if you make a claim and you're unable or unwilling to back up your claim beyond "it's obvious, isn't it?", then that speaks to the veracity of the claim.
alasdair
This is incorrect.
A claim that doesn't have any evidence to back it up is not therefore incorrect, or less correct.
You have committed a logical error/ fallen prey to a common fallacy.
You don't have to choose to accept the claim, but lack of evidence is not the same thing as lack of correctness.
Psychomimetic is correct when s/he says that some things that are clearly true have no scientific studies to back them up.
You have too much faith in science to explain the world for you, and you therefore don't trust that some things that science cannot explain may also be real.
There are things that happen that science cannot explain. Any good scientist admits this.
Those who get angry and fight are not scientists, but merely converts to the religion of science.
They require explanations for all material phenomena in the realm of science.
Without the backing of a scientific study, they are unable to accept the wisdom that comes from actual experience in the world.
They are blind to major portions of reality.
The limits of their vision are the limits of what has already been proven. (And this is but a small portion of what is real.)
If you mention that other two types of real phenomena to them - those that are not yet proven, and those that will never be proven because they are not provable - they cannot grasp them, or accept them. Their realities are limited to the bare minimum of conclusions that are based on published studies.
I know when I am happy, or angry, or relaxed, or stressed. I do not need science to tell me whether or not it can recognize and evaluate my own direct experience of life.
Those of us with experience with LSD and cannabis know about their relative (dosage-dependent) strength. Just because science cannot reliably distinguish between types of consciousness, just because science cannot accurately measure one's (temporary) distance from consensus reality, doesn't mean that we are incorrect.
I believe that you would be much more successful if you expanded your definition of science from
'work done on chemicals/particles etc. by technicians in lab suits' to
'a philosophy of inquiry into the condition of existence based on the scientific method'.
If you did so, you would see that ignoring common sense and experience is just as dangerous as completely trusting that common sense and experience give the final word.
This conversation is clearly closely linked to that we had in the thread on the 13-year old boy who died after smoking synthetic marijuana through a plastic Pez dispenser.
If you refuse to accept as real conclusions that do not have scientific studies to back them, you will miss generalizations, explanations, and motivations for important phenomena relevant to harm reduction. These generalizations, explanations, and motivations may be employed as part of the scientific method, but if your mind is closed to all explanations save those published in scientific journals, you are not being a responsible scientist, in my opinion.