Christof Koch is a leading investigator at Seattle’s Allen Institute for Brain Science. He is the author of a number of books about consciousness, including The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can’t Be Computed (MIT Press 2019) and, most recently, Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It (Basic Books 2024).

Michael Egnor is the author, with Denyse O’Leary, of The Immortal Mind: (Worthy 2025).

A debate between the two was hosted by science writer and broadcaster Michael Shermer. It was cordial, and quite relatable.

Here are two highlights that give some sense of the scope and tenor of the debate:

The Girl Who Had Her Sense of Guilt Removed Surgically

Koch: But Mike let’s get down a little bit to fact There’s this [16:28] beautiful case study by one of your colleagues, Itzhak Fried, that I’ve worked with for many years that was published a couple of years ago, about a 14 year-old girl — no previous medical illnesses — who complained when she got 13 or so of intense episodes of feeling guilty. Guilt and some distress, typically in a social situation at school or with friends or with her parents. At some point she got tonic–clonic epileptic seizures and was seen, evaluated by neurologists — and they detected a tumor in the anterior cingulate… underneath the corpus callosum.

And then they did this study where first Itzhak Friedput electrodes in there to monitor and could show that every time you stimulate in the brain of this girl you invoked intense feelings of guilt.

So I grew up as a — disclosure — I grew up as a Roman Catholic and was devout and of course there’s a lot of guilt in Roman, I mean [17:42] it’s sort of a Catholic emotion So here you could invoke guilt.

Furthermore then they did the resection. They removed the tumor and … the girl never had these episodes of guilt again. … So here you have a you have a really nice causal study where a social emotion that is often associated with religious practice — feeling guilty about a sin you committed or something that you did or didn’t do inappropriate — that seems to have a very concrete correlate in a particular brain area of the brain .

You stimulate, you get guilt; you remove the area, the guilt is gone. So why do you need anything else? Well in addition there’s a soul that feels guilt but yeah you can postulate that but that seems completely redundant here. It’s all explained by a particular part of the brain that’s active.

Egnor: Yeah it’s kind of like they like [18:48] they they removed her Catholicism.

Koch: Yