Is the statement "Claims demand evidence" always true?

[bennyboy]

@benny. Still reading but I'll just add a little bit of food for thought in case it's relevant to either of us: what about a lucid dream? First you are dreaming as normal and as such you take everything in the dream (the context/environment)... as true. But then you can become aware that you are dreaming.... that is you become aware of information outside the context which changes the rules of the game completely... introduces a relative underlying principle of your reality (living in the dream) that changes how you interact with it in profound (and wonderful) ways. So could that not be likened to an absolute/objective truth that exists outside the context/environment, but which can nonetheless be discovered from within the context/environment? Just food for thought.

Well, that's a very interesting example. I'm not sure, when you're lucid dreaming, if you can choose to receive sensory input, though obviously it very often happens spontaneously.  That outside awareness would be to a lucid dream much as divine intervention would be to our mundane existence, I suppose.  Or, if it's really voluntary, maybe something like taking the red pill in the Matrix.

I'd also say that some kinds of thinking, like insight meditation or just too much philosophy or quantum mechanics reading, can lead to a translation of context in the other direction: you become aware that the ground you're standing on is much less firm than you thought-- the universe, including everything and everyone you thought you knew, is mostly empty, that-which-makes-you-you falls away under close scrutiny, and so on.

So yeah, we can play with contexts sometimes, and perhaps one definition of genius would be that one has the insight to build bridges between contexts that nobody has connected yet.

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So reason supplements and improves on what's already there, by allowing not just passive coincidences to be analysed but also active, willfully arranged coincidences (ie collating thoughts and ideas).

You're in danger of opening up a thread-wrecking can of worms, methinks, because the word "will" is if anything more controversial than the definition or use of evidence.