The brain's consensus algorithm demonstrated: 
Permit me to explain why your brain is flipping its interpretation of the image. For starters, human vision acts very similarly to touch. medium.com/intuitionmachi…
When your eyes looks at an image, it is actually rapidly moving around and 'feeling' the image. The part of the eye that can see color and high resolution is just a small fraction of what you see in front of you.
However, even if your eyes are moving, you see a stable image in front of you. Your brain creates this illusion out of the many samples it receives from the fovea.
The brain is a parallel processor. There are many processors that each are attempting to discern meaning for each patch of visual stimuli that it receives.
To maintain coherent thoughts, these many processors must reach a consensus. So when you focus on one plate and see it as flipped up or down, the other processors are forced to reinterpret their original interpretation.
The brain is also strongly influenced by what it perceives most recently. In this example, one is conditioned by the original wording that forces one to see the plates in one way.
Illusions like these are clues as to how our brains work. For more on this see: gum.co/empathy
A final note, human cognitive bias are a consequence of eons of evolution. We are biased to see light from above and rarely ever from below. That is why there is no ambiguity when you rotate this image 90 degrees in any direction.
This example is also presented very ingeniously like a magic trick. The pledge is that all the plates are flipped upside down, the turn is that except one of them which you should find. The prestige is when you find the one (it could be any of them) that every other plate flips!
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