@north,
There's a problem with saying that the universe works differently at different levels. That's counter intuitive. If that claim is made, it begs some explanation.
The idea that consciousness is the home of the collapse of the waveform is a popular idea about QM. Amer pointed out that physicists these days generally don't accept that.
But if it were true, it would mean that if you're alone, the things that are directly behind you, and therefore unobserved, have no position or other characteristics. Not until you turn around and look at a table, for instance, does the table appear out of the the cloud, and it does so because you looked at it. This drastically alters the meaning of objectivity, which gives us a map of the world around us in three dimensions. It would mean the contents of the map aren't "there" the way we think they are.
Amer explained that the common idea in QM these days is that events other than conscious observation can make things pop into a state of actuality (actuality being defined as a state in which matter has a 0% chance of being anywhere other than where it is.) He said that physicists have the idea of there being two "realities." One is a set of actualities. The other is a cloud of possibilities. For our purposes, they're distinguished by measurability. Actualities are measurable, the cloud is not. Amer says the actualities are accessible to consciousness, the cloud is not.
But is that true? As we think rationally, we're continuously considering alternate possibilities. Is this the fundamental state of reality impinging on consciousness? Amer's opinion on that would be interesting.
To me, it seems that the two realities amer spoke of are fixtures of the mind. They were prior to QM. The only difference is that with the advent of QM, we started examining the nature of that which we previously would have said is nonexistent. When we say the cloud is nonexistent, I think that's because we're thinking of the individual possibilities as if they are phantom actualities, each one in its own universe. So an irreconcilible conflict is set up that's inherent in considering hypothetical events. We say they aren't real, but the only way to focus on them is to imagine that they are real in a fantasy. That's how you end up thinking about something that doesn't exist.
...it is because at the micro level the "neutral" media of macro observation (like light) interact with the phenomenon being observed. Its like trying to cut cheese with cheese. This in turn leads to major physical and philosophical issues about the status of the observer with respect to the observed.
