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Jonathan_Lee comments on Hypotheses For Dualism - Less Wrong
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If someone pushes down in the middle of a sheet of rubber, it isn't mysterious to me why the rubber sheet gets distorted in other places.
Objecting to "non-physical" explanations means objecting to explanations that we don't understand. And yet huge swaths of science are things that we don't understand. Here's an example to distinguish between understanding and mere curve-fitting:
Thermodynamics: You say that heat is actually the kinetic energy of moving particles. Heat is communicated by particles bouncing off other particles and imparting momentum to them. Now you understand heat! You can use this understanding to construct equations that will let you predict how heat flows.
Gravity: You observe a lot of objects rising and falling. You observe the orbits of planets. You take all this data, and find some equations that fit it. You can now predict the influence of gravity. But you don't understand gravity.
Gravity is the macro-scale effect of non-euclidean space Balls rolling in curves on rubber are the macro effect of the rubber not being flat.
Space has a tensor field of the locally correct lorentz transform. Rubber has a vector field of the local gradient. Both are derivatives; the fact they aren't constant implies non-eulcidean geometry
The laplacian (second derivative) of space appears made discontinuous only by mass-energy Ditto rubber.
If it isn't mysterious why rubber sheets get distorted, then it shouldn't be mysterious why space is distorted. Both are minimising the deviation of second derivative from a specified forcing, and have dynamics for the forcing over time. They are identical processes.