[Phaedrus]

You are asking for a metaphor or image that comports with ordinary experience. Ain't gonna happen. Still there is some evidence that more and more people are "getting used" to quantum theory and are able to make non-ridiculous statements about it. The ramifications of quantum events will gradually work their way into ordinary speech, and in a hundred ears or so, ordinary educated people will wonder what the fuss was about.

I would not ask for a metaphor because I don't really think that's possible. But I also don't think the physicists themselves have any clear consensual idea as to how QM works, how probability becomes actuality, let alone its ramifications. Some are doubtlessly closer to the truth than others (i.e. among the physicists), but no one knows who.

[tortoise]

But I also don't think the physicists themselves have any clear consensual idea as to how QM works, how probability becomes actuality, let alone its ramifications.

It would be more concise to assert that nobody has a solid idea as to the mechanisms behind QM, but that the consequences of QM from the standpoint of things like mind and computational theory are obvious.

Summary for the impatient: QM has only a single very important impact on any abstract conception of computational machinery. It fundamentally changes (and reduces) the characteristic time complexity of certain classes of computation. Nothing more, nothing less. From this, any theoretical consequences follow.

(NOTE: Time complexity is a weak property in many respects, as the fundamental concept of Turing equivalence still applies. Or to put it another way, novel systems that alter time complexity will necessarily be implementable on bog standard silicon.)