Quantum bizzarness

The quantum eraser experiment is friggin' weird.
Up until those results it was possible to take 'observation' to be any interaction between particles. Thus most of the weirdness of quantum mechanics is actually not terribly weird. Everything is a probability wave until it interacts with something else's probability wave (where the two waves peak together, presumably), at which point both waves collapse into particles (or fields, or whatever), do their interacting business, and depart again as waves.

The quantum eraser makes mincemeat of the notion. Using the traditional dual slit experiment but polarizing the light differently for each slit eliminates the interference pattern if the detecting medium can detect the polarization. That's in line with the above in that the probability wave is collapsed by the interaction with the polarizing element. But if you subsequently polarize both streams of light in the same way, thus making the streams indistinguishable again, the interference pattern returns. Which would seem to disagree with the idea above.

I'm curious if the interference pattern is identical to the pattern formed when the light goes through the entire process unpolarized and I'm also curious what occurs if the detecting medium is unable to detect the polarization. If the assumption is that the probability only collapses when a human detects a particle then a medium which can't detect polarity should always display an interference pattern in the above experiment since no matter what you do to the polarity the streams would be indistinguishable. It's just entirely bizarre that the capacity of 'observation' should be reserved for humans (or more likely thinking beings, which leads you down the rabbit hole of what qualifies as thinking). It's intuitively reasonable, to me at least, to describe 'observation' that collapses a probability wave as any interaction between particles but it makes no sense to ascribe that capability only to conscious thought. Here's to hoping this is considered more thoroughly later in the book.