Is the statement "Claims demand evidence" always true?

[Mudhammam]

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 think you put that well.  I don't mean to discredit the subjective and relative nature of experience, but only to suggest that it matters less than objective standards (of truth, beauty, justice, etc.); that our judgments are oftentimes affected by both, and that good philosophy is by and large an exercise in learning how to better discriminate between the two.

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.

I agree that epistemologically we can only speak of knowledge about the world "out there" as it has been modeled by neural networks and the patterns that have developed "in here"; but in terms of the ontology of "being" -- both of the microcosm ("in here") and of the macrocosm ("out there") -- I think we are justified in our projects to understand both, and that epistemology is fundamentally related to the ontology of the world "out there" in ways that make such attempts possible.  Whether or not ontology includes abstract objects which can only be conceived by minds but are every bit as real as -- if not more than -- the interactions between bodies, which seem to make the existence of abstract objects knowable by creatures such as ourselves, is, in my view, an open question.  But I should distinguish one thing:  Even if abstract objects or "essences" are in some sense distinct from bodies, it does not necessarily mean that they are separately existing entities.  The physical and the abstract may or may not be two properties of some further substratum that is ultimately unknowable.

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.

I think it may be arbitrary to the extent that we as a species could have evolved brains which enjoyed the taste of plastic, or hands that boasted of seven fingers instead of five, but I don't think it is arbitrary that we have the intuitive understanding that 1+1=2 or that torturing a child to derive sadistic pleasure is morally wrong.  These are facts about ourselves as subjects of experiences, yes, but unlike mental events that merely express or reveal our personal preferences, these latter are, as you put it, "pretty universal."  Does an appeal to our evolutionary history undermine an interpretation of these universal traits that defines them to be features of and in the world as well as minds, that minds have not invented but discovered?  I don't think so, at least as long as we want to avoid a slide into extreme subjectivism or relativism, positions which I don't find intellectually defensible.  But perhaps I'm rushing to judgment and have overlooked a more moderate interpretation that retains the objectivity of rational determinations, whether these be about truth, morality, or aesthetically pleasing experiences, without placing this objectivity "out there"... To put it a different way, if we were to delineate three views, call them A, B, and C, as...

A. "Man is the measure of all things."
B. "God is the measure of all things."
C. "The Good (the True, The Just, etc.) is the measure of all things."

...I would go with C.  But admittedly, I haven't the slightest clue what the Good or the True is outside of my experience of it , that is, my experience of making different judgments about the world, and believing that at least some of these are true (or good, or beautiful, etc.) regardless of my having been previously unaware of them.  Maybe it is "no more" than something like an overarching "principle of rationality."  But what is said principle, and if it is not distinct from brain activity, at least we have to acknowledge that we have, in some capacity, discovered(?) such principles to be responsible for that very brain activity, whether its math or physics or the relations that these bear to one another.  What I find most significant is that we have accomplished this using those principles (of, and/or made possible by, rationality).  It's almost like one big circle jerk.

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.

But this information that occasions the modeling of different objects in the mind, interpreting some of these objects to be "partakers in chair-ness," still involves the "problem of universals," that something "out there" -- as represented by these various sensations -- shares these common properties which can be categorized by a machine that is as much a part of the whole "out there"; that is, it begs the question as to whether these relations exist in (a) the subject, (b) the object, or © both -- or (d) only in the resulting interactions between them.  So long as we discard (a), I think we have grounds for discussing "objective" truths, values, etc.

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.

That may be true, in part, but it is only logic that can get us to the point of distrusting logic.  I find that not only profound but very reassuring (especially as someone who is studying to be a philosopher by trade).  

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Neurons do no such thing.  Nor do brains.  Minds do that sort of thing.  

Sure, but I am under the working assumption that neurons are related to minds in such a way that, to put it crudely, you might call them the "atoms of minds."

Of course humans invented the concepts.  Those concepts are part of our modeling reality; the underlying reality that exists irrespective of the existence of minds.

How could we invent all of said concepts if they are "part of our modeling... [of] the underlying reality"? We certainly didn't invent the underlying reality or the manner in which it gets modeled... and isn't this manner equivalent to what our most fundamental concepts basically represent? It doesn't sound quite right to claim that we invented the concept of "space" in the sense that one would (rightly) say we invented the concept of "sinners in the hands of an angry god."

We can objectively determine that the paintings in the Sistine Chapel are statistically less likely that a child's finger painting.  
We can objectively determine that those paintings communicate more effectively than a child's finger painting.
We can value them because they are rare and unlikely.  We can measure that their emotional effects are greater than those of a child's finger painting.
None of that is arbitrary or irrational.

I agree with this. But further, I don't see that it is in tension with the further possibilities about objective standards of truth or beauty, or our objective (i.e. rational) judgments about them, that I have suggested. If anything, it only defines those various aspects that may or may not be intrinsic to such standards or judgments.