What are some good books that counter materialists...

Who is this semen demon? Sauce me up

Ask your friend into which category (a or b as you have described) the idea of the self reflecting on its own soul falls into. Then read the Greeks you fucking plebian

>What are some good books that counter materialists?

If you are an honest person, maybe your first reaction to ideas that counter your instincts, shouldn't be "Someone please call the inquisition!!1!!!!"?

Maybe your friend is right? But so what? Maybe not? But so what? Etc.

But to help you with books, try to look up Descartes, Hume, Berkeley, and Kant, or something generic like "How do we know things", and go from there. It isn't light reading all the way, but pretty interesting stuff.

Confessions of St Augustine. One of the main plot points is his difficulty in understanding the immaterial.

The Republic. Basically the foundation of Western metaphysics, based on immaterial forms.

Get into mathematical realism and watch as your 'materialist' friend starts to sound like a retard.

>read muh greeks to understand reductive materialism
Please be memeing.
OP read Thomas Nagel, John Searle, and Edward Feser.

ITT
>read some ancients to understand scientism and reductive materialism hurr durrrr
This is a case where reading contemporary philosophy is actually useful. Your friend is parroting some sort of Dennettesque materialism. I'd start by looking into Dennett, then going on to his detractors. Keep in mind this reductive worldview is fairly well accepted writ large, he's not parroting some obscure ideas that are easy to tackle. This is one of the key issues in the Philosophy of Mind.

The position does have a name (though the friend likely doesn't know it), which is reductive physicalism.

A good introductory work would be John Heil's Philsophy of Mind, though it deals mainly with analytic philosophers interpretation of modernist
and contemporary thought, which is good for clarity in introducing the basic issues, though is limited in scope ignoring completely classical and continental though which has its definite merits.
If you just start reading philosophy in general, you will find most people are dripping from the tip to get at analyzing the concept of mind.

Some remarks I would have are, in the case of neural firings, there is no way as of yet to explain how our actual ideas arise from the action
potentials of neurons (i.e. how me seeing red translates from rods and cones, occipital lobe processing and so on, to my actual thought of
redness), and at the moment, there is an explanatory gap the way most neuroscience functions (and most cognitive psychology glosses over),
though at the same time I think it is foolish to that mind and body are not related at a physical level. Take for example people with neurological
disabilities, or the plain fact that my particular mind controls my particular body.

At the same time, all of this is grounded by massive metaphysical assumptions as to the basic nature of reality and especially the principles of epistemology
(though I think metaphysics necessarily has to come first), and ideally, along with Schelling, Hegel and Whitehead, science and metaphysics ought to ultimately
be parts of the same whole.

A non-exhaustive list of seminal thinkers regarding mind off the top of my head would be Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Ockham, Descartes, Malebranche,
Hume, Vico, Berkeley, Locke, Rousseau, Leibniz, Spinoza, Wolff, Kant, Maimon, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, the Neo-Kantians, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Wittgenstein,
Kripke, Frege, Russell, Lewis, Kaplan, Salmon, Grant, and Searle.

Great answer. Throw Nagel on the list, though. If you haven't read What it's Like to be a Bat, you aren't doing Philosophy of Mind properly.
www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/iatl/activities/modules/ugmodules/humananimalstudies/lectures/32/nagel_bat.pdf

>He also believes dreams are random neural firings
Uh, what do you think they are? Because that's what they are.

There you go OP, just show your friend this post and he'll be completely BTFO.

>The Republic. Basically the foundation of Western metaphysics
In the sense that it helped get the ball rolling, not in the sense that most people have ever believed in Platonic forms.

Woah thank you for the detailed answer, I appreciate the recommendations and will definitely check out Philosophy of Mind.

At a really general level, what sort if metaphysical assumptions and epistemological principles are you referring to?

Generally speaking, metaphysics and epistemology are closely tied when we are talking about mind, as the basic way reality exists seems to imply how, or what, sort of things we can know.
For example, a question that had been the center of much debate is whether there is a difference between physical things, which are "extended" and occupy space
and non-physical things such as ideas.
Some people thought there was a difference (generally dualists), which then lead to the huge issue of how physical and non-physical things could interact
which then leads to the question, how our minds could possibly know of the external world.
On the flip-side of this, if we argue there is only one sort of physical matter, how do we then explain the apparent reality of our thoughts, or abstract entities such as mathematics, if there
is only physical matter? Where do they come from, and even if we are being fooled or mislead, it seems to still imply thought to some degree if we are in fact being fooled or mislead.
Another perspective on the issue is that everything is basically mental, but then many idealists have had issues in avoiding solipsistic conclusions (Kant, Fichte and Berkeley have all been
accused of this), in that it seems we must pinpoint the wellspring of this reality to our subjective experience and activity.

There are a wealth of replies to these views across eras which either defend, modify or attack these basic premises and this is one of the basic issues anyone who has discussed mind deals with either implicitly or explicitly, as necessarily, our mind resides somewhere in reality.