The ontological assumptions of science.

Now my problem with your "questions" is that you are like the Azande in so far that your rationality is entrenched in a paradigm of "ontic reality" which "exists" independent of "observers". You do not see that as A paradigmatic rationality but THE rationality. You therefore cannot even begin to accept statements like Maturana's that "information does not exist for an organism interacting with its medium, only for an observer involved in a descriptive activity in another domain." For you there is no distinction between "activity" and "description of activity", or beween "adaptation to a perturbation" and "acting on information". For you there is no distiction between "medium" (the organism's domain) and "environment" (an observer's domain) You are like the Azande who see their "reality"(of Witchraft) being all pervading.

I did not say anything about right or wrong.

I said paradigms shift. They shift because old ones cease to have consensual support. i.e. they are superceded or delimited by ones of "greater functionality" or "greater range of applicability" or even "greater elegance".

I am clearly not alone in my contention given the profusion of the literature on the subject and the expansion of the paradigm beyond "biology" into many academic studies of social discourse.

I can accept the existence of an "ontic reality" if it includes both the observer and observed as an interactional unity--much as the Cosmos is at both ends of the telescope. I do not accept a reality that is bifurcated into something objective "out there" and something subjective "in here". The subjective is an objective fact and the objective world is seen as such in terms of our grand intersubjective paradigmatic consensual strategy: Culture.

What if the object that is radiating its physical influences into the sensory receptors of the experiencing organism is the outcome of a consensual construction? If we are interested in what happens before any second order consensus has been attained, then we should not presuppose the physical objects, as we perceive them, to be the causal agents of any sensory impressions!

Eventually we always need other people for the confirmation of our impressions. Solitarily we cannot bring forth objects.
...
Though the constitution of objects is not a solitary affair, this does not mean that the mere act of naming an object in a conversation, and agreeing on it, would bring it into existence. Though objects do arise during the recursive coordination of actions, each of the interacting individuals is having his own bodily existence in the first place. And it is in the course of each person's "praxis of living", as Maturana (e.g.
1987a, p. 326) calls it, that new perturbations may pop up that are to be dealt with and compensated.

Finally, Maturana's notion of 'illusion' is of our interest. According to him, illusion is not distinguishable from 'correct' perception "because a closed neuronal network cannot discriminate between internally and externally triggered changes in relative neuronal activity. This distinction pertains exclusively to the domain of descriptions in which the observer defines an inside and an outside for the nervous system and the organism." (Maturana, 1978, p. 46). Therefore, the discovery of an illusion is not so much the replacement of a perception (hence to be considered as 'erroneous') by a more correct perception, but rather the decision by an observer to discard the previous perception in favor of the current. When, later on, the observer again decides that his current perception is also an illusion, it will be a matter of just replacing it, not a matter of coming more close to reality 'as it really is'

Vico, the review said, had produced an excellent exposition of his philosophy but had not furnished a proof of its truth. For a constructivist who has deliberately discarded the notion that knowledge should correspond to an independent ontological "reality", the request of such a proof is an absurdity because he could not supply it without contradicting the central thesis of his philosophy, namely that knowledge cannot and need not reflect an ontological world but must be judged by its function in the experiential world and by its coherence.

I was suggesting the philosophical implications that some may associate with QM (but in general is countered by the argument that QM only applies on the atomic / subatomic level) may be not the case any more, due to the demonstration of the Bose-Einstein condensate.

So.....philosophical considerations as to how QM affects perception/reality may indeed have applicability to man's "macro world".

Why?

Because the results of QM have now been proven to not be limited to effects on the atomic/subatomic level. Sort of a macro-scaled version of the potential philosophical implications behind Schrodinger's Cat!

Thus Bose-Einstein condensates suggest that reality on a human scale may be scientifically shown as a matter of perception (at least in the case of Bose-Einstein condensates).

Compared to more commonly-encountered states of matter, Bose-Einstein condensates are extremely fragile. The slightest interaction with the outside world can be enough to warm them past the condensation threshold, forming a normal gas and losing their interesting properties.