Our Consciousness is not a physical object, does that make our world virtual?

Why does it feel like something inside? Why is all our brain processing — vast neural circuits and computational mechanisms — accompanied by conscious experience? Why do we have this amazing inner movie going on in our minds? 

All sorts of mental phenomena have yielded to scientific investigation in recent years, but consciousness has stubbornly resisted. Many have tried to explain it, but the explanations always seem to fall short of the target. Some have been led to suppose that the problem is intractable, and that no good explanation can be given. (Journal of Consciousness Studies, (1) 1996, pp. 4-6) ³

There is a circularity to understanding our conscious performance. In the first instance there is a structure/agency tension that circulates around the concept of performance. To investigate this, we have to look at phenomenology which lays bare the very structure of consciousness itself and into the same act lay bare the very phenomenon themselves. But, in doing so, are we indulging ourselves in a methodological idealism that is seeking to explore an abstraction called human consciousness?

As Dennett (1995) has it:

What impresses me about my own consciousness, is my inability to hold more than a few items in consciousness at a time, my ability to be moved to tears... my inability to catch myself in the act of framing the words I sometimes say to myself...these are all ‘merely’ the ‘performance of functions’ or the manifestation of various complex dispositions to perform functions. Subtract them away, and nothing is left beyond a weird conviction (in some people) that there is some ineffable residue of ‘qualitative content’. (Our vegetative soul Descartes' Error, Times Literary Supplement, August 25, pp. 3–4)

In the quantum realm, in order to account for the actual existence of anything physical, we are forced to recognize the existence of a non-physical consciousness. The world cannot be just a bunch of inert matter, a collection of objects. There must also be a consciousness apart from objects, which is aware of them. To account for actual existence at all, we must recognise a consciousness, which by its very nature is not another physical object in the system. 

The above is an Extract from Peter Cheevers' PhD
 http://www.worldcat.org/title/subject-and-its-performance/oclc/500328126