You lock into (become entangled with) a random selection from a superposition of states, according to the probability described by the wavefunction at the time. What the deal is with the other states you don't see is a matter of interpretation, e.g., Many Worlds hypothesis.
Or how about this gem: “If you look at these tax deductions for employer-provided health or for state and local taxes or mortgage-interest deductions, they’re really subsidies to the affluent, which I guess I hadn’t thought about them.”
Something like Many Worlds is necessary to explain what it means for something like a wavefunction to collapse. Although it may multiply entities, that doesn't mean that it does so unecessarily. The trade-off is that new physical laws aren't introduced when doing so, and with other theories, you can say that introducing new laws is unnecessary, with respect to Many Worlds.
It seems that there is enough demand from women to become police officers to justify the quotas (based on general population, not proportion of applicants), whereas not a lot of men want to be teachers. You see the same thing with nursing.
Standardization by a small group can have a positive effect on a language's evolution. Look at what Webster's dictionary did for English spellings and common usages.
Normal English words also vary widely in their usage, but consistency is often found within tight peer groups. In either case, universalities are still implied or they emerge, whether it is a smiley face to mean a smile or an eggplant for sexual connotation.
Particles are actually just excitations in a field but it's the field that makes them actual particles. An electron arises from an electron field. An electron hole arises from an absence of an electron.
Yes, it's normal so long as you are in one component or the other. I don't think that you can experience a superposition of being coherent among both components—of existing in both worlds. I think that we're always unconscious in a Schrodinger state.
I think that self-awareness is more than a matter of (classical) computation. The immediacy of subjective experience implies an entanglement of states, as when one observes one's own self. The marbles would have to be coherent in a cardboard XOR gate for that to happen.