The epistemic view of the wavefunction explains nothing, because it attempts to put all the quantum weirdness into "our knowledge of reality" rather than "reali

The epistemic view of the wavefunction explains nothing, because it attempts to put all the quantum weirdness into "our knowledge of reality" rather than "reality". The whole argument seems to me silly, because the epistemic view requires that indistinguishable particles in fact are merely undistinguished particles. That is, the epistemic view requires that reality behaves quantum mechanically when no one is looking at it, whereas what we observe is that reality behaves quantum mechanically when no one can look at it. These are completely different situations. In one case it is what we do know that matters--which is an epistemic state--in the other it is what we can know that matters, which is an ontic state. And it turns out that reality does limit what we can know, and this has dramatic consequences. The clearest example of this is the heat capacity of solids. Heat capacity is a measure of how the temperature increases as you add heat energy to an object. The temperature is just the average energy per state in the material, so the heat capacity is a very direct measure of the number of states the collection of particles constituting a material can be in. It is very simple to show that particles that cannot be distinguished have a different number of states from particles that can be distinguished even if they don't happen to be at the moment. For example, consider two coins: if they can be distinguished they have four possible states, HH, HT, TH and TT. If they can't be distinguished then HT and TH are the same state (because there is no way, even in principle, even if you're god) to distinguish the left coin from the right coin. So there are only three states. You can do something similar with particles in a crystal lattice and show that they are indistinguishable. So it isn't a question of what we do know, but what we can know, and that is determined by ontology, not epistemology. The problem is that the ontology of the wavefunction is non-classical in the extreme. Because it is nonlocal it violates the law of non-contradiction from the perspective of locally causal beings (us). That makes it hard to understand, but it doesn't make it any less real. It just means reality is weird, which at this point in history shouldn't come as a huge surprise to anyone.