Is the statement "Claims demand evidence" always true?

[emjay]

Yeah me too... almost tears but not quite... just very moving and involving... like being a direct witness at a pivotal moment in history. I have the feeling I'm going to be reading it many times in the future; I want to really understand the arguments in depth, and see what arguments I'd put against it in a thorough refutation. My main objection is that it seems to take too much for granted... essences for instance are things I've only ever really thought about in neuroscientific terms (because it is neurons that 'extract' the essences of things they represent... that's what they do... so all this talk of categorisation, classes etc seems to me to be only describing how the brain works rather than talking about anything objective), and absolutes of beauty, truth, goodness etc again are things that I see as essentially arbitrary perceptions in the mind... that might be different, or non existent, or replaced with something else in different animals. So I don't take any aspect of perception for granted even if it appears to be something that is objectively 'out there'. But by reading this stuff more thoroughly I'm hoping I'll get a better and more foundational understanding of all this causes, essences, absolutes stuff and see if it really is at odds with my understanding of the mind, or whether I'm just conflating the two and there's room for both interpretations to co-exist.

Anyway, thanks for your further reading list I'll try and read them in roughly the order you suggest. At the moment I've got a 'complete works' compendium of Plato's to go through... you can't really argue with 49p for all of that on Kindle... so that should keep me busy and what's cool is the one I've got has got a lot of analysis and commentary as well, so that'll be very helpful in getting the very most out of each one

That sounds like a wonderful plan.  I'm currently in the latter stages of a project that began about two years ago, which was an undertaking to read all of the major philosophers and their primary works beginning with Plato (well, actually, I began with all of the important Ancient Near-Eastern texts, at least those that were known by the 1970s or whenever the compilation was published; I know many more have since been discovered; and Homer -- my goodness, if you haven't read Homer!) and working my up towards the present-day.  Currently, I am about to start Kant once I finish this more recent philosophy book by Derek Parfit called Reasons and Persons (I've taken a number of detours along the way), and honestly, though I now understand many of the issues much better, talk of abstract objects like numbers or essences or substances or beings is just really intuitively difficult, I think, because we are such sensual creatures.  You'll find this not only to be a common theme in Plato's works, but in most of Western philosophy -- the tension between mind and body and the attempt to make sense of how it is that subjects perceive objects, and what these tell us about both, one or the other, or neither; in a word, what is "truth" and how can one understand it?  The 19th century mathematician/philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once famously said that, "The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato."  I'm not entirely sure I'd disagree.

Wow... it's amazing that you've got that far in two years... you must have read hundreds of books? It sounds a pretty cool project but as for me I'll take it one day at a time Nope, I haven't read any Homer except the excerpts in Phaedo... unfortunately all that came to mind when reading it was Homer Simpson hehe, so I'm going to need to read a lot to dislodge that image   I'll take all these other suggestions on board as well, and surely refer to them in the future, but for the moment just a day at a time. It does sound great though, because ultimately what else has philosophy to argue/ponder about than perception vs reality and how we fit into it all, so yeah, I'm really looking forward to going down a similar route to you  

Now, when you write that 

My main objection is that it seems to take too much for granted... essences for instance are things I've only ever really thought about in neuroscientific terms (because it is neurons that 'extract' the essences of things they represent... that's what they do... so all this talk of categorisation, classes etc seems to me to be only describing how the brain works rather than talking about anything objective), and absolutes of beauty, truth, goodness etc again are things that I see as essentially arbitrary perceptions in the mind... that might be different, or non existent, or replaced with something else in different animals

I have to inquire, if neurons weren't, in evolutionary terms, designed to track truth -- not for the sake of truth but simply because the more accurate the representation of the world, the easier can harms be avoided and the more can energy-saving advantages be procured -- then what explains our success as a species at overcoming nature and the ignorance she fosters upon us all, especially when this ignorance can be so dangerous?  Did humans invent the concepts or merely the terms by which to communicate them?  Did they invent the "categories" -- of space and time and relation and action -- and the internal consistency that allows us to map our signs/symbols and their theoretical relations onto a world?  And through it we have discovered ourselves to be this privileged species, living on a giant ball that orbits around a much larger ball of gas, all of which is in fact less than a spec of dust in the grand scheme of things!  It's all too odd to rule anything out, but it seems less odd to me that the world is as fundamentally abstract as it is physical, perhaps counterparts to the ancient notions of "form and "matter," rather than that the world is only a figment of my mind.  Can one really believe that the only difference in beauty between the Sistine Chapel and some ordinary six year old's finger painting is an arbitrary or irrational judgment formed by one's brain that the former is far more beautiful?

Just to clarify what I meant when I said beauty etc was arbitrary, I didn't mean the content that we judge to be more or less beautiful... i.e. the Sistine Chapel vs a child's finger painting... though that is as well, but rather the actual measure that we call beauty is arbitrary... there might be some animals that do not detect/represent what we call beauty. The way I see it is that any and every changeable thing in consciousness represents some changeable state or measure in the neural networks of the brain. The most obvious examples of that are our sensory qualia (colour, sound, pain etc) but I see no difference other than subtlety between them and any other emotion or sense we can feel, including the sense of the beauty of something... it's something that can come into and go out of awareness. So the only questions for me are what beauty is a measure of, why it's needed, and how is it achieved in the NNs. There is the arbitrary, subjective kind of beauty that is learned and/or conditioned and different in everyone and that's comparatively easier to theorise about than the innate, natural sense of beauty that seems to be pretty universal... of which your Sistine Chapel example is a good example. It's a mystery to me too. My best guess is that it's a measure of 'majesty', similar to the awe you feel when standing in front of a mountain. Would the Sistine Chapel be more beautiful if you were actually standing in it looking up, as opposed to looking at a picture of it? I think it would. I think that sense of awe that accompanies looking at something large and with multiple depths of focus (?parallax(es)) is a kind of inherent measure of beauty that we have... a kind of mixture of fear and wonder. But that's just a guess... there's probably many types of beauty, innate or not, and composite or not (i.e. mixtures of different emotions, like awe may be).

