We have five senses, and they are what provide us with “information.” From that information we either experience things emotionally or draw conclusions intellectually.

Examples:

1. The intellect only starts working after it “receives” information from the world. I can’t infer one thing from another and draw conclusions if I haven’t heard it or read it.

2. Emotion — a person only experiences after receiving something from the world. I see a beautiful woman, and then a stimulus is created in me.

But the information I receive from the world changes according to the quality of my five senses.
A blind person — does not see (does not receive information through the sense of sight).
A color-blind person — sees one thing.
A person like me — sees colors that a color-blind person does not see.
A person with schizophrenia — sees a different reality (sometimes completely so).

As I said above, my five senses come before intellect and emotion. If the information I receive changes according to the nature of my senses, that means the conclusions will also be different.
More than that — the five senses cannot point to the objective truth of what I see (I see a table, but in fact there are atoms here. Maybe we are all schizophrenic and imagining something that does not exist at all?)

It follows that no intellectual or emotional claim can point to the existence of any truth, because all the information on which I feed may vary and may be mistaken. I will never know. So if I want to clarify whether there is an entity that runs the world, I can’t know that either, since everything is open to doubt.

So I’m left only with existence, and therefore I’m trying to clarify whether one can arrive at there being a root to existence / life (and not arrive there through intellectual understanding, since that is open to doubt). I thought to say that everything included within “life” is considered adapted to it, at least in a general sense. And if life as a whole thinks or feels, that shows that the tools are correct in some way.
That is to say, just as humanity in general experiences and speaks in a shared way, and that points to something true. Of course, one can always challenge that, because it’s not strong enough, in my opinion).

This has nothing to do with schizophrenia. You’re simply troubled by ordinary skeptical questions. Who says that what I experience or think is correct? There is no answer to that, nor could there be one.
But if that is your point of departure, then I don’t understand the rest of what you say. You go on trying, by means of the intellect, to find ways around the intellect? Why would you believe them? And even if you do believe them, who says your beliefs can be trusted?
And all the points you formulated here — after all, you arrived at them with your own intellect.
In short, you need to decide whether you are a skeptic, in which case be silent, or not, in which case there is no problem.

1. The Rabbi links experience to thinking, and then, as I understand it, tries to argue that a person is unable not to think, because even thinking that he is right is itself thinking… And insofar as you do not trust it, you cannot infer anything at all from it. So if you want, by virtue of thought, to deny what the eyes see, that too is a problematic inference. And the proper thing is to remain silent.
But his question, as I understood it (following the second message), was connected only to experience and the thinking derived from it, not to thinking itself, which he is forced by circumstance to trust…
2.
Doesn’t this relate to column 247, “Disagreement Among Colleagues”?
3.
By the way, someone who experiences schizophrenia — I don’t think he has absolutely no trust in his senses; rather, it’s a kind of intermediate reality: he adds interpretations and things onto his senses. The fact is, he was your friend. It’s not totally arbitrary, as someone might claim. So it’s not entirely a counterexample. And it seems to me that it’s already much easier to deal with. And maybe even someone who sees *the complete opposite* is not a counterexample either, but evidence for the philosophers’ pile-up of tricks :).

4. Rabbi, according to your view, how can a person who is schizophrenic, God forbid, or let’s say imagines an eighth sense and everyone tells him it’s imaginary, etc., accept what they say? After all, according to your view he can never be skeptical about himself…
But it does seem that there are people willing to go for psychological treatment, and not only because of social pressure or forced treatment. On the other hand, maybe that’s a sign that they themselves are unsure about it.
But someone who definitely experiences an eighth sense — how could he abandon it? For the sake of discussion, let us assume that on the real level it is indeed a false sense.

The connection to schizophrenia is that it awakened me to the realization that my means of perception are doubtful.
That is exactly the point from which I start — if everything is doubtful, why decide to talk about anything?

And suppose you go ahead and do things the way people do everything else in life, even though in everything one can be doubtful.

But when it comes to things like war in the name of truth, how can you do that? Kill people?
After all, everything begins from doubt.

I thought about it again,
You said: “You’re simply troubled by ordinary skeptical questions. Who says that what I experience or think is correct? There is no answer to that, nor could there be one.”

The definition of “correct” is always relative to the dimension you are in. It’s like saying that the world of imagination is “not real” — that’s a mistake. The world of imagination is not real in the world of external reality, but it is real in the world of imagination.

So if you meant to say that I’m troubled by “whether what I experience or think is correct *objectively*” — then no, I’m not troubled by that. I know that what I experience or think is subjective.

I really will never know what is objectively true, but you sharpened my understanding that it simply doesn’t matter. Because as I said above, “correct” is relative to a particular dimension. And if we add into the equation the subjective tools — namely the five senses — that I have for receiving information from the world, then we are speaking about my plane within the dimension of reality.

Therefore, the fact that there is a way of seeing different from mine does not mean I am wrong. (The fact that in the laboratory they see the table as atoms.) It simply means that I see on one plane (the ordinary human eye), and they see on another plane (the laboratory eye).

So the information is correct on my plane, and since it is my only tool for receiving information, I will choose to use it. And that is the answer.

I really don’t understand what the discussion is about (if there even is one). If you are not doubting, then don’t doubt; and if you are doubting, then doubt (there is no answer to that). That’s all.
As for the question of how a schizophrenic person is supposed to relate to the views of his friends who tell him he is imagining things: I touched on this here in the past regarding the mathematician Nash (in the book/movie A Beautiful Mind). I have no answer beyond what I wrote to you: if he accepts it, he accepts it; and if not, then not. I have never experienced what he experiences, and therefore I do not know what to tell him.

Regarding the doubts, there is an answer to that, as I explained above.
Thanks anyway.