It’s All Relative

This is a simple picture of a gear with the most distant portion blurred. When I posted it on Instagram, I described it as “Emerging from the mists of time.” The idea was that this obviously old mechanism was present as a display, somehow representing its use many years ago.

The description was meant to evoke a sense of the gear approaching the viewer as it came from the past, emerging from the blurry darkness in the background.

Can you see it that way?

However, it could also have been seen as the gear moving away from the viewer into the distant darkness.

Now can you see it this way, too?

So which is the correct view? Neither, and both. It depends on the viewer. One person may see it one way, and another person see it the other way.

In a way, this is an example of a “bistable image”, like the Rubin’s vase in which a symmetrical shape is pictured that can be interpreted either as two profiles facing each other, or as a vase.

It turns out that there are many things in science that work like this – the result depends on the viewer. For example, Einstein’s theory of relativity describes how certain observations about the universe don’t have a single answer, they are relative to the observer’s situation. This is why it’s called the theory of relativity! Observations depend on the viewer.

Just like the picture.

If this is true in science and pictures, how much more true must it be for human motives and beliefs. Not facts, but the perspectives that affect how we interpret the facts.

It’s so easy to think that we have the only right perspective about everything, but the reality is that others may see things differently from us. This shouldn’t be surprising since everyone has their own story, relationships, beliefs, and inclinations. Yet we often just ignore that and assume they must be wrong.

It’s well known that we need to be careful, and we even have a saying about this: “Don’t judge a man until you have walked a mile in his shoes”. And yet, we often fall into that trap.

So, what if we make an attempt to see things from their points of view? Not just listen to their arguments, but actually understand where they are coming from.

Like trying to shift the perspective in the picture, we can try to deliberately change our interpretation of what we see, to try on a different viewpoint.

This may apply to more than just the people around us, but also when we read about how people act in other cultures, other times in history, and perhaps even when we talk about things beyond human experience.

It can be mind-bending to adopt other perspectives, but also mind-opening.