility of these varying views. You can see the duck, and then see the rabbit, but you can’t see both at once. Holding one interpretation blocks off the other. This worries me. How many truths am I blind to simply because I currently hold some limiting interpretation? I see this problem a lot in some scientists. Science yields compelling and well-supported interpretations of the world. What is happiness? Dopamine, serotonin, certain areas of the brain ‘lighting up.’ This is of course true in one sense, but if we obsess over finding neuro-chemical processes and peer-reviewed descriptions to interpret each and every bit of reality, we miss what is right in front of us. No attempt to objectify all of reality will properly see itself.

What I take away from making a metaphor out of these visual illusions is a humility about my own convictions. I have my own opinions about how to see the world. Many times I have met people who I do not understand. They use words differently than I do, they wear clothes that I would never, they make decisions that make no sense to me, they value things that I do not. We do not share the same framework, we are not looking at life from the same angle. Nonetheless, we are seeing two sides of the same whole. We are each figuring out what life is, and one of us sees a duck and another sees a rabbit. 

These visual illusions are only illusory by virtue of an attempt to interpret. In reality, they are just pixels and colors distributed in such and such way. If I were striving to be more correct, I would say the photo ‘is what it is.’ But this isn’t a meaningful interpretation. One way of looking at this is that any meaningful interpretation is also a unique way of making mistakes. The full truth is not in any single interpretation-scheme, it is between all the particular ways of looking at things.

Whatever ‘muscle’ my brain uses to alternate between seeing the duck and the rabbit, the process by which I shed my interpretations in order to see things as they are (meaningless), in order to let in a new interpretation, this muscle should be exercised often. With virgin eyes, I did not choose to see the drawing as a duck and not a rabbit. I looked, and the interpretation found me. It would be wrong to fix this interpretation in place. I think the right way to look at the world is not by adopting a doctrine and fixing yourself to a single consistent point of view, but by frequently alternating between perspectives. 

It is time to make decisions

In practice, it is nearly impossible to maintain the ambiguity of a ‘between’ state in our actions and beliefs. The reason for this impossibility has to do with time. Consider the famous trolley problem. A train is racing down the tracks risking the lives of five people, and you are given the choice of pulling a lever to divert the track and thus risking the life of only a single person. One way of looking at it: if you do nothing, the train will kill five people but you will have had no part in that, absolving you of ethical responsibility, whereas if you pull the lever killing the single person, it will be your actions that caused that death. Another way of looking at it: it is better to have one person die instead of five, so you should pull the lever. There are many more ways of looking at it.

However, the best part of the philosophical trolley problem is that we can forever refuse to definitively answer the question. The figurative train is not unstoppably hurling forward toward a certain fate. The trick is that you can stay in the ambiguity of contemplation, this is a form of saying No. You can avoid saying Yes to any choice in particular. I can lean towards one choice versus another, taking credit for the merits of one and taking refuge from its deficiencies in my ongoing consideration of the alternative. The imaginary train is incapable of finalizing your decision, it can always be reversed or contemplated longer. This means you can forever avoid responsibility. 

In real life, you do not have such a luxury. Time drones onward with all the unstoppable violence of a universal train, and it is your fate lying on the tracks. Your life is happening now, and you are forced to stop contemplating and make a decision. No matter the depth of consideration given to alternatives, you ultimately bear the full consequences of your chosen path. There is no way out of this problem, you are forced to say yes to something. In doing so, you abandon the alternatives and can no longer hold on to all the things you would’ve done. We must choose one way of living, without ever having wanted to make such a choice; nonetheless, we are responsible for it.¹

We live a life that requires us to make decisions about ourselves, others, and the world. Again, we ask ourselves what is the Right way of thinking about these things? An authentic response will demand an effort to balance between questions and answers, between evaluating and committing. I think of the college kid who has an undeclared major, who graduates without knowing what career they want, who is “still figuring out what to do” with their life. They have not said yes to anything definitively. Through continuing to contemplate and question, they say no, they live tentatively. However, we know that they cannot live ‘undeclared’ forever. The moments are already adding up as we speak to make up the whole of a life.

