“The more important lesson, that finding the right guru isn’t really the path to enlightenment, remained elusive.”

implies that certain lessons can’t be learnt. (how come all the comments?)”

I disagree.

There’s a difference between learning from other various people and spending your life jumping from one guru to another, constantly seeking that special being who has all the wisdom of the world and if only you just follow their “way” all will be right in your world.

“The more important lesson, that finding the right guru isn’t really the path to enlightenment, remained elusive.”

implies that certain lessons can’t be learnt. (how come all the comments?)

“Science can’t know everything, but it can study how the physical world behaves, and everything we’ve learned about that behavior leads us to conclude that death is the end of consciousness.”

Sorry Sean, consciousness is not in the same category as Russell’s silly teapot orbiting Saturn, since that is totally ad hoc, does not fit in with physics in any way, and has no conceivable reason (unless tea-loving litterbug aliens passed through). As for consciousness, just think carefully how it could possibly arise from chemicals or electro-chemical impulses. What is the fundamental difference between chemicals in a test-tube and in the brain? If you say ‘organization’, then is a computer conscious and why? Using a term like ‘emergent property’ is more bogus than so-called ‘mysticism’. Consciousness is a tremendous mystery, which does not fit in at all with materialism, and you cannot simply sweep that under the rug. At the same time, you are right to criticize ‘What the Bleep’, because that movie implies that we can wave a magic wand and create ‘our’ reality as the say, and that is patently false. We have no control over the laws of nature.

Also, intelligent design should most certainly not be taught as science, since it totally violates the scientific technique, which is based on correlated observations. It might be the case, however, that some kind of ‘God’ intended the primordial soup to cook up some life through natural processes, but that idea is still outside of the domain of science.

Physicists are extremely brilliant, but most of them need a good philosophy course. It’s not quite as trivial as they suppose.

Finally, an explanation of why physicists are so humble.

Way to go, Sean! This is what we need, scientists who will honestly tell it how it is, and not go in for intellectual multiculturalism ["the question of the so-called truth of statements about the afterlife is not relevant here...we have to be sensitive to the way different cultures have different *discourses* when dealing with the human condition....."] or straight-out bullshit of the non-overlapping magisteria kind….

-cvj