👁️ The World as a Thought: George Berkeley, James Tartaglia, and the Idealist Reversal

When we began this series seven weeks ago with Alfred North Whitehead, we started with a radical rejection of “dead matter.” Whitehead famously argued that both traditional materialism and idealism suffer from the “Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness”—the mistake of treating abstract concepts like “matter” or “mind” as if they were the fundamental, concrete reality. To be honest, much like Process Philosophy, this week’s view is hard for me to get my mind around. It challenges every instinct we have about the “solidity” of the floor beneath our feet. Yet, the logic is so tight that it has remained unrefuted for centuries.

Whitehead chose a “middle path” known as Process Philosophy. He was a Provisional Realist: he believed the physical world is real and exists independently of human perception, but he redefined that “physicality.”

Whitehead’s Organic Reality

To understand why we are moving into Idealism, we have to look closer at what Whitehead rejected. He was primarily concerned with the “Bifurcation of Nature”—the idea that the world is split into two unrelated piles: the “hard” world of physics and the “soft” world of our feelings. To Whitehead, the idea that a “colorless, soundless” world of atoms could somehow produce a “vibrant, noisy” world of human experience was a logical dead end.

Whitehead replaced the idea of static, “simple location” with “Actual Entities.” He viewed what we call “matter” as a series of energetic events or “throbs of experience.” For him, nothing exists in isolation. Every “piece” of matter is actually a “prehension”—a grasping or taking account—of the entire rest of the universe from its specific perspective. He wanted to preserve the “hardness” of the physical world while acknowledging that the world is alive with value and purpose at every level. It is a world of Organic Realism.

Today, however, we explore a perspective that pushes even further than Whitehead’s living organism. Idealism suggests that the physical world—the rocks, the stars, and even your own brain—is not just “alive” with experience, but is fundamentally mental in nature. As the physicist Sir James Jeans famously put it: “The Universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine.” To understand this view, we look to the man who set the logical trap: Bishop George Berkeley.

The Trap of the Senses: Berkeley’s “Deletion” of Matter

In the early 1700s, George Berkeley saw a logical error in the science of his day. Thinkers like John Locke were describing a world of “Primary Qualities”—size, shape, and motion—that supposedly existed in “matter” even when no one was looking.

Berkeley pointed out that this is a leap of faith. We are, quite literally, trapped behind our own faces. Imagine you are holding an apple. You see Red. You feel Firmness. You taste Sweetness. You hear a Crunch. Berkeley’s “gotcha” question is simple: If you take away the red, the firmness, the sweetness, and the crunch, what is left of the apple?

The materialist says, “The matter is left! The physical substance that causes those feelings.” But Berkeley argues that “matter” is a useless, abstract word. You have never seen “matter”; you have only ever seen colors. You have never touched “matter”; you’ve only ever felt textures. To say something exists “unperceived” is a contradiction. How can you describe a tree that has no color, no shape, and no sound? You can’t. If you remove every sensory quality, the object doesn’t just become invisible; it ceases to be anything at all. Berkeley’s conclusion: Esse est percipi—”To be is to be perceived.”

The Brain Paradox: The Image vs. The Source

This leads to a question that often arises: If the world is mental, why do we see a physical organ when we open a skull? If my mind is the “creator” of my world, how can it be “inside” a brain?

In the Idealist framework, the brain is not the source of consciousness; it is what consciousness looks like from a specific perspective. Imagine you are watching a live stream of a concert on your phone. You see pixels moving on a screen. Those pixels aren’t the “cause” of the music, and the music isn’t “inside” the pixels. The pixels are simply the representation of the music.

Berkeley argues that the physical body is an idea in the mind, not a “provisional reality” outside of it. When a neuroscientist looks at your brain, they aren’t looking at the “thing” that makes your thoughts; they are looking at the visual representation of your thoughts. It is the “icon” that represents the processing power of the soul. Whitehead would agree to an extent—he viewed “matter” as a series of energetic events—but Berkeley goes further by denying that there is any “non-mental” substance at all.

The Mirage: A Glitch in the “Mental Movie”

A common objection to Idealism is the Mirage. Critics ask: “If everything is just a perception, why can’t I just ‘think’ a mirage into a real drink of water? Why is a ‘real’ oasis different from a ‘hallucination’?”

Berkeley handles this with the logic of Consistency. He argues that “Reality” isn’t defined by “Physical Stuff,” but by Order. He suggests that our perceptions come in two flavors: those we conjure up ourselves (imagination) and those that are forced upon us by a higher source (the “Laws of Nature”).

• The Real Oasis: You see the water, you touch it, and it feels wet. Your perceptions (sight, touch, taste) all “handshake” and agree. This consistency is what we mean by “reality.”
• The Mirage: You see the water, but when you reach down, you feel only dry sand.

In Berkeley’s view, a mirage isn’t a “fake thing” vs. a “real thing.” It is a disconnected perception. When you see a mirage, you are seeing a “sensory typo” in the mental movie. It reminds us that we are navigating a representation, not a cold world of atoms. The “real” oasis is simply a more stable, shared, and complex set of ideas.

