It is too soon to tell. One thing is sure, however, that it calls into question our dualist inheritance, and prompts us to consider the ways in which mind and matter form an integrated system in us, just as the fundamental physics of matter calls into question the distinction between the mind and the world around us. We have to wonder, then, what kind of cultural collapse, evolution or accommodation will take place in the face of the new science, especially as its technologies begin to redefine the parameters of our social, economic and medical lives. Will    dualists in years to come gather like smokers on the margins of our social spaces, indulging together their passion for illusion? If so, what will prompt change: human telepathic communication through enhancement of neural activity? Telekinetic control of our surroundings? Conscious computers? And what kind of change will it be: how will "integralists" think — culturally, socially and philosophically? How will we make sense of ourselves and others when we understand that we are materiality so complex, and so alive, that it becomes self-aware? We are optimistic that the new vision of human nature will help us to make better sense of at least three important areas of concern. 

First, it should help us to fathom our individuality and subjectivity. Our sense of our own uniqueness, of the key fact about my life that "I" and no one else has this particular perspective on this particular time and place, can appear antithetical to the "view from nowhere" to which science aspires. Alain Badiou has rightly lamented the loss of what he calls "the uncountable infinity constituted by a single human life" in this age of anonymity and digitisation. Yet biology and neuroscience have much to say about this irreducible particularity of the person, which is the source of so much that we value. Individuality and interiority are notable features of organisms generally, and the extraordinary complexity of our brain, with its thousand million million modifiable connections, is surely relevant to the subtleties of human variation. 

Second, we believe that the new paradigm will help us to understand how religions work, and how they can go wrong. These ancient traditions straddle the globe and deeply shape our contemporary world. Under a dualist view, it was difficult to make sense of religious practices and embedded beliefs since these are the product of earlier ages and integrated cosmologies which assumed a "porous" relationship between mind and body, self and world. Religions have so baffled and fascinated us because they were born "under different skies". Religions, like magic perhaps, have such a strong hold on our imaginations partly because they presuppose a participatory relationship between mind and world that dualistic science denies. The new scientific view of the human, which respects consciousness as an integral "feature of the world", is in fact surprisingly close to the metaphysical realism and theistic cosmologies of medieval Abrahamic religions, mutatis mutandis. Late medieval thinkers, such as Duns Scotus, anticipated many of the insights of the "embodied cognition" of our own age.  

Finally, the integrated view simply offers a more accurate description of what is going on in us as self-aware human beings than does the dualist one. Dualist philosophies were the natural and creative response to the rise of reductionist materialism, but they will always be limited in their critical power since dualism is based on incomplete science. The integrated view offers a more grounded account of what we are like as both body and mind, and so should help to illuminate our individual and, importantly, our social lives. The growing neuroscientific interest in the "second person", in how I and Thou (to use Martin Buber's terminology) communicate and interrelate, may offer real help in dealing with human conflict. How are community or family mediators, for instance, sometimes able to effect such rapid and lasting change in the face of deep-seated hostilities? Professional mediators "know how it is done" — they have an intuitive, implicit grasp of what to do. An integrated understanding of how body and mind combine in our social existence may offer a theoretical explanation of how this happens, which we can "port" from one context to another. This opens up the intriguing possibility that we can learn from our own best practice in one area and then recreate it in a wholly different context, such as the present encounter between China and the West. Indeed, this approach is showing promise. Chinese identity presupposes a particular way of managing social difference, based on harmony and assimilation, while Western identity has a contrasting tradition, based on confrontation followed by reconciliation and peace-building. Each identity manages social difference differently. A more broadly based understanding, working with the neurobiology of primary human social cognition, may allow us helpfully to reconcile these contrasting approaches in a new species-wide account of how we can best manage and positively adjust to difference.

Will the conception of human nature that will succeed the porous and the buffered views contribute to human wellbeing? We hope and believe so. After a period of "neuromania", a "neurophobic" scepticism about the relevance of neuroscience to understanding human nature is becoming fashionable. We believe this is misplaced. There is no need to defend mind against matter in this way. The absorbing challenge is to understand their manifest and mysterious integration, and then to apply this new self-understanding. We believe that it will help us to humanise our rapidly globalising world.