In this book I have addressed the physical basis of social life. Within the social sciences the de facto ontology is dualism. While most social scientists would probably consider themselves materialists, and virtually everyone at least implicitly accepts the CCP, positivists and interpretivists alike routinely reference intentional phenomena in their social theorizing. This is problematic because such phenomena presuppose consciousness, and no progress has been made on integrating consciousness with the materialist worldview. Philosophers seem increasingly inclined to think that consciousness must therefore be an illusion, but that would leave social scientists in a tough spot. Either we become behaviorists, eschewing reference to intentional phenomena altogether, or we retain them in our explanations and become dualists and tacit vitalists.

The source of this dualism is an assumption that the relevant causal closure constraints on solving the mind–body problem are those of classical mechanics, which describes a purely material world of matter and energy. But since the 1930s we have known that the causal closure principles in the universe as a whole are quantum mechanical rather than classical, where the physical constraints on explanation are radically different. In particular, quantum theory admits a neutral monist/panpsychist interpretation in which ‘physical’ does not equal ‘material,’ and instead sees the material world described by classical physics and the mental world of consciousness as joint effects of an underlying reality that is neither. The question then is whether an ontology in which consciousness goes “all the way down” can scale up to the human and specifically sociological level. While there are a priori reasons to doubt it, there is growing experimental evidence that human behavior in fact follows quantum principles. If that evidence continues to mount, it would confirm a key prediction of quantum consciousness theory, according to which our subjectivity is a macroscopic quantum mechanical phenomenon – that we are walking wave functions.