Gravity Is an Illusion?

Erik Verlinde is a Dutch theoretical physicist and string theorist. He recently was interviewed at Big Think on his theory that gravity is an illusion of some sort. When asked why he thinks this he replied that:

Gravity, of course, is something that many people have already thought about. It’s something that we see every day, and it’s not like it’s not existent in our ordinary life. But what I mean by [saying] that it’s an illusion is that one would eventually like to know where it comes from. [We'd like] an explanation.

Up to now we have, well, descriptions. Newton, of course, is the one famous for first writing down a theory of gravity and he described why apples fall and why the moon goes around the earth using the same basic equation for gravity, but he described it. He had to assume that gravity was there and then had to write down a law that described that when two masses are a certain distance [apart], how they attract each other.

But he was also not very happy with the fact that we should just, well, assume that these things, these objects, attract each other without anything in between. So if there are two masses and empty space, there’s nothing that really happens between them, but still, they’re attracting each other. And he thought that was kind of mysterious and that it was something he would have liked to explain in a better way.

In other words, we can describe how objects behave when they encounter a gravitational field and we can measure the strength of the field, but we don't know what gravity actually is, nor how it's produced, nor how it interacts with matter to cause the effects it does.

Verlinde goes on to discuss Einstein's view that material bodies bend space and time. This is very strange. One of the arguments materialists make against substance dualism is that interaction between two disparate "substances" like mind and matter is incomprehensible. It's therefore less complicated to suppose that there's only a single substance, usually assumed by scientists to be matter, which comprises reality. Mind is just a superfluous posit, the materialist believes, a word we use to describe what the matter in the brain does.

But if matter can bend time don't we face the same problem trying to account for that interaction? How can matter interact with time? How can time bend? What is it that's actually bending? If we accept that matter can curve time then why do we balk at thinking that matter, or brains, can interact with minds? Why do we have a problem thinking that an immaterial mind can cause an effect in a material brain?

Thanks to The Blaze.com for the tip.