No model of human beings is complete that does not have room for the experience of being human, of what it is like to be you or me. This feeling, consciousness, is such an essential feature of the human condition that a life without it would be hardly worth living at all. Yet as suggested in Chapter 1, for fear of Cartesian dualism the main currents of twentieth-century social theory, both mainstream and critical, have run away from experience, seeking to reduce, displace or otherwise marginalize it in their models of man. Human beings are rendered instead into machines or zombies, both ultimately material systems which are able to think and behave but not to feel – transformed, in short, from subjects into objects.

Recently there has been more pushback against these materialist tendencies, in the form of sustained efforts to “bring the subject back in.” Scholars in the continental tradition have drawn on insights from German idealism and phenomenology to critique critical theory, for failing to place the experiencing subject at the center of its ontologies. Feminist theorists have brought experience to the fore by arguing that women's experiences differ from men's. And in the analytic tradition the founding of Journal of Consciousness Studies and the work of David Chalmers and many others has given subjective experience a mainstream philosophical standing that it has not had in a long time. If there is still no consensus on what to do positively with experience, the taboo on subjectivity has at least finally been broken. This book seeks to contribute to this subjectivist revival by giving consciousness a quantum basis in wave function collapse, understood as a process of temporal symmetry-breaking driven by will. As such, “part of what it is like to be a thinking human being is to have direct experience of the effects of quantum theory.”