 There is a kind of agony in this fact. When making a decision about what to do with your life, or developing an opinion on any important question, there is a temptation to delay the ‘moment of truth’ as long as possible. You want to be sure you’ve prepared enough, that you’ve considered all the possible alternatives and outcomes, that you have done all the research necessary to confidently say “this is the Right decision.” 

There is a tension here that I cannot seem to overcome. Between contemplating a question and giving an answer there is an irreconcilable loss. It feels like the best part about being alive is the vastness of our potential, the brightness and excitement of our undetermined future. But living is the process of coming to know our future, of using up our own potential and turning it into a determined concrete reality. At the point of tension between the determined reality and the undetermined potential, we find the present. 

At this very moment, you are acting a certain way, you are holding certain biases and blind spots, you are making an irreversible decision about who you are. It is now, the present, that we give a definitive answer. But every moment is tempered by its separation from all other moments. Each moment requires a new answer. This is our greatest luxury. We have the opportunity to experiment with our lives, to say yes to a certain approach and then return to questioning, to slip between yes and no. In short, we have trial and error, through which we can approximate our best life. The essence of trial and error is a dance between yes and no across iterations, across moments. 

The only time to make decisions is the present. But the present is endlessly being reborn. In one sense, you cannot take back the things you do today, they will be made irreversible by time which makes every ‘today’ into a yesterday. In another sense– think of seeing the other side of a visual illusion– today is different from yesterday, you can freely choose new actions and have different beliefs, you can say yes to new things. Our answers are as if they were written in the sand, washed away by each new wave. Neither our mistakes nor our successes can escape being washed away by time. We must make ourselves day by day. This allows us to change our mind, to continue asking “am I seeing things the Right way?”

Consistency

There is a powerful pressure imposed on us by society, our loved ones, and the world. We are pressed against it in all our endeavors to experiment and contemplate truth. It pulls us away from our ability to redirect, to change and evolve, to refine and approximate our best self across time. I am referring to consistency.

To others and to myself, my refusal and inability to decide once and for all who I am, what I value, what my purpose and behavior should be, constitutes a stubborn inconvenience. In general, this inconvenience is so great that it often leads people to abandon their interrogation of life and self in favor of a consistent, static way of being. A person is much easier to interact with when they operate consistently, when all their actions can be derived from an unchanging set of ideas. In short, when it is clear that they will think and act the same way today as they did yesterday.

The world seems to value consistency across time. We feel pressure for our current conviction to be correct, so we look to rationalize and justify our own correctness. We turn a blind eye to any doubt or continued questioning. In this way, we establish the appearance of consistency and thus the appearance of correctness. But consistency across twenty years only implies correctness insofar as the underlying conviction has genuinely undergone twenty years worth of doubt, trials, interrogation and has survived. Without this vital questioning and continual risk of self, consistency means nothing. Consistency can only be a good indicator of truth if we do not seek consistency.  

We sacrifice so much for ease and comfort. How much incompetence do we put up with in these rigid and slow-moving structures of government for the sake of avoiding the inconvenience of restructuring, revolution, and recreation? We tend to say yes, to develop a somewhat sensible orthodoxy, and then refuse to question it until our errors smack us in the face with an unavoidable and violent failure. This is how most people encounter death. They develop ideas about life in which they grow comfortable, they stop questioning the extremely unusual fact that they are alive. They take life for granted. In other words, they glue themselves to their interpretation and refuse to let things look any other way. It is only when the cold indifferent fact of the world strikes them unequivocally that they realize how wrong they have been to be so certain. This thing you call being alive, your sensations and your world, it will evaporate in death. Things can look much different than they do now. Ultimately, I will not be able to avoid experiencing these moments where the world strikes me with brutal honesty. My only defense is to put forth the effort and struggle against the structures and opinions that grow old and rigid without interrogation.

I think this temptation to be sure of ourselves, to have coherence in our views, actions and life, is a huge detriment to our success and happiness. The rigidity that my mind develops in seeing the drawing as a rabbit, and therefore resisting new interpretations, induces a temptation to believe that there should be a single right way without contradictions, that anything that works should be made absolute. Consistency, and the pressure it imposes on us to not question ourselves, is an enemy of trial and error. There is no such thing as a ‘once-and-for-all’ correct point-of-view, and consistency is a false idol of a person’s quest for truth. The only valid conviction is a present conviction. I condemn all past convictions whose ghosts overstay their welcome in the present.

