Over the Rainbow

Lately, my good friend and office-mate Michael Tarpey, a philosopher, and I have had a grand time discussing all sorts of philosophical questions. In the context of these conversations, mostly focusing on the perennial question, as Bob Dylan put it, of "what's real and what is not,"  I observed that certain things we take for real are merely artifacts of perception--that is, things we perceive, whether with our eyes or our mind, and therefore assume to be real, but which in fact, are simply a virtual reality,  a consensual concept which we have agreed upon to be "real" in order to better organize our experience and behavior. As an example of such a perceptual artifact, I cited the rainbow--something we can see, but that isn't really "there" because it is simply the perceptual consequence of a temporary convergence of sunlight, rain, and point of view--that is, only those who stand between the sun and the sheet of rain perceive a rainbow, opposite the sun, and everyone's rainbow is in a slightly different place from everyone else's, depending on where they are standing. (Therefore, Dorothy could dream all she liked about "somewhere over the rainbow" but she'd never get there--since the rainbow would move with her!) In this way, a rainbow, though it appears to be "real," is in actuality no more real than a shadow or a heat mirage (both likewise artifacts of perception).

Looking more deeply, we find that artifacts of perception can be found not only "out there" in the world, but also in our minds. By this I refer not only to dreams or mental images, which are obvious examples of insubstantial perceptions, but also to a whole array of concepts that most people take to be, in some sense, real, and which form the pretext for many of our actions, but which on closer examples are no more "real" than a rainbow, a shadow, or a mirage.

Here are a few noteworthy examples: money, the past, the future, and the United States of America. We all assume money to be real; we can, after all, buy real, tangible things with it. But money is, in actuality an empty, arithmetical signifier, whose value depends entirely upon a shifting consensus within a community of buyers and sellers.  It is, as Gregory Bateson might have said, a transform of information about the relative value of commodities in the market. And "commodities" themselves can often be quite virtual, quite nebulous. What, for example, is an "insurance policy"? A legally binding agreement between insurer and insured. But if the insurer goes belly-up, what happens to that contract? It becomes a worthless piece of paper.

But surely, you might argue, the past and future are real; we have artifacts to prove that the past in fact actually happened, and we can make reasonably accurate predictions about the future--weather forecasters do it all the time.  While I agree that the past and future can be useful concepts, whether for reflection or planning or imagining, they still lack any substantive reality. The past is gone an irretrievable; the future hasn't happened yet.  All we actually have is the ever-shifting present moment. Both the others are imaginary constructs.

We can take this further, of course. While the past is gone and irrevocable, the future can be influenced, up to a point, by our actions (or inactions) in the present moment.  But it is still an artifact of our imagination, for no matter how carefully we plan, something could happen in the next moment to completely eradicate those plans, or at least require a major change in them. Or, of course, we could die--at any time--rendering all such plans and dreams null and void.  That notwithstanding, our actions today will still influence the shape of the future, with or without us. And if the Buddhist teachings are right about a continuum of mind that pre-exists our birth and transcends our death, then we--or some version of ourselves--will reap the karmic fruits of our actions anyway.  But even that, if or when it happens, will not be "real" knowable until it becomes the Present Moment, whether for ourselves or for another "self" we cannot even imagine. After all, this concept of "self" we have and cherish is yet another perceptual artifact, no more real than a rainbow.