Do we have souls?

[GliderGuider]

175. There may be "Two Solitudes" at work here.

On one side are the materialists - to them the universe is a purely physical place, all human subjective experience is an emergent property of the brain's electrochemistry.

On the other are those I might call phenomenologists, specifically those who ascribe in some way to the phenomenology of mind or spirit, as outlined by Hegel. To such people (speaking from personal experience), the working of the mind assumes a degree of independence from the brain. In many cases the perception is of a "Self" that is has little to do with the physical brain/body at all.

From my perspective, the gulf between the two positions is largely a product of the rationalist culture that has grown up since the Enlightenment. The rules of evidence for the two sides are quite different, as are the definitions of "truth", "meaning", "value" and even "reality".

The materialist worldview has been in the ascendant for the last couple of hundred years, and has had enough success at restructuring the physical world that the correctness of the position seems axiomatic. For a variety of reasons, this position seems incomplete to the phenomenologists, who point back to thousands of years of non-materialist human culture as evidence for the evolutionary correctness of their position.

To bring it back to the terms of reference for the group, this difference mirrors the theism/atheism debate so closely that I wonder if it might be the underlying driver of most such conflicts. Perhaps we're dealing here not so much with truth and falsehood, but simply with people who perceive the world in different ways. If this is the case, the best we can hope for is to increase each side's understanding of the other, but converting each other through argument is a lost cause.