What remains is to see clearly. An interrogative mind will adventure through life and find many ways of living and looking at the world. It will happen that these views will not be coherent. Things inevitably look different from different angles, and you can see things one way at a time. It’s important that we have the effort and courage to maintain the tension and awareness of all these conflicting perspectives, without reconciling or synthesizing. Don’t sacrifice the rich complexity of all your different experiences for the sake of simplicity or consistency. The flow of time will inevitably lead you to act definitively, forcing you to abandon the careful ambiguity that we strive for in thought. The only recourse we have is to know the mistakes we are making while trying to minimize our errors and be willing to pay the price.

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APPENDIX: Examples

• Money

•  Individual/Collectivism

• Covid-19

What is money? Money is interesting in that it plays a huge role in the lives of basically everyone, and at the same time it is an extremely abstract thing. It is both very real and very imaginary.

From one angle, money is a medium of information. The idea behind imposing a carbon tax, i.e. a tax on any activity that produces an excess of carbon emissions, is that we can effectively signal discouragement of carbon-emitting activities by making them a more expensive activity. A government can send a ‘nudge’ to its people through the system of money to convey the idea that we should produce less carbon emissions. Similarly, we can impose an electric-vehicle credit to signal encouragement of the use of electric vehicles. If I am willing to offer a certain amount of money in exchange for ready-made meals, I am signaling that other people should prepare meals for others (restaurants)... If restaurants charge too high prices, they are signaling that people should prepare their own foods. 

From another angle, money is a medium of power. By having money, a person has power over other people to make them do things. On what basis do we decide who makes the food and who gets to eat it? One person has money, another person needs it. By having money, I can pay to own land and do with it as I please, I can bribe people and incentivize others to do as I please, I can impose my will on the world with greater effectiveness through money. Similarly, poverty induces a sense of powerlessness in people, unable to realize their dreams or to spend their time as they please.

From yet another angle, money is time. By having money I can spend my days freely, do whatever I like without concern for work or unnecessary obligations. Without money, I lose my time to working and making money to sustain myself. It happens that you can also come to think of your hours and weeks in terms of money, on the basis of your wage or salary. You spend a day at the park instead of work and think that the day costs $300 in unearned wages.

The ways of looking at money are innumerable. Some of these can be partially reconciled, but ultimately you cannot understand all that money is by seeing it as only information or power or otherwise. You have to maintain a nuanced understanding of it that forces you to think about it in ways that won’t add up to a pretty and simple picture.

Many issues can be understood as a conflict between individualistic or collectivist perspectives. These two are some of the least reconcilable perspectives. Eating a cookie an individual time, this is good. Eating a cookie over a great collective of times, not so good. There are a lot of debates between capitalism and communism that center around the tension between the individual and the collective they belong to, the way that each individual benefits their collective and the way that a collective benefits its individuals.

The covid-19 pandemic saw some of the greatest clashes of differing perspectives. On one hand, it can be seen as absurd to allow another person to infringe on your rights to go out in public. On the other hand, it can be seen as absurd to let others' individual/selfish desires cause me or my family to get sick and die (setting aside the question of the virus’ lethality). In the abstract, this is about defining the exact degree to which we should let others’ interests infringe upon our own, and how much we should allow our own interests to infringe upon others. From the angle of either person, they seem right. The social and political disaster that came from the pandemic resulted from the fateful necessity to make a single decision given two correct and irreconcilable perspectives. There were stories of vocal advocates of lockdowns, with all the typical arguments of selfless love for others, who were spotted quietly breaking the terms of lockdown for their own individual benefits. There were also stories of vocal advocates against lockdowns and vaccines who later died or had family die due to the virus. These serve as some of the greatest proof of the incoherence implicit in holding any one perspective. Nobody was fully consistent nor right, how could they be?

1. There are many ways to have written this paragraph, I had to choose one way of writing it, and in doing so I presented the idea this way and not all the other ways, I cannot hope that my reader will understand what I’m saying based on all the things I had considered writing, only what I did write.