I'm afraid it is. The issue stems from confusing the popular usage of "observed" (i.e. by a person) with how the term is used by quantum physicists (i.e. the interaction of the quantum particles with any other particles). That is to say: For the purposes of quantum physics, it's the hardware of the LHC that's doing the "observing," long before the scientists observe its output on the monitor.

I think you are misinterpreting what is meant by "force of consciousness", in that it doesn't necessarily imply an observer in the colloquial sense. Its not meant to imply any supernatural or otherwise mystical existence - not any more than the 'force of gravity' or whatever.

To state it another way, why does the universe exist at all? Why is it not just a jumbled mess of superposition quantum states? We know at the deepest levels there is a wave-particle paradox to most of what exist, so what causes the collapse to happen so that particles can exist?

The standard answer is that the question itself is a form of survivorship-bias, meaning because our universe is one in which superposition states collapsed into regular particles, is what allowed humans to evolve to even pose the question.

However, there is an alternative, which is that the universe exist because the 'force of consciousness' was present to cause those collapses, which then in turn provided an environment which animals could evolve and eventually detect / interact with that underlying force.

And what independently testable, otherwise non-reproducible effect on the physical world would this "underlying force" have? This explanation reeks of the same long discredited arguments used by Creationists.

What independently testable, reproducible effects can you ascribe to "hyperstring theory" or any other postulations of modern theoretical physics? Is even "big bang theory" (although imminently logical), actually testable?

It all becomes philosophy and metaphysics after a certain threshold.