But I don't "feel" that this is a cognitive tool. True, I understand that a significant part of my understandings would not be valid were it not for the approach you present.
But in the end, if I don't feel that this is a kind of cognition, isn't it preferable to assume that indeed that is not the case? I mean even at the cost of giving up some of our conclusions.
What does the Rabbi think about that? How can thinking be turned into cognition without a prior sense of the ideas of cognition?

What advantage do the senses have as tools of cognition over reason? Seemingly, both the senses and reason are tools of cognition that are conditioned by various a priori items of knowledge, no?

I didn't mean that the senses have greater cognitive ability and power than reason. Besides, each sense differs from the others in a qualitative and essential way, not only quantitatively.

What I meant is that the clear advantage of the five senses over reason and thought is that I feel and experience the senses directly, in an unmediated way, as reflecting and receiving information from the reality external to me. In contrast to reason and thought, which I experience only as an ability to analyze information from the senses, and not as possessing a cognitive tool for an ideal external reality.

P. S.
And that is the question I asked the Rabbi here: is it correct to accept his position when I do not experience in my reason a cognitive power?
As for the advantages and the conclusion of the method as saving the world of science, I do not disagree.
I am asking whether it is right to accept it when we do not feel in our reason that ability.

I have nothing to answer to that. If you think all your feelings are illusions, what do you want me to say? Why would you accept what I say? There is no real way to deal with skepticism.

I didn't understand how you reached that conclusion from what I said.
My claim is exactly the opposite! Because I trust my feelings—for example, that the eyes really do reflect what is happening in the external environment—and I do not feel that the brain itself has cognitive potential, then isn't it worth assuming that indeed the brain has no cognitive potential?!
(even at the cost of giving up some of the conclusions that seem obvious to us.)

By "your feelings" in my words he didn't mean the senses, but everything you feel is true (intuition).

Do you mean the feeling of intuition regarding certain beliefs like analogy, the laws of nature, and so on?
So as is known, intuition is not a 100% reliable tool (we all agree on that), so regarding those things we have not managed to prove, it makes sense to claim that the intuition was mistaken. I am sure that you too often reach that conclusion, that what you felt was right turned out not to be right.

So why should we abandon our other beliefs? It is because we do not have any "intuition" (feeling) that intuition has the power to look and observe outward.
But I am not sure I understood the Rabbi's answer, so I would really be happy if the Rabbi would elaborate a bit more on his short and concise words. It feels to me that we are spinning our wheels because of wording that is too brief for me to get to the bottom of what he means.

Shabbat shalom!
Eli

Do you reject every intuition that you failed to prove? That's ridiculous, since it is impossible to prove anything. On the contrary: true, intuition is not one hundred percent reliable, but in my opinion, in order to reject an intuition you need good evidence (though not a proof in the strict sense).
I don't see what more I can spell out. As far as I'm concerned, an intuition is correct unless there are good arguments or evidence against it.

The problem is that (as the Rabbi also writes explicitly in his book) we have no intuition that "intuition" is a cognitive tool. Rather, we grasp it as a purely intellectual tool.
Certainly not as a sense that sees ideas in a Platonic world through "transparent" objects.

So I do not understand which intuition I am rejecting here. If anything, I am being completely coherent in my approach.

Could we get a bit more detail about what you call "cognition" and what you call "thinking"? (I understood that this is one of the main arguments in your books, and I'm not sure I understand what it means.)
I assume that "thinking" here also does not refer to a person's feelings/desires, which are subjective, and therefore I don't really understand the distinction between "cognition" and "thinking." After all, cognition of reality is carried out by means of reason and the senses, both of which one can challenge and question the validity of the information they provide, and whether this information (sensory and intellectual alike) has any grip on a real existing reality or not, or whether it is simply our thoughts (there is no existing reality outside us).

Although this cannot be proven, we assume that both the information supplied by the senses and the information supplied by reason have some grip on a real existing reality. So the distinction between "thinking" and "cognition" is not clear to me (even if, for some reason, we have more confidence in seeing sensory information as representing an existing reality than intellectual information).

In a pure sense, the information produced for us by the senses and by reason is "thoughts," and for various reasons (intuition?) we tend to see it as "cognition" of reality. So what, then, is the difference between them?

I've written books about this, so here I can only describe it very briefly.
It is customary to distinguish between thinking and cognition. Cognition is carried out through the senses, and thinking takes the data of cognition and processes it. Alternatively, thinking can generate claims from within itself (like mathematical claims, according to certain interpretations).
The principle of causality, for example, is not drawn from the senses (as David Hume showed). Therefore the conclusion is that it is a product of our thinking. But if indeed it is not a product of the senses, but of thinking that takes place inwardly within me, there is no reason to assume that it corresponds to external reality—that is, that in external reality everything really does have a cause. Therefore Hume argued that the principle of causality is only a form of our way of looking, and not a claim about the world itself.
By contrast, I argue that the distinction between thinking and cognition is not sharp, and therefore we have a faculty of "cognitive thinking." This is cognition not through the senses, but through some intellectual faculty (the "intellect that apprehends," in Maimonides' language, or eidetic seeing in Husserl's language, or auditory thinking in the language of Rabbi HaNazir). My claim is that the principle of causality, and other assumptions of reason as well, are not products of pure thinking but products of cognitive thinking. Therefore this principle and others like it do make a claim about reality, and not only about us and our mode of perceiving reality.

Thanks for the explanation.
What is still not entirely clear to me is why in the first place we should distinguish between sensory and intellectual information. After all, even the data of the senses can be challenged, and one can argue that they do not represent an existing reality (as Descartes did in the Meditations and Russell in The Problems of Philosophy), and in fact it is impossible to prove absolutely the existence of sensory reality. Yet that is what we do, so the data of reason are on the same level as the data of the senses.
In other words, even the data of the senses are thought, which for one reason or another we regard as cognition; by the same token, the data of reason, even if they are thought, can be regarded as cognition. So why separate them?

Is our extra confidence in the data of the senses as opposed to the data of reason merely a gut feeling (intuition)? I think every person has one logical necessity or another whose correctness he is ten times more certain of than the data of the senses. So again, where did the distinction/preference between the data of the senses and the data of reason come from?

And another question: did David Hume and Kant really see all these forms of thinking as merely forms of human thought that have no grounding at all in reality? Or are you explaining that this is their position—that these are not private forms of thought of the individual, but ones that do have grounding in reality?

Correct, and still these are two different mechanisms. People relate to the senses as something that is inherently more reliable, and I am arguing exactly what you are saying.
As far as I understand, both of them saw some of the basic forms of thought as fictions of the intellect—constraints of the way we think. In Kant it is a bit more complex, because there are several different categories.