Is the statement "Claims demand evidence" always true?

[bennyboy]

Because I'm sensitive to context.  In the context of living my daily life, I haven't stumbled on a good reason for a solipsistic outlook...
In the context of determining absolute truth, though, all that goes out the window.  In context of mundanity, it doesn't MATTER what underlies it all... But by discussing what's outside that context, we are attempting to apply what is experienced to what underlies experience.  This seems like a pretty pointless exercise (in a logical sense, not in a pragmatic one).

There are a number of assumptions in here that I find suspect.  For example, I'm less inclined to believe that the gulf that separates the two contexts you mention is as great in its disparity or as inconsequential in its impact on action as you imply.  This is undoubtedly true to some extent, such as the activities that you would continue to engage in regardless of what underlies appearances, but it seems undeniable to me that what is in fact true about the world, or even merely that which one believes about it, often does influence outcomes, whether the issue exclusively pertains to one's ethical or theoretical outlook.  Of course, there's plenty of room for disagreement, but it remains true that progress is possible, which could not be the case if all was subjective.

It seems to me you are conflating reality with ideas about reality.  Reality is what it is, and objectively so.  Even in solipsism, you could say this-- if solipsism is true, it would be objectively true that nothing exists that is not of the self-- i.e. EVEN IF you believed that solipsism weren't true, it still would be.  Conversely, if the Universe is as we see it, and there's nothing else behind it (no invisible idealistic framework organizing QM particles into meaningful forms for example), then that would be objectively true, whatever we thought about it.

It may even be that reality is malleable and intrinsically ambiguous, much like a photon-- that reality is at once both physically monistic, idealistically monistic, and many other things, and a combination and none of them.  But if paradox is after all the prime rule, THAT is objective truth-- nothing we think can change that fact ALTHOUGH how we interact with reality might change the manner in which we are able to experience it.

So yeah, we could perhaps lay out a set of possibilities, and be confident that somewhere under our blanket lies reality.  One of our ideas must be objectively true.  But the question is how can one know which?  I do not believe that you can go from experience to an understanding of the reality that underlies it.  You cannot know that the Matrix is not consistently managing the falling of apples or the resolution of quantum particles.  You cannot know that the Mind of God isn't constantly feeding to us images of things, their properties, and their dynamic relationships.  Nor can I know that there is more than a physical Universe, which perhaps is philosophically complex to be exclusively self-supporting, meaning that there are no other universes and no Creator at all. This is because, hypothetically, all possible frameworks which are capable of providing experiences might possibly contain the organizational principles (all things attract by gravity, certain forces cause particles to interact in certain ways, etc.) with which we are familiar.