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byrnema comments on Hypotheses For Dualism - Less Wrong
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Rubber molecules are springs, approximately, which can be verified experiments.
(Not 'spring' in the sense of a metal coil, but spring in the sense of Hooke's law.)
That is .... ideally. I guess if you examine the details, natural rubber isn't so accurately a Hookean material.
But the point isn't whether I'm an expert in the properties of real rubber (I'm not) but whether 'we' (modern science) understand the deformation of rubber, and we do, especially if we mean for some simplified, idealized concept of rubber. (You can google scholar 'rubber deformation', but already Wikipedia is convincing.) There are definitely boundaries to this understanding -- we don't understand everything about it, but it's much more than just understanding an analogy.
I see. I guess then my question is: why should we think that gravity needs more of an explanation? We can understand material elasticity in terms of their molecular bonding but why should we think there is an equivalent means of explanation for gravity? Maybe there is nothing left to reduce it to. If thats the case then I don't think it makes sense to say we don't understand enough about gravity- we'd understand all that anyone could.