Hi Steve. Great opening question. “If I focus really hard do my power of quantum mechanics allow me to manifest reality? No, but then why did some of the founders of the theory seem to think that consciousness and quantum mechanics were interminably linked?”.

You may perhaps think this unlikely, but a spiritual (mystic?) explanation for this might be that it is not the ego - what you are calling ‘I’ - that is responsible for this, rather some higher level of your being, the soul, the higher self, or some term like that.

On the whole, however, quantum physics notwithstanding, I tend to believe in the existence of objective reality without the intervention of human consciousness, although, as Plato said, the things we perceive as reality are really only shadows on a wall.