I won't put words into your mouth but it may be the case that you and I have a fundamentally different way of viewing the world, in that you may be looking 'out there' for objective beauty etc, but to me technically there is no 'out there' because everything out there must first be translated, through neural signals, into a model 'in here' and only that is perceived... and moreover, everything we perceive about anything [implicitly; in the model]... every differentiated and changeable state in consciousness... is part of the same system and signifies something in the state of that system. So at that fundamental level, I can't see beauty or any other emotion/sense/perception as anything other that a measurement of some state of the system. So that's why I tend to have difficulty with these 'objective' discussions, and don't usually partake.

But as I said, now I actually do want to learn more about causes, essences, and absolutes from the philosophical point of view, and see whether I'm conflating things or whether it is possible to view the world through both perspectives. And your questions here seem to hint at the essence of that problem; on the one hand we have brains that have evolved to model the world and present us with both irrational (emotional, generalising, bias etc) and rational (sequential, logical) modes of thinking but on the other hand we have developed systems of thought that implement and expand on those same lessons that the brain learned long ago So in that sense, we, the system have kind of overtaken evolution, as a result of self-awareness and the modes of thinking at our disposal, but still heading in the same direction (i.e. the system of formal logic, and the ability to write and talk about it, expands our logical our logical abilities exponentially compared to if it had to be done entirely in the mind)... towards truth. That could imply one of two things; that objectively truth is something that both we and evolution aim for for whatever reason or that we have only modelled and expanded upon what we know from our own mental experience... just as we are incapable of and have no desire to create art for senses that we do not possess, in which case our pursuit of truth through formal logic would just be indicative of the expansion of our own mode of thought into the outside world and the exponential benefits that provides for learning both in terms of magnitude and scope (as in knowledge shared, and passed down through the ages through writing etc)... but not necessarily indicative of that 'truth' being anything other than a certain arbitrary nature of the brain being emulated. I'm not saying I don't think truth exists, but I'm just illustrating some possibilities.

But with regard to our irrational nature, that's a different matter altogether. I think in general that produces more bad in the world than good. In practice in our emotional minds it's usually not a good thing, when it's either negative or positive (for instance Buddhism sees this... that there is suffering in both positive and negative irrational thought... as did Socrates but in a different way), but it seems that reason can tame even this and that's what's particularly interesting about this causes, essences, absolutes stuff... that it appears to be modelling and expanding upon our irrational mode of thinking... i.e. generalisation/categorisation. It is the emotional/irrational part of our mind that generalises and categorises; stereotypes... which cause so much pain in the world when combined with negative emotion/bias... are one type of 'essence' that NNs extract... the common features of a thing after repeated presentations of different examples of that thing to the network. So in my thinking, the essence of say a chair would simply be the stereotype of a chair, and that would be in essence a statistical summary (though neurally much more involved than that, and not as clear cut) over all examples of chairs I've ever seen. And the question of what makes the perfect, or absolute, chair is related to this; that far from there being an objective perfect chair, it would be, in my opinion, different for every individual and based on their individual representations of chairs... that there is no absolute chair and it's all subjective based on prior experience. The perfect chair for an individual would be related to how closely the incoming pattern matches some existing pattern, though I don't know what... whether it would be the stereotype or some previous instance from the set, or both... but in whatever way it would be related to the comparison of the incoming with an existing representation. Too perfect and intuition will tell you it's not right... because you've never actually seen an instance that is perfect... you feel 'it's too good to be true'; if you represent objects ABCDE + CDEFG then the stereotype will probably come out as CDE but if you then present ABCDEFG I reckon you'd get that feeling of 'too perfect' because the presence of a stereotype doesn't dissolve the individual instances... they're still there for comparison and retrieval, they just require more constraints to activate. So the too perfect case may be a measure of the disharmony in the network of trying to activate both of those at the same time, maybe... just thought of that. So anyway, where was I? This is why I've always had trouble thinking in terms of philosophical absolutes and essences... because I view those feelings and their causes from a very different perspective. But now we're onto a different issue... the issue of us modelling and expanding on these processes through reason. I have to say, as much fun as it is trying to define things and find their essence with logic, I think it's ultimately a fool's errand that will always be left wanting... because it is trying to model with reason and logic a system that is inherently fuzzy logic in nature. That's not to say it's not worth doing and that there aren't plenty of useful examples of systems of generalisation/categorisation... such as the philosophical stuff we're talking about, the notion of tags in websites etc for categorising things into more than one category at a time, just as the brain does, classes in programming etc. It's good that reason has tamed and capitalised on those processes but all I'm saying is that the true essence can only be found by the fuzzy systems that find it... that logic is too discrete and will always have boundary problems.

Anyway, I think that's enough for today. Did that answer anything that you were asking?