Everyday Philosophy: Are rainbows, farts, and emotions “real”?
By Jonny Thomson | Published: 2024-12-13 15:30:00 | Source: Thinking – Big Think
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I was having a conversation with my six-year-old daughter about the reality of the rainbow when she asked me why we can’t touch it. I explained to her that the water and light were an illusion, but then asked if it was real. I said yes, but not in the way we can touch and feel. She then asked me if things like farting, tastes, or emotions were real, and I had a hard time explaining the idea of different types of “real” things. I would love your thoughts on how I can best explain these concepts to her.
– Liz, United States
There are two ways I can approach Liz’s question. At first, I thought she wanted me to explain the nature of reality to a six-year-old. It’s not quite the “explain it like I’m five-year-old” approach, but it’s also not that different. Big Think is an intelligent publication for curious and mature individuals. Well, we also have a product called Explain It Like I’m Smart, which intentionally aims to address the ongoing disregard for online content. So, I’m sorry Liz, today I’m going to explain it like you’re smart and leave the talking to your daughter in your hands.
After all, this is not a particularly easy topic. It gets to the heart of an entire field of philosophy—in fact, one of the oldest: metaphysics. Metaphysics is a broad category. On the one hand, it is about God and religion. Evil spirits, elves, and the Ghost of Christmas Past are considered metaphysical entities. But, for our purposes today, metaphysics is also about matter that may or may not support perception. It’s about what lies behind the veil of sensation and what makes something “real” or not.
To answer the question more fully, I reached out to the philosopher Graham Harman at the Southern California Institute of Architecture for his ideas. Harman is a bit of a philosophical figure when it comes to “reality”, so I hope his thoughts give Liz something interesting to pass on to her daughter.
What reality is not
I think if you asked most people “What’s real?” Their first answer will be based on some differences in materialism. They say that it occupies space (as Descartes believed) or that it is composed of material particles. We can say that a rainbow is defined by the refraction of light. Emotion is neurochemicals that react in the brain at a specific time in response to a stimulus. But Harman believes this definition is too narrow.
“There are some issues with physicality, and one of the obvious issues is the mathematical stuff,” he tells Big Think. “Because to some extent it is real, and real even before the dawn of the human race. (We can) list some immaterial exceptions, but it is still real. Some people believe in God. And that is something immaterial, real. Imaginary characters, too. If I say ‘Hamlet,’ everyone knows what I’m talking about, and everyone who has read the play has an idea of what that character means.”
Another common way to define real is its effect. Something real if Affects other things or other people. God changes the lives of believers. Mathematical objects change calculations, predictions, and models. Hamlet changes the way some people look at the world. Rainbow makes us smile. A fart makes us bounce. Here too we have a problem.
“I think there can also be real things that don’t affect anything else at the moment but might be triggered by certain circumstances. So, it’s about potential. I remember during[the Balkan Wars]before things got really bad, I saw a small news magazine profile on Ratko Mladic, and it described him as a ‘potential war criminal’ because of his reputation for ferocity. But the war was still very early, and he hadn’t had the chance to do any of those things yet. And of course, after that he became an actual war criminal, so, I would like To say that the war criminal in Mladic has not yet been activated because of the opportunity that war presented him.
This is where we can depart from Harman’s position. Not everyone will agree with the idea that all of the body’s capabilities are “real” right now. You might be a killer one day. Is the killer inside you “real”? A raindrop may one day meet light in a certain location to form a rainbow, but does that mean that a real rainbow is inside the raindrops?
An irreducible reality
There are no easy answers to all of this (but if you want to try, perhaps you should consider studying philosophy at university). He’s also at risk of losing our curious six-year-old staring at the rainbow. I doubt Liz would sit her daughter down to talk about the nuances of potential.
So, what is real? Harman defined the real as “something which cannot be reduced to its parts. The real body would be something like water, which combines hydrogen and oxygen but adds properties which neither has. We call this emergence.”
For Harman, an object is real if all parts of that object work together to create something new or “emergent” that cannot be explained in the individual parts. The rainbow is a good example too. A rainbow is real because it is a phenomenon created by water, light, and the human eye. The human eye is not a rainbow. Water is not a rainbow. But when you put all the ingredients together, you get something real.
Harman’s definition is not about knowledge – it is not about what we know to be true or not. Nor is it a linguistic claim. It is metaphysical. A rainbow might depend on the human eye, for example, to know it’s there, but as Harman said, “The rainbow is still not completely mind-dependent because I can’t say anything I want about it. There are accurate and inaccurate descriptions of the rainbow.” In other words, there is a right or wrong way to describe a rainbow.
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