What if Reality Isn’t Made of Matter?

We usually think that the world around us is made of physical “stuff” called matter. And we tend to believe that this matter exists whether or not anyone is looking at it or experiencing it. For example, the chair in your room is still there even when you close your eyes or leave the room. This idea, that physical objects exist independently of our minds, seems like simple common sense.

However, some philosophers have looked closely at how we actually come to know about the world, and they have arrived at a surprising conclusion.

Experience is the Starting Point

Philosophers who think carefully about how we gain knowledge often agree that all our knowledge begins with experience. Our senses – sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste – provide us with information about the world. This raw information, or “sensory experience,” is what fills our minds from the moment we are born. Thinkers like John Locke (1632 – 1704) described the mind at birth as a “blank slate,” which is then written upon by experience.

Taking Experience Seriously

Building on this idea, the philosopher George Berkeley (1685 – 1753) took this focus on experience even further. He argued that if all our knowledge comes from experience, then perhaps experience is all there is.

Berkeley’s core idea is often captured by the phrase “to be is to be perceived”. What this means is that for something to exist, it must be experienced by a mind. Things don’t exist independently on their own; their existence depends on being perceived.

This leads to a view called immaterialism, which is central to Berkeley’s philosophy. Immaterialism is the idea that matter, understood as something that exists outside of and independent from any mind or perception, does not actually exist. So-called physical objects – like the houses, mountains, and rivers we commonly talk about – have no existence apart from being perceived by a mind. There is no separate, external world made of physical substance that exists “out there” apart from our experience of it.

The World Is Perception

For Berkeley, the world is not composed of matter; it is composed of perceptions. Reality consists of minds that perceive, and the ideas or sensations that are perceived.

He argued that there is no hidden, inert, lifeless “stuff” existing behind the scenes. Our perceptions, the appearances in our awareness, are not the effects of some independent material world causing them. Instead, these sensations or ideas are the immediate contents of our consciousness.

Berkeley was deeply opposed to the idea of a split between a supposed material world and the world of our experience. He thought it was a mistake to invent substances behind experience. Just because we use a word like “table,” we shouldn’t assume there’s some underlying “thing” called “table-substance” that exists apart from the collection of experiences we have (seeing its colour and shape, feeling its hardness, hearing the sound it makes when tapped, etc.). This tendency to think that nouns must correspond to independent “things” or “substances” behind our experience is something he argued against.

According to Berkeley, we should simply accept what is directly given to us: our perceptions, our awareness, our experience itself. All we ever have access to is our perceptions. Therefore, there is no evidence for a world existing outside of our experience. Perception is primary. A sensation is not the result of something material hitting our senses; it is the immediate content of our consciousness.

In essence, Berkeley’s philosophy suggests that the reality we inhabit is fundamentally mental or experiential. It is not a world of solid, independent matter, but a world of perceptions and minds.