Does quantum mechanics give consciousness a special role to play in our description of the physical world? Opinions range all over the map. I myself would say yes, but in a rather limited sense: the laws of physics are conceptual tools we have discovered in our collective efforts to impose coherence on how the world impinges on us, and ultimately the world gets through to each of us only through our conscious perceptions. This, of course, is as true of classical physics as it is of quantum physics. What makes quantum physics special is that it forces us (or ought to force us) to acknowledge this to be the character of physical law, while in classical physics we could (and did) fool ourselves into thinking that the abstractions we created to help us organize our perceptions had an independent existence of their own.
Take space-time, for example. We organize our...
