Heisenberg and The Conscious Object

From "Seven Attempts at Liquifying the Self" by N. Schultz in his Experiment in Private Self-Consciousness
Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle is rightly seen as the first 20th Century result that puts an absolute limit on what can be measured, and, by implication, known about the world. The principle states that complementary variables such as the position and momentum of a particle cannot be simultaneously discerned to any arbitrary degree of precision. The principle is often illustrated with a standard thought experiment: in trying to observe smaller and smaller objects, the wavelength of the light used to "illuminate" the object must use a smaller and smaller wavelength, i.e. photons with larger and larger energy. This large energy then gives the particle to be sighted some momentum change that makes it impossible to determine the particle's momentum. This explanation, referred to as the Gamma-Ray Microscope thought-experiment, is widely used at many educational levels. See the Discovery Education site for Grades 9-12, for example. A more interesting use of the illumination example can be found at the Fly in the Honey blog , posted by Mary (that's all the info I can determine about the author other than I believe that she is a teacher), where she claims to be very poor in math and science, yet is incredibly moved by the standard conclusion of the Uncertainty Principle: "the very act of observation changes the object being observed."
The Gamma-Ray Microscope thought-experiment, a mythological story that began with Heisenberg himself, has been de-valued as a good example of the principle. It turns out that the world is much weirder than that pictured in the thought-experiment. (I will explain this in a future post.) Regardless, it does not diminish from the fundamental idea that observation affects the observed in fundamental ways that cannot be eliminated with more precise and careful instrumentation and methodology.
On one hand this is a very deep concept; on the other it appears to be tautological, especially when both the experimenter and experimental subject are conscious agents.