Is the statement "Claims demand evidence" always true?

[bennyboy]

I'm asking you to distill it down.  Please stop saying you've done it, and humor me by doing it once more, simply and. . . unequivocally.  I'm not saying you haven't, I'm saying I can't find it, and I'd like you to dumb it down for me.

The product of valid arguments supplied with sound propositions.  

Okay, you've taken one step. Why don't you explain what arguments are valid, and what propositions are sound? How do you know which are valid and sound?

I seem to think that, because there is a "real" you, and an avatar in a video game.

This is philosophically debatable. In both cases, it's just an agent of the senses sensing stuff. It's not even that important, because that was one example of context, and there are very many others.

Which would be pointless, because it doesn't make me the ingame avatar in question even if true.  You may be an avatar in your own internal game (I certainly think that you are..but I can't prove that, I can't call it true), but that won't make you the avatar in Skyrim.

See, you've focused on this "I" while skipping the point of that example. You can say, "I" and "my avatar" if you want, it really doesn't matter. Go ahead and say, "In the context defined by pretending an on-screen avatar is a real person, the dragon is real." You can say it's not really really real, but there is the dragon-- smoke coming out of its nose, a jingling sound as it move around atop its pile of gold, etc.

The same goes for dreams. And in dreams, at least sometimes, you are not aware that you're dreaming, and may not even be Khemikal but might think you're some guy named Rhythm for some reason. In that context, you are having a direct subjective experience of "dragon." Now, you can argue it's not really really really real, cuz you know stuff about reality. And I'd respond that you really don't-- unless you have access to a layer of metaphysical truth to which you clearly do not have access.

All of material monism is truth-in-context: "In the context of the Universe as I understand it, bodies in space are drawn together by a mysterious force called 'gravity.'" Or "In the context of a blind organism, color doesn't exist."-- because we know that color is a representative experience, not a physical reality.

Red is a wavelength of light.

The hell it is. You are conflating correlates with their subjective counterparts again. Yes, you can find out that "red" light is x nano-meters wavelength or whatever, but that's only because the human brain processes light of that frequency as red-- just like the flatness of a table or the beauty of a symphony, neither of which exists outside a subjective agent's experience of it. By the time your moment is assembled into a compound idea including redness, it has long (I mean billions and billions of logical operations) ceased to have anything to do with that frequency of light.

This is very easily proven by the fact that we can dream in color. Do you think in any part of the brain whatsoever, there's a record of the "wavelength of light"? No way, dude, I can't imagine even you would say that.

LOL, I actually think that they both represent something real, but that you're horrible at both rational thought and accurate descriptions....leading to posts like these.

That's because you aren't aware that by "rational" you mean "according to my world view," and that your world view is one based on arbitrary assumptions, not rational conclusions based on evidence as you like to claim and apparently to believe. You feel things are a certain way, and so you assert that they are, and beg the question constantly in doing so.

Oh ffs Benny.  "No I'm not, you are!"  It doesn't -matter- whether or not my metaphysical views are right.  I understand that you'd like to bicker about that, and that's fine, but bring something other than sloppy descriptions and equivocations to do so...that's all I ask.  I ask that, because, supposing it were wrong, we won't exactly figure that out by reference to the sorts of things you keep foisting in thread.  We won't figure -anything- out that way.  That's why I avoid providing you with the means to bicker.  It's uninformative and frustrating.  Here we arrive at the part where I inform you that this defense of equivocation as context, too, is entirely fallacious.  An appeal to hypocrisy.  If it were true, you wouldn't exactly have rescued any statement you made.

You like to take anything that bothers you, and make it sound debatey, by calling it "appeal to X." Well, your appeal to utility is duly noted and discarded as irrelevant to the idea of "truth," under any definition.