Yes it does, but It can be completely smashed too, as I will soon do, but first some clarifications are needed:
Consciousness is not awareness, but usually includes that; however people in environmental awareness suppression experiments* have little awareness and, cut off from that, often begin to create - like some. Sort of like what one is aware of in dreams.
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* total silence (except for their own heart beat, if they can hear it with ears plugged, total darkeness, hands imobalized, body too as floating in water with temperature fraction of a degrees less than 37C, nothing to smell, see, hear, taste or touch.
Consciousness is hard to define, but once you know it is not awareness but thoughts, not even connected to your environment, it comes down to sense of self, or being, plus some "qualia" like boredom, happiness, sadness, anger, etc. and possibly pain if you have any chronic ones. - Things no machine can have - a real mind. Consciousness, unlike awareness, is 100% pure subjectivity.
Now I need to clarify QM's "observation" (a very unfortunate term, not nearly as misleading in the original German.) What "collapse a mixed state" (weighted sum of two or more of the system's pure states or "eigenvectors") requires is energy interaction with a macro system. Lets consider cosmic rays (another unfortunate name as they are all particles, 90+% simply protons.):
Caption is: Pacini makes a measurement in 1910.
But new sciforums makes insert of photo very hard - see it at link above or if "insert" is available to you, here is its link:
Hess & Pacini and all the early turn of the century investigators who sent stacks of glass photograph plates high up into the air on balloons are long dead now.
When a primary or first few generation cosmic ray passed thur these plates and "hit" a nucleus many interesting "tracks" were left in the film, curved tracks for charged particles if plates were in a magnetic field. Measuring the curvature and other characteristic such as track density and connections to other tracks, when it is obvious. Hours of carefull microscopic analysis for just a couple of tracks. These tracks are or contain the QM interactions that "collapsed" the mixed QM states in to more classical ones. That collapse happened about 100 years ago. For every classical track set that has been process there are many dozens that have not been. - Too time consuming and Cosmic Ray studied have shifted the interest to the rare but very high energy primary interactions. No one (nor machine) is even looking at this wealth of old data now. No intelligene is "wasted" on it now that the focus of cosmic ray research has changed. Occasionally some high-energy Ph. D. graduate student may be told to process a track set just to understand what an effort it was. I think most of the plates have at least been developed - chemically processed as film was, before digital cameras existed.
POINT IS:
No intelligence, not human, dog or flea nor any clever machine is needed to "collapse the QM mixed state wave function."
Many like
BIGFOOT, who have no understanding of QM have been badly mislead by the phrase: "An observation collapses the wave function." to think some intelligence does that. QM wave function were collapsing 10 billion years ago! long before our later generation sun even existed!