On the subject of the relationship between consciousness and quantum particle behavior, here’s a very interesting article proposing that we live in essentially a world of virtual reality. That is, the author believes that reality is mind, and that what we call the material or physical world is a creation of that mind.
http://www.cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/ConsciousRealism2.pdf
He begins with the standard view of a physical world experienced by conscious observers, and argues against the idea that what we experience closely matches actual reality. This echoes Kant’s argument that we can never know the thing-in-itself, and by itself is not particularly radical. Many philosophers, though probably not many scientists, would accept this. But this author has a novel and very interesting argument to support this claim that is based on science. He points out that from an evolutionary viewpoint, adaptation to the environment would be facilitated if we don’t experience all the enormous complexity of the real world, but only a relatively small number of indicators that allow us to navigate reliably in this world. The relationship of the material objects that we experience to the underlying reality, he suggests, is rather like that of the icons we see on a computer screen to the actual electronic processes that create these icons. We accomplish things on a computer by manipulating icons, but the icons themselves have no resemblance to the computer hardware or software, and in fact do not even do anything; they’re just indicators of what is going on.
He uses virtual reality to develop this point further. Imagine you're playing tennis in virtual reality. You have a virtual body, on a virtual court, you see a virtual ball, you hit it with a virtual racket, and so on. The reality of this world is not the virtual ball or racket, but the very complex computer program that allows images of the ball and racket and so on to be experienced by you. You don’t have to know anything about this program to play the virtual game, and in fact of course you play much better if you don’t. You would never be able to play the game if you tried to keep up with all the electronic processes that are the reality underlying this game. All you have to do is see the ball and hit it. It's the enormous abstraction process--boiling down all those complex computer processes into a few simple symbols--that allows you to navigate the program.
IOW, by greatly simplifying reality, we are in a much better position to deal with it. In the same way, the author argues, what we call the material world is like the virtual tennis game. Material things like atoms, cells, organisms, and so on are just surface symbols of an underlying reality that we have no experience of. We have evolved, according to this thesis, to be blind to all but very simple indicators of the underlying reality, because that allows us to adapt to this reality much faster and more easily. As long as what we experience provides a fairly accurate representation of what the underlying reality is--mapping the latter onto the perceived reality--we can survive.
At this point, the argument is still for a material world that is separate from conscious observers. We just experience this world in a far more simplified form than it actually is. The material things we see are no more indicative of actual material reality than the icons on a computer screen are indicative of the processes occurring in the CPU.
But even at this point, it’s still a very unusual view. The material world that we do experience is not public. If you have a glass of water, and you hand it to someone else, the conventional view is that the glass is public. You and your companion are seeing and touching the same glass. According to the author's view, that is not the case. There is an underlying world not experienced by either of you, and the glass you actually experience is not the same glass your friend experiences. The glass is not even the same glass when you turn away from it and then look at it again, and the glass that you touch without seeing is not the same glass that you see. To support the obvious objections to this counter-intuitive view, the author draws heavily on the virtual tennis game. If you are playing virtual tennis with someone else, the ball you see and hit is not the same ball that your opponent sees and hits.
But then the author goes a step further, and argues that this underlying reality can consist of nothing but conscious observers. There doesn't have to be an underlying physical reality--computer hardware, so to speak--at all. There can be nothing but mental activity, with different observers interacting with each other and with a world of objects and processes that are created by this mental activity. This seems to be a form of idealism, though the author never actually discusses the relationship of his view with classic forms of idealism, such as Berkeley’s.
This is where quantum physics comes in, as the author points out that the observer-dependent features of quantum phenomena seem quite consistent with his view. But of course it's more complicated than this, as these observer-dependent phenomena do not occur in the macro world. That is, why do we observe that the behavior of quantum particles is dependent on the observer, whereas the behavior of larger objects is not. Quantum physicists have explanations for this, of course, involving collapse of the wave, and in fact, many physicists argue that what causes collapse is not necessarily a conscious observer, but just a measurement process of some kind. In any case, the author does not pursue this issue.
Beyond this, I have several criticisms of this view. I won’t discuss them here, except to say that this theory seems to be a form of intelligent design (though I believe the author would vigorously deny this). In this view, consciousness is fundamental. Every scientific worldview postulates something fundamental; in the conventional view, simple particles and their properties like mass and charge are fundamental. They are givens, that don’t require explanation. The author argues he’s just replacing one concept of what is fundamental with another. The problem is that fundamental consciousness in his theory is not something very simple (as it is, e.g., in panpsychist theories, which argue that everything is conscious), but seems to be quite complex, from the outset. I think he requires a lot more to get things started than is the case in the conventional scientific worldview.