Materialism, as the name implies, reduces things to "matter"

When I say "things" I mean reality

Or the buddhist doctrine that experience is fundamental to reality.

It is the myth of the cavern and the shadows

Sure, matter is important in reality, of course

But there are, of course, things that are not matter. Why would anyone ever beleive that there is only matter?

Just like, why would anyone ever believe that there are only the shadows of the cavern?

It doesn't reduce things, no. Hypothetical things exist in the sense that we can describe reality using language.

Material is the proximate cause of all things.

I'm not talking about hypothetical things. This has nothing to do with hypothetical things

It is silly, and filled with pride, and arbitrary, to want to reduce things to the material

But the motivation is clear: the material is somehow familiar, people are used to it, and it is comfortable to reduce reality to it

Because it is easy, and convenient, to not to have to deal with things that can't be quantized

Things that have no length, or similar properties of the material

Ehh, it's like the great created clockwork. How is that prideful? I'm looking at God's creation the way Robert Boyle did. You are looking at creation and assuming a fundamental substance exists aside from the plane material, and it's totally ad hoc. This is basically Chemistry vs Alchemy.

I can deal with non-physical things while believing in materialism.

I'm just not making the nonsensical, arbitrary assumption that the only things that exist are those that have length or whatever

Matter is not some fundamental thing that is in the basis of reality

Do you believe in a human soul that transcends death?

Is it different from animals?

Of course I do, because death is just the movement of some particles and chemicals or whatever, there is nothing from the material point of view that fundamentally changes

In other words: if thereisn't life of the soul after the events known as death, there was no life to begin with

It's kind of like when I crack a CD in half. The CD will never work again.

So, I have a soul that will exist after I die?

Because "working" just means that some process that tries to spin it and read data will work

in the case of the CD

The soul doesn't disappear because some material particles move in some way. There is an important connection to the body, so death is important, but there is literally no reason to think that death annihilates the soul.

Can you affirm that I have a soul that will exist after I die?

If you define "life" as the flow of some impulses or chemicals or whatever in some arbitrary region of space, sure, there is nothing after death. But that definition of life makes life completely empty of any value or special.

The obvious question is "how do you know?", but I'd like to just flesh out your beliefs first.

Well, I know that death is just the movement of some arbitrary particles in space

Nothing in the material world has changed in a significant way

To accept that death is something significant, there must be something beyond the material things affected by death

I don't see death as arbitrary. There's a qualitative difference between someone who's died and someone before they die. Their body becomes a husk.

Wow, what was before a bunch of particles in arbitrary regions of space, are now a bunch of particles in arbitrary regions of space. Big deal

"becomes a husk" is a romantic way of describing what doesn't really have any significance in the material world

But, can you give a straightforward answer to my question? Do I have a soul that will exist after I die? What is this soul? How long will it exist? How do you know?

And what you call "qualitative difference" is only a difference because you, as an individual, identify it as such, not because there is any intrinsic difference in the impersonal, external world

You do have a soul that will exist after death, because death affects the body

We can say of the soul what is revealed to us, or what we can infer though phylosophy, or theology, or similar sciences

Bro, I've seen animals die. I know there's a qualitative difference after. The body was just a vehicle for the mind that animates it.