Constructivism part 2
Understanding and belief
Given that communication is challenged by constructivism, there is a serious problem: How do we deal with information that cannot be used to construct a mental model, that is information we do not understand?
Understanding is always best and any attempt to improve that is well worth the efforts. Structurally improved explanations, analogies, visualizations, there are many ways to increase understanding. But eventually there will be things we just don't get. Remember that mental models are essential, as it is our only way to deal with life. Not being able to build one stresses us, so an easy way out is intolerance: You can claim things to be invalid you do not understand, there is no problem to be solved and you can go back to the couch watching TV. Works. But you aren't like that, right? You are rational. Your mental models are based on facts. When you are intolerant, you have a solid reason. Sure?
Challenging your tolerance, try this:
Imagine being a different gender and sexual orientation. If you think about it, can you imagine how that would feel? I guess not, because you never felt it. Your nature is different. You cannot see yourself as such, yet obviously your gender is not the only one, so there are valid mental models plain alien to you.
What about being blind? How would your world look like if you never saw anything? The question is already wrong, as the world would not “look”. Blind people do have a mental model of the world, though.
How do you accept what you cannot understand? In the end that asks for believing.
Believing means to trust someone things are as they say, even if you don't understand it at all. Although that does apply to religion, science is really the same. You haven't seen electrons or photons in your life, and assuming you are not a theoretical physicist that has a great model and understands what all the experiments others make tell about reality, you believe them not to lie and that electrons and photons exist. Physicists tell a good story about them, it sounds like it could make sense if you understood it deeply, and it takes away the unknown. When you stand outside in the sun and it feels warm, what's actually happening is that many probability fields emerging from the sun throughout the cosmos until earth, shaped like waves, cause tons of quantized interactions of energy transfer with your body and that warms it. There are no light particles flying from the sun to warm you, or rays or waves, it's just math you are bathing in. And that's not even the craziest thing they tell us, yet there is no protest movement and not even universal ignorance: You listen to a physicist, because they wake your curiosity. Why is a camera lens not entirely sharp? Why does lens bokeh look the way it does and makes such impressive photographs?
In the same manner, why do I believe being queer exists? Just by knowing people that claim to be queer and believing them, because they sound like sane and good persons and I trust them in other matters, so I trust them to tell the truth about them in that aspect as well.
The key to belief is curiosity that meets good, authentic stories, how the experience feels like, how the perception of the world looks like as a whole. A strong belief feels like understanding, like finally you got it, because you have a mental model to predict outcomes of actions, and that is what you as a human are after.
You got to accept that there are many things you just don't understand and never will, yet they exist. Actually you believe a lot and understand very little. Conscious belief is not a pleasant mental model. The benefit of believing is the ability to construct further models from there and accessing conclusions you would have been locked out from otherwise.
When it comes to constructivism, believing is the process of encapsulation, whereas understanding is abstraction. Both are important processes. Being aware of that can be very helpful to stay open minded.
Oh, by the way: You didn't really believe me there is math emerging from the sun warming you, did you? We cannot tell what light really is. Math is just a great mental model to believe in and it could be true – just like reality in total.