@pathfinder @autistics Interesting! In quite different contexts, I'm starting to realize just how desperately toxic it is to insist on understanding something before acknowledging its existence. It is critically important to be prepared to do the opposite: to accept realities that we cannot presently understand.
My wife and I recently watched "The Most Reluctant Convert", a dramatization of the intellectual journey of C. S. Lewis, ultimately based on his autobiography "Surprised by Joy". Watching the movie, and thinking back to my reading of the book, I realized how, at certain crucial turning points, Lewis's thinking was driven by insistence on accepting only what he found comprehensible. Thus it was that a brilliant and deeply skeptical intellect, who should by rights have been a champion of rationalism, ended up as an apologist for a vile and pernicious body of traditional superstition.
I'm also currently reading Maria Rosa Antognazza's biography of Leibniz, and before that I had read Alexandre Koyré's "From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe". These books shed light on a controversy between two of the greatest intellects in history — Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Isaac Newton — over the nature of gravity. Leibniz, like Descartes before him, insisted on understanding how gravity worked as a condition of accepting its reality — and ended up with some beliefs about the nature of matter that rate as quite bizarre, both by the standards of the 18th century and of the 21st. Newton famously replied "Hypotheses non fingo", usually translated as "I feign no hypotheses". By which he meant: "Observations of heavenly and earthly bodies have revealed certain regularities in their motions which cannot be explained by direct contacts among them, or by any other type of causal interaction that we can presently understand. But I can describe those regularities by laws stated in the language of mathematics. That is the basis of my law of universal gravitation. It would be pointless to add guesses as to why these regularities hold."
In the 20th century, Einstein — building on two and a half centuries of science in the Newtonian tradition — finally did come up with some reasonable hypotheses as to why gravity exists and how it works, in his general theory of relativity. But science would never have gotten to that point if it had insisted on starting out, in the late 17th and early 18th century, by "feigning hypotheses" about the nature of gravity. Newton was right: sometimes you just need to accept and describe first, and explain later.
Now if we could just get social scientists to accept what physicists had to learn centuries ago.
Douglas Edwards 
Kevin Davy
Energetic Nova
sonja