Quantum theory shows that consciousness influences the outcome of experiments. The behavior of small objects depends on whether anyone's watching. This is fact, but how far does it go? All the way to the edges of space-time? Experiments are now underway to determine how deep into the macroscopic realm these observer-determined effects reach. One possible consequence is that the universe may exist only because we do. This sort of thing was first argued by George Berkeley, for whom the town and campus were named. He eloquently demonstrated what we perceive are our perceptions — and only assumed the cause of those perceptions to be an independent, external world. The universe may indeed be correlative with us.
We can't even take the Moon for granted. Earth's satellite looks the way it does because sunlight bounces off of it. But these photons are just bits of magnetism and electricity. They have no visual properties, no appearance or form, until they interact with a complex retina-brain system after transferring their energy. What could the Moon possibly look like if our minds didn't process photons in unique ways? When nobody's watching, the Moon certainly doesn't remotely resemble the thing we remember. It's even possible the Moon isn't there at all when everyone's asleep. Its component energy-particle waves exist as quantum probabilities that apparently take form only when their wave functions collapse, which happens whenever it's observed.
Don't believe everything you read about quantum mechanics. Berman may be a very competent astronomer, but if he's a physicist, he's one prone to oversimplification, repeating dubious pop science as fact, and shoehorning vastly different concepts together.
The interpretation of quantum mechanics that depends on a
conscious observer is not widely accepted among physicists, even if it's beloved of science fiction authors, pop science writers, and people who've never actually worked with the equations. It's an inelegant explanation in many ways: it suggests that we're somehow privileged and special and can make the entire universe collapse from fuzziness to certainty, whereas a computer or a nematode couldn't. Could a chimpanzee cause quantum collapse? I suppose that depends on whether it's a smart enough chimp, in this view.
The two more plausible views, to my mind, are:
* An "observation" is simply anything that allows the system to verifiably interact with the outside world, whatever that may be. In other words,
it doesn't matter if you look at the moon, as long as theoretically somebody or something could. If we all didn't look at the moon, it would still be hit by light, and light would still reflect off it, and the waveform would collapse perfectly normally.
Defining "the outside world" is trickier, of course; at what level of interaction do we have collapse? How is it that a moon made out of things that don't have definite positions and velocities be so well-behaved? It's a major puzzle, but I don't think consciousness is the answer.
* There are multiple universes, all individually well-defined. This one's a bit more unnerving, and seems to imply that there are universes where the moon
does fly apart into its component particles when we're not looking. Thankfully, they don't appear to be ours... yet.
In the other direction, could consciousness have a quantum underpinning? Yes, in that individual neurotransmitter vesicles have some amount of quantum randomness in their filling. But this argument tends to end up in fuzzier territory. "Consciousness is mysterious! Quantum mechanics is mysterious! Wouldn't it be awesome if they were the same thing?"
