This is pretty much impossible, spunkets. There is no content-neutral education. Supreme Court Justice Scalia was wise enough to note this about public education. There is no content-neutral education. We are human beings and only through analysis do we separate what in real life exists integrally. Your earlier response was good, and I concur with your sentiments about Ridley, that he abuses science and that he misapplies its principles. It is also possible to swing another way, to pretend like Patrick Henry that the principles of science "is what it is." Science, as in physics or biology, is the product of an interaction of human thinking about something else.
If we can fault Ridley for thinking mind is the extension of body, we could also fault (as does general_re) for making body the extension of mind. We rarely want to confess to the same error that we've seen in others. There is no pure science that can be equated with isness. If you do, you collapse the distinction between mind and body, you make them coeval. Raising phenomena to the status of law may be useful, but it is an abuse of reason to equate that law with isness. For science is partial. It cannot be equated with an "is what it is." Sometimes scientific theories mate happily with the things it studies, sometimes not. But they are not one and the same, otherwise the mind loses its object. It's quite possible to come close to objectivity by getting rid of the objects.
Yes, I know. It was just wishful thinking. "There is no pure science that can be equated with isness. If you do, you collapse the distinction between mind and body, you make them coeval. Raising phenomena to the status of law may be useful, but it is an abuse of reason to equate that law with isness. For science is partial. It cannot be equated with an "is what it is." Sometimes scientific theories mate happily with the things it studies, sometimes not. But they are not one and the same, otherwise the mind loses its object. It's quite possible to come close to objectivity by getting rid of the objects."
Science always deals with representations rather than what really is. I can't think of anything in science involves a congruence between representations and reality, rather than what really is. A law in science always refers to something simple and very well defined and that definition always contains representations, not what really is. There's always a congruence between what's held in the mind and the phenominon itself. I don't think there's any loss in objectivity with the use of accurate representations.
As far as the body being an extension of mind. The self is an individual's mind and all that is held in it. Again, I must use representations. All those physical things, such as eyes, legs, noses, ect...are just it's connection to this world. Whether it's for locomotion, or sensory input, or to communicate, they can all be considered as extensions of the mind. The brain is the physical object that operates as the machinery of the mind. If the brain malfunctions, the mind does also. The body is just the connection of the mind to this world. That's just the way I think of it, anything else would be conjecture, but I do think that if one dies the mind also dies, unless it is resurrected and given new machinery(conjecture).