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Vladimir_Nesov 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.
Seems relevant: Feynman on understanding.
What do we mean by "understanding"? Things are always understood in terms of other things already familiar to you. Sometimes the distance between everyday experience and a given idea is too big for immediate explanations, but even otherwise grounding the idea in everyday experience may be cheating, since everyday experience may result from the phenomenon that you are trying to understand this way in the first place!