Posted this in the comments to Kripal's blog post:
Thanks for the post, Jeff. Jerry Coyne should be embarrassed to publish such an article. As you point out, anyone who thinks parapsychology experiments always fail is simply not conversant with the literature. In almost any other field of inquiry such ignorant statements would not be taken seriously, and yet, we have academic heavy-weights like Steven Pinker tweeting that Coyne’s post represented “sanity.” Sanity it is not, more like ill-informed invective.
I have a few comments on Coyne’s article. First, his assertion that “when the brain expires, so does consciousness” is beginning to be challenged by EMPRICAL evidence. The evidence in question is a result of Sam Parnia’s AWARE study. It suggests that consciousness is not annihilated during cardiac arrest. The results are under peer review, but publication in a major medical journal is expected later this year.
Coyne does not seem to understand your suggestion about trauma as a catalyst for
robust psychic events. He writes, “And of course Kripal doesn’t explain why those “messages from beyond” have to [italics are Coyne’s] involve trauma.” Either he misreads you, or is deliberately misrepresenting you. As someone who has read your monographs, I find his insinuation that you are clueless about the alleged psychic abilities of mystics, saints, and yogis to be spectacularly ill-informed.
I also don’t think Coyne is aware of how common the experiences you describe are
among the general population. Peter Fenwick’s studies of hospices in England and Holland, for example, suggest that so-called Death-Bed Visions and After Death Communications are actually quite common. Their ontological status notwithstanding, these things do happen, and they happen all the time!
Finally, Coyne seems to be ignorant of the significant minority of philosophers who doubt physicalist accounts of mind. Nagel is far from a voice crying in the wilderness. See, for example, the edited volume “The Waning of Materialism”.