Scotland stretches to the horizon a grey-green canvas of mossy, rough hills blanketed with mist*. The view of the harbor in Portree, a town on the Isle of Skye, breaks the monotony. The colorful facades of the houses contrast with the church rising above them. Behind the church, in a forgotten cemetery, an old maple tree hides in a pointless shade a massive tombstone to the memory of Louis Albert Necker of Geneva, who died at Portree on the 20th day of November 1861.

Necker arrived on Skye to observe birds and the aurora borealis, study glaciers, and map trails in the Cuillins mountains. Before settling in Portree permanently, he studied geology and crystals. He belonged to a species of naturalists sentenced to extinction by later centuries. During his research on crystals, he described an optical illusion now known as the “Necker cube”.

The two-dimensional model presented above is interpreted by our brain as a cube. The front and back walls of this cube are two-dimensional squares. The question is, which square in the three-dimensional interpretation is the closer wall, and which is the farther one? For most observers, these walls switch places from time to time, even despite our best efforts to keep them in one position. You cannot see both orientations at the same time and neither is more correct. There are two equivalent states. This spontaneous change between two or more perceptual states that occurs when sensory information is ambiguous, as in this case, is called multistable perception.

In the description of the main ideas of the Third Woods I wrote:

Each way of perceiving reality (scientific-artistic; reductionist-holistic; objective-subjective, etc.) excludes the other at a given moment, favoring the particular mode of experience. However, despite the temporal impossibility, you can learn to change the focal plane smoothly and involuntarily, so that at the seemingly same time you can see a detail and the bigger picture.

The problem is that the analogy of changing the focal plane, though used as figure of speech, does not accurately reflect my vision. Changing the focal plane allows us to get closer to the object or sharpen it, so we can better see the details, but we won’t see the object in a different form, like with multistable perception. Since there is no one correct interpretation, and involuntary-spontaneous “transformations” occur, multistable perception in many cases better reflects my idea of the Third Woods. It can also be expressed in other words, or, to put it differently, in the words of others.

I first encountered the Necker Cube in Richard Dawkins’ Extended Phenotype. Dawkins presented this illusion to emphasize that “the vision of life that I advocate (…) is not probably more correct than the orthodox view. It is a different view and I suspect that, at least in some respects, it provides a deeper understanding”. Decades later, Sean Carroll in his book The Big Picture described a similar approach (without referring to Dawkins) and named it poetic naturalism. He summarized this philosophical stance in three points:

1. There are many ways of talking about the world.
2. All good ways of talking must be consistent with one another and with the world.
3. Our purposes in the moment determine the best way of talking.

Dawkins also quotes biologist John Tyler Bonner:

I am a great believer in saying familiar, well-known things backwards and inside out, hoping that from some new vantage point the old facts will take on a deeper significance. It is like holding an abstract painting upside down; I do not say that the meaning of the picture will suddenly be clear, but some of the structure of the composition that was hidden may show itself.

Bonner’s words are not just a metaphor. My father collected abstract art. I remember the day one of the painters visited our house. He looked at his work, puzzled. ‘I painted it vertically,’ he said, tilting his head. My father did the same. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘that makes sense. But I prefer it this way.’

Since then, I’ve often wondered—how many things in my life have I been seeing at the “wrong angle”, certain that they were exactly as they should be?

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*the grey-green Scotland on Isle of Skye in August 2019.