Photon Interaction With Electrons: Not The Same As Idealism

I can see exactly where a tree is with regard to some other nearby object--it is impossible for spatial distance, other than the infinity of an empty space in all directions, to be identified without a reference point, such as a tree's positioning by comparison to another tree.  I can see the speed, even if I cannot tell from the movement itself precisely what it is, of a person walking, as well as their direction.  With regard to other sensory stimuli around it, I can perceive their velocity, the combination of speed and direction.  Since these are macroscopic objects or events, the epistemological limitations of the senses apply, but on the level of fallible perception, I can know the position and speed of something at once.  The subatomic issue of observing both qualities at once is tied to far more overtly philosophical matters than this.

For something at the quantum scale, the size of an observed or sought after particle is much, much smaller than anything visible to the unaided eye.  An electron can be hypothetically seen by directing light towards it, but the moment it is noticed, its movement can be affected by the process, so its trajectory will be altered.  This outcome is summarized as the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, dealing with how at the quantum scale, location and velocity cannot be fully known at the same time.  The photon used for its light drives the electron away.  Now, this is not supposed to be like a rock breaking glass.  A photon is conceived of as massless and thus immaterial, joining things like empty space within atoms that are nonphysical components of what are often ironically assumed to be naturalistic paradigms.

A photon is immaterial, a massless unit unlike even something as small as electrons, which, despite having a very miniscule mass compared to a proton, still have some mass.  It is bizarre on one level that a massless unit of energy can impact the location of a physical object, however small, but it is not logically impossible for immaterial things to affect physical things, such as when my mind controls how I lift my arm.  String theory, an utterly unverifiable but entirely possible metaphysic of the universe, would even require that physical substance is ultimately created at a quantum level by nonphysical energy.  This is not the same as another somewhat popular idea about quantum physics and its relationship with the immaterial.  Some posit that observation itself, a phenomenological activity, makes the electron behave differently when perceived.

Conscious perception might generate or sustain matter in the sense of metaphysical idealism (but there would still be more than just mind and matter in existence, like logical truths and the space that holds matter).  There would be no epistemological way to prove this given human limitations in the same way I cannot know if matter alone, arranged into the structure of a brain, generates my consciousness.  If what reportedly happens in research is the case, though, and electrons are "tossed" about when photons reach them due to the former's extraordinarily small size, this would not have to be an idealistic phenomenon at all.  The photon is correlatively required to see light, and since the photon affects the electron's state, this alone would not be a mind-influencing-matter event.  It would not be the same as looking at something and making an event occur with no other act than passively focusing one's consciousness in a given place.

I cannot know if object permanence at the macroscopic scale is true.  After all, I obviously cannot perceive matter when I am not perceiving it to find out!  Moreso than this, I cannot know if something similar happens at the subatomic level that I cannot even see.  As obvious as this is upon thinking about it without making assumptions, many people never think about such things.  Either option about the external world at either scale is logically possible but unknowable for me.  A photon "pushing" an electron about would still not be about conscious observation making the electron move.  As strange as it is, it would be about a different immaterial thing, the photon, making this come about.  Quantum physics might very well reduce to idealistic metaphysics when it comes to the causal connection between mind and matter, but not because photons and electrons interact in the way they allegedly do.  In light of photon behavior, the observer-particle relationship is not suggested to be idealistic just because electrons move when one looks for them.