In the materialist version, we began in bondage to matter and the game of survival, have conceived the possibility of freedom, and strive to make it actual. The search in both worlds is for underlying unity and first principles. Science inquires about the physical world, the object of experience. Spirituality inquires about the subject and its relationship to experience at large. Science seeks the underlying unity of objects, while religion seeks the underlying oneness of subjects.
Science inquires into the ultimate truth of the object, spirituality into that of the subject.
Because this awareness presupposes consciousness of self, the mind-matter split is intimately involved with subjectivity and selfhood. Self-consciousness may be defined as the ability to place a frame around some portion of experience, so as to consider its contents as the property of a self rather than of the world. Subjective consciousness implies the existence of a self separate from the phenomenal contents of its experience. Standing back to appreciate experience as such, rather than as an attribute of reality, defines the observer as a presence distinct from the scene observed. Without the category of experience, as opposed to the world, the mind could not be aware of itself.