The World is in Your Mind – Subjective Idealism

The whole world is in your mind.

Ask yourself how and where you know that your body is there?

Obviously in your own mind because you “know” there is a body (your body) since you can “see” it, “touch” it, “smell” it, “taste” it, “hear” it.

And where is seeing, touching, smelling, tasting, hearing happening?

In your own mind.

There is nothing else to your body apart from these 5 sensations.

And, all these 5 sensations are IN your own mind.

Think a bit more and you realize the same applies to every other object in this world – everything is a sensation in your mind.

Hence, the whole world exist in your own mind.

Hence also, this world is nothing but a dream because the night dream you already know happens only in your mind.

That is why, the famous Irish philosopher George Berkeley remarked, “Esse est percipi“.

“Esse est percipi” is a Latin phrase meaning “to be is to be perceived,” a core tenet of George Berkeley’s philosophy of subjective idealism. This concept states that for something to exist, it must be perceived by a mind, with reality being dependent on perception. Things are bundles of sensory experiences or ideas, and their existence is their existence as perceived.

George Berkeley’s Philosophy

Subjective Idealism: Berkeley’s philosophy holds that reality is fundamentally mental or spiritual, rather than material.

Perception is Key: He argued that physical objects are simply collections of qualities that we perceive through our senses, such as color, sound, and touch.

A Mind-Dependent World: For Berkeley, if something is not being perceived by a mind, it ceases to exist.

The “Tree Falling” Thought Experiment

A common illustration of this concept is the question: “If a tree falls in a forest with no one to hear it, does it make a sound?”.

According to Berkeley’s philosophy, if no one perceives the tree falling (e.g., no one sees it or hears it), then the event itself, as a perceived reality, would not exist.

God as the Ultimate Perceiver

To address the question of how things continue to exist when no human is perceiving them, Berkeley proposed that a supreme mind, God, perceives everything.

This ensures the continuous existence of the world, even when individual humans are not actively observing it, because God’s perception ensures its ongoing reality.