Two Paths to the Mental Universe: The Theist vs. The Atheist

While Berkeley provided the logical foundation, modern philosophers have taken the theory in very different directions. This split shows how flexible Idealism can be as a map for the universe.

George Berkeley was a devout Theist. For him, Idealism was the ultimate proof of God. If a tree in a deserted forest continues to exist even when no human is there to see it, Berkeley argued it must be because it is being perceived by an Infinite Mind. In this view, the universe is a constant, orderly “conversation” between the mind of God and the minds of humans.

James Tartaglia, by contrast, is a modern atheist. He arrives at Idealism through a secular, existential lens. He doesn’t posit a Divine Mind to hold the world together. Instead, he sees the mental nature of reality as a brute fact of the universe’s structure. For Tartaglia, there is no “Grand Author”; there is only the Transcendent Reality that our brains represent to us as “matter.” He argues that we can live in a mental universe without needing a religious framework, finding meaning in our role as the observers who turn raw “transcendental” data into a world.

The Modern Interface: Donald Hoffman’s “Desktop”

To bridge these views to the modern day, we look to thinkers like Donald Hoffman. Hoffman uses the metaphor of a computer’s User Interface to explain why we “see” matter even if it isn’t there.

When you look at your computer screen, you see a blue folder icon. Is the “real” folder actually blue and square? No. The reality is a chaotic mess of electrons and silicon. The blue icon is a helpful delusion. It hides the complex reality so you can interact with it.

Idealism suggests that Space, Time, and Physical Objects are our “Desktop.” Evolution didn’t prime us to see “The Truth”—the raw, overwhelming mental complexity of the universe; it primed us to survive. Seeing a “solid rock” is a shortcut—an icon that tells us “don’t walk here.” We assume the icons are the truth, but they are symbols for a deeper mental reality. This explains why science gets so weird at the quantum level—it’s like zooming in on a digital photo until it breaks into pixels. We’ve reached the edge of our biological interface.

James Tartaglia and the Transcendent Meaning

James Tartaglia takes this “interface” idea and applies it to the human condition. He argues that the “Materialist” worldview—the idea that we are just biological robots in a dead, accidental universe—has led to a modern crisis of meaninglessness.

Tartaglia suggests that our physical life is a “Representation.” Think of a VR headset. While the headset is on, the mountains look real. You take them seriously, but you know your “real self” is outside the game. Tartaglia argues that our entire physical universe is a mental representation of a Transcendent Reality.

We aren’t biological accidents; we are localized “windows” through which a much deeper consciousness is looking at itself. By shifting to Idealism, Tartaglia suggests that meaning is found in the fact that we are the Observers—the subjects who allow the “movie” of the universe to happen. It restores the “Mind” to the center of the story.

Summary Comparison: Whitehead vs. The Field

Viewpoint	Materialism	Idealism	Whitehead (Process)
Fundamental Reality	Dead, inert “stuff”	Ideas or Mind	Creative “Events”
Relationship	Things exist separately	Things exist in the mind	Everything is “internally related”
Nature of World	A machine	A dream or thought	A living organism

Conclusion

Idealism allows us to keep the rigor of science—which maps the patterns of our experiences—while restoring a mental depth that Materialism often strips away. It suggests that we are not accidents of chemistry, but the foundation upon which the world is built.

Whether we view our experience as a flowing process of events, a clever illusion of a biological machine, or a representation of a transcendent mental reality, each theory offers a different way to account for the fact of our own awareness. While Berkeley’s logic challenges the very existence of matter, it leaves us with the question of what exactly is being represented by our senses—a question we will continue to explore as we look at Thomas Nagel’s famous perspective next week.

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Deepen Your Journey: Suggested Reading

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• Philosophy in a Meaningless Life by James Tartaglia
  • A modern masterpiece that tackles the “existential anxiety” of our scientific age. Tartaglia explains how a return to the idea of a transcendent reality can give our lives a sense of purpose that materialism simply cannot provide. (This book is expensive, but  it was funded by Knowledge Unlatched, meaning it is available as Open Access. You can read or download the full text for free through the Bloomsbury Collections or the OAPEN Library).
• A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge by George Berkeley
  • The 300-year-old foundational text for Idealism. Despite its age, Berkeley’s writing is sharp and accessible, leading the reader step-by-step through the logical “trap” that proves matter may not exist at all.
• The Idea of the World by Bernardo Kastrup
  • A rigorous, contemporary defense of Idealism. Kastrup uses analytical philosophy and modern neuroscience to argue that the universe is “transpersonal mind,” providing a scientific-leaning alternative to physicalism.
• The Case Against Reality by Donald Hoffman
  • A fascinating crossover between evolutionary biology and philosophy. Hoffman argues that our senses did not evolve to show us the truth, but rather to act as a “desktop interface” that hides the true complexity of reality.
• Science and the Modern World by Alfred North Whitehead
  • The quintessential text for those who want to understand the “middle path.” Whitehead examines how the history of science led to our current dead-end views of matter and offers his “Philosophy of Organism” as the solution.