Is the statement "Claims demand evidence" always true?

[emjay]

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

e tu, Brute?  

Sorry, I didn't mean to be rude or anything but that's what I took from reading the thread, Rhythm's responses, and watching you two go round and round in circles the same way I'm so used to doing when I talk about neurons  

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.

I don't really know what you're talking about here. By as-above-so-below do you mean that I have a theory grounded 'out there' which informs me about 'in here', and that from your perspective, 'in here' should take precedence for informing me about 'out there' because it's all I can directly know? If so, then I'd more characterise my position as a synergy between the two; experience informs and predicts about neural dynamics and neural dynamics inform and predict about experience, and their continued extremely high degree of correlation, is enough to convince me that they are one and the same, just different sides of the same coin. But your position does not compute for me... I can't get my head around it. On the one hand you say that we can agree on mundane things like the brain and mind in context, but on the other you seem unwilling to allow anything out there to inform you about in here.

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.

I think what it looks like you're looking for may already exist (or at least have been proposed... possibly by Daniel Dennett... not sure) in the form of 'Theorist Fictions'; a way to turn subjective reports of experience into objective evidence... the verbal/written/communicated report itself is the evidence. No assumptions are made about the accuracy of their content... whether a person is lying, deluded, telling the truth whatever, but instead the evidential value comes from the behaviourist fact that someone communicated those words and must've had a reason to do so... in other words that much and only that is evident to an objective observer. So if you collate a few thousand Theorist Fictions, on say NDE's or meditative experiences, then you've got some real data to analyse. I would think such a collection would be just as interesting to you and me, but we'd both have very different approaches to how to analyse it. I'm guessing that your analysis would focus mainly on the reported phenomenal content/differences of experiences, looking for patterns there, but from my perspective experience is experience... all of it is amazing but there's nothing more amazing about a lucid dream say, than 'mundane' waking life except for how they're subjectively experienced by the self... they both have qualia so they're both equally amazing from that point of view. My analysis would focus on the fact that, under my theory, everything that is referred to in the document must have a neural representation to be noticed/referred to and associated with in the first place. Therefore without even looking at content... almost as if you replaced every referral to anything with a simple letter or code number... it could treated as something like a map of representations, activations, and their relationships... and thus with enough of them it would be a statistical goldmine of data that could be analysed looking for patterns of known or yet-to-be-explained neural dynamics. So for me, the first port of call is always to look for or propose a known or plausible neural explanation of any reported experience and only if it fails on that account, and looks destined to fail... ie looks like there is no potential whatsoever for it to be reconciled with neural dynamics in the future, would I consider the possibility of there being something else... something other-worldly or 'spiritual'. For instance, you talk about insight mediation and seem to consider it evidence of the spiritual, but to me there's a plausible neural explanation in line with my theory; that insight mediation allows focusing on lower layers of the transformation/abstraction hierarchy due to allowing the higher levels to drift away or die out... so for instance say you have a neural representation of a cube, which for simplicity consists of neural transformations line > square > cube, then the process of meditation... of calming the mind and starving representations of attention... allows the cube representation to deactivate thus allowing the next highest activation to break through into conscious awareness... the square. Thus from that perspective, insight meditation allows subtler and subtler perceptions of the relational structure of the things we experience. It's only a theory of course but the fact that it can even be conceptualised at all in neural... i.e. earthly... terms makes it far more plausible to me than any other worldly explanation, so there's no need to go any further.

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.

Yes but there's no way to join the dots from the outside to confirm any theory because you don't have access to the outside, if there even is an outside   But sure, if it makes you happy, theorise away   ... after all it could be considered like a 'thinking outside the box' puzzle like the one I'm stuck on at the moment in my Christmas present of a calendar of Mensa puzzles    Four boxes of numbers (ie contexts), something connecting them (ie an uber-context) but I have no idea what (and it's only a three out of five difficulty rating but I'm completely stumped). So you can theorise outside the box and if it makes useful predictions about inside the box (in my puzzle's case, what number the ? should be) then that would make it a more valid theory.