Is the statement "Claims demand evidence" always true?

[bennyboy]

@Benny. Okay I'm up to date on the thread and I agree with Rhythm and think that you're equivocating.

e tu, Brute?

I'm not ready to do that because I have yet to confirm to my own satisfaction the link between what we call philosophical truth... ie the truths arrived at by deductive or inductive logic... and neural 'truth' ie activation. I'm sure there is a correspondence but until I can translate this process of 'willful' logic into NN dynamics, such that I understand what's going on neurally at every stage of the reasoning process... only then can I personally consider them equivalent and be able to say to myself (rightly or wrongly... it is a theory after all) this phenomenal reasoning process translates into these neural processes, representations, and/or states.

See, here's the thing that puzzles me about Rhythm, and now you. Truth-in-context is not jealous. A brain is still a brain, a neuron is still a neuron, and so on. In the context of our normal experience of life, and our basic understanding of brain and mind, we are going to agree. So long as that's the context in which we're discussing, there's no problem. It's when people say "Show me the evidence" with regard to metaphysical ideas that things go south-- obviously, metaphysical ideas will be abstractions of what we know-- extensions of as-above-so-below, for example; but you're unlikely to take many instances of as-above-so-below as evidence, any more than I am to take physical evidence as metaphysical evidence. Everyone knows the truth of this-- that we don't know, and that engaging in any kind of discussion about certain subjects means we are speculating just for something to do.

As for equivocation: I think calling the logic in logical positions "evidence" is an equivocation. Evidence means literally "that which is out into view," and taken literally, it would mean providing someone with a direct experience of a thing or its properties. If you want to take it in an abstract sense, then it means something like, "Showing that a new idea is coherent with those ideas which are already held," and perhaps "truth" is defined as "coherence with those ideas which are already held." I don't think those are very good definitions of those words. I really think for something to represent "truth," it must conform to an absolute objective source-- and the only way to establish this kind of truth is to establish a context in which subjectives are taken as objectives-- since there is nothing that we can interact with on a non-subjective level.

Anyway, onto your other points. I don't really know what to say; we can't know about what exists outside our 'mundane' environment/context (ie the known universe), if anything. At best all it can be is theories but with no way to prove them.

That's what metaphysics is. But some answers are still better than others, in my opinion. We can at least try to inject contexts. For example, I'd say that as we examine our universe at more and more primitive levels, things get more and more insubstantial, ambiguous, and downright squirrely. We know that QM involves definite observer effects, and that this is built-in to our universe. I'd therefore say it's reasonable to believe that if anything lies UNDER QM, i.e. QM supervenes on something, that something must be so incredibly ineffable and incomprehensible that it has to be expressed as a philosophical principle or quality.

Can I prove this? No, of course not. But given what we know in THIS context, I think it's a fair attempt to inject into that more basic context. Saying, "Show me" defeats the joy of this kind of philosophy-- playing with the known and speculating on the different ways it might interact with the unknown. Appeals to evidence in this case would be pointless and maybe a little rude.