There are some who believe that only sentient beings such as humans can collapse quantum wavefunctions. IMHO this is a fallacy and it leads to a paradox, which can be resolved by developing a deeper understanding of consciousness.

The paradox is, if sentient being are required to collapse a wavefunction, then how could the classical universe exist before sentient beings evolved, and how could sentient beings evolve if the classical universe didn't yet exist? At what stage did the pure quantum potential suddenly start collapsing into particular classical actualities? How did this new ingredient "wavefunction-collapsing-sentience" arise from the pure quantum potential? There is a maze of paradoxes here...

In fact any interaction with another system will collapse the wavefunction. Any observation will do it, because whenever an observable is required by another system as part of an interaction the wavefunction must collapse to provide an observable. This approach is a natural part of an efficient simulation algorithm, which only computes the state of a virtual system when another virtual system requires an observable in order to experience and interact with it.

The sensitivity to collapse is why researchers are having so much trouble building quantum computers, they call it the "decoherence problem". In order to perform computations with wavefunctions we can't have them collapsing willy-nilly, but the slightest interaction with any aspect of the surrounding universe will collapse the wavefunction. So how can one develop a framework within which to compute with wavefunctions?

If it was only sentient beings who collapse wavefunctions then the decoherence problem would be easy to solve, just put the quantum computer in an opaque box and don't let anyone open the box until the computation has had plenty of time to complete. Then a sentient being can open the box to collapse the wavefunction and observe the final result of the computation. This is not what happens in reality.

The only way out of the quantum-sentience-paradox is to accept that not only complex systems with complex forms of awareness (such as ourselves) are involved in the collapse of the wavefunction, but even simple systems with simple forms of awareness. Hence the way out of paradox is to overcome anthropocentric concepts of consciousness and accept some form of panpsychism, such as pan-proto-experientialism.

Even a fundamental particle has its own primitive form of consciousness - nowhere near as complex and rich as ours, but it is aware nevertheless. A particle couldn't interact with other particles if it wasn't aware of their existence and their state of being. It needs to observe their state of being in order to react to them, and this observation collapses the wavefunction of the other particles.

Thanks to Tim Cumper for raising this issue and inspiring me to write this article...