Q&A: Are Letters (At Least for Human Beings) Part of Reality or a Product of the Imagination
Are Letters (At Least for Human Beings) Part of Reality or a Product of the Imagination
Question
Hello Rabbi, a thought occurred to me yesterday, and it goes something like this:
Is the proof that letters are part of reality (at least for human beings) and not a human invention? Dyslexia. More precisely, the fact that dyslexia is not classified as a psychological problem.
It seems to me there are still a few more things to justify before jumping to that conclusion, but in any case, and so as not to ramble, I presented it like this. I’d be glad to know what the Rabbi thinks.
Answer
Could I get a translation into Hebrew?
Discussion on Answer
I don’t understand your assumption. Even if we have a problem with a certain thing and not with all fields, does that mean that this thing is subjective? Why? His abilities are weak in that field. There are people who are weak in physics but excellent in all other fields. Does that mean physics is subjective? I’m really not managing to understand this assumption.
The Rabbi didn’t understand me. I’m doing what you taught so well regarding theological proofs. From the conclusions we discover the assumptions. And that is exactly what I wrote: that at least for us, this is true.
I don’t understand.
It only means that the brain is built to deal with written language, and that this is not an ability that emerges from other general abilities. Therefore it is expressed only in a reading difficulty.
That of course does not prove objectivity. A much larger part of the brain is built to interpret light wavelengths, and our eyes are specialized for that task. Does that mean visual reality is an objective truth? (That is, it is of course a reality—but only in our brain. You could perhaps call it an illusion. In objective reality there seem to be only particles and not any sort of visual scene. If you want to claim that there exists an ideal form of visuality, you’ll have to work harder.)
Sorry, but I don’t understand a thing.
Because we classify the problem as a neurological problem and not a psychological one, that shows that we are identifying here a problem in the brain’s proper functioning, and not, by contrast, some emotional problem related to the subject. From here I learn that at least the creature called human beings sees the written word as an essential tool for interpreting reality (otherwise why say that it is a neurological problem to get confused specifically about the order of letters if he is not also confused about the order of objects arranged in a picture?). By the way, I want to qualify what I claimed and say it this way: if we classified it as a neurological problem, that is a sign that we identify here a problem in understanding reality, but the reverse is not necessarily true. Meaning, if we identified it as a psychological problem, I do not conclude that this is not an area that belongs to reality, but only that there is no proof from here that we are dealing with an aspect that really exists in reality. In other words—it is not evidence that there is no such aspect; it is simply not evidence that there is such an aspect.
P.S. If the person you described had difficulty specifically with electricity, while succeeding in every other area of physics, I would classify it as an emotional problem and not a neurological one, and even so electricity is a field that really exists in reality. So how is what I said still correct? Because the fact that it is an emotional problem only means there is no proof from here that it is a field that exists in reality, but that does not contradict the fact that if I identified it as a neurological problem, then I understand it as an aspect that really exists in reality.
Let me sharpen the point: we did not discover that this is a neurological problem (at least not at the beginning); we tried to prove that this is a neurological problem (and not an emotional one). By contrast, if someone told me that he has a problem where he has to wash his hands all the time, I would try to treat him with various psychological methods (not me personally, because I have no faith in psychologists) before I would even raise the possibility that this is something neurological. With dyslexia there was no such initial assumption at all—so that is a sign that we see this way of understanding reality—namely, the written word—similarly to the eyes, or similarly to the intuition of the principle of causality.
Sorry, I’m going to stop here. I don’t understand a thing.
Let’s say a person told me that he has trouble studying the history of the Middle Ages (and has no problem besides that with any other subject, including the history of other periods)—I would classify that as an emotional / psychological difficulty. From that I understand that we are implicitly assuming that the history of the Middle Ages is a human construction (some internal division of ours that is not necessary to the world). From the fact that we did not classify dyslexia as a problem of that kind, that indicates that this construction of language belongs, for us, to a different category from “human constructions.” That is, just as I interpret / understand reality through colors, sounds, objects, and space, I also do so through the written word. So for us at least, letters are an essential interpretive tool for reality.
I don’t know if I explained myself properly.