Does consciousness cause collapse?
Here are a couple recent attempts to discern this

No they don’t.

Your basic confusion stems from the “common sense” idea of an observation and that from physics.

An observation is made using a photon or another quantum entity.

The mind does not send out a “mindon” or any other imaginary part of conciousness to make the observation.

Other possibilities include:
–a is identical to b (e.g., lightning is correlated with electrostatic discharge of a certain sort).
–a influences b and vice-versa (e.g., voltage across a neuron and current through a potassium channel)

I went through this here.

Except we often find that a and b have no meaningful common cause, and even when they do, have no meaningful common effects or purposes.

Science is about probability You have introduced nothing to your consciousness scenario that makes being even partly a “cause” of brain and/or some ethereal mind either probable or even possible from a rational standpoint. You propose no mechanism, no operative structure, no suggestion of how we might test for it’s substantive existence, etc., etc., etc.

The present understanding of consciousness as phenomena generated by our sensory apparatus is rational, reliable, and in that sense not only possibly but probably “true.”

Our logic is quite capable of determining an exceptional degree of probability for virtually any conceivable proposition. What we lack is the capacity to conceive of every possible scenario. Which may explain why some come up with the essentially impossible as a filler.

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/27640

Apr 20, 2007
Quantum physics says goodbye to reality

Some physicists are uncomfortable with the idea that all individual quantum events are innately random. This is why many have proposed more complete theories, which suggest that events are at least partially governed by extra “hidden variables”. Now physicists from Austria claim to have performed an experiment that rules out a broad class of hidden-variables theories that focus on realism — giving the uneasy consequence that reality does not exist when we are not observing it (Nature 446 871).

For more on this try:
http://arxiv.org/abs/0704.2529

For a different type of experiment try-
http://www.mindmatter.de/mmpdf/bierman.pdf

cwfong-
No problems. Emergence is a concept that I know and love. I do get tired of the ‘emergence in the gaps’, however.
What I meant earlier was that if you have two phenomena (a and b) that are strongly correlated you have these possibilities.
a causes b.
b causes a.
c causes both a and b.
So it is not unreasonable (that is it is inside of the logical reasoning we commonly use) to say that it is possible a ‘consciousness’ is the cause of both brain and mind.
Of course it is also possible that our logic and current understanding is not fully up to the task of figuring out the truth

(I also proposed a test to confirm my impression to at least first level. Run the classical two-slit diffraction test using automated equipment to count the photons a) going into each slit and b) hitting the target screen – but have the slit-counting turned on or off for different trials according to some random function whose results are unknown to the experimenters. Prior to looking at the screen-count results for the trials, erase all slit-counts from computer memory, and see whether the proportion of interference results to non-interference results matchs the expected statistics of the random function.)

After that, you might try to tackle this one:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/properties-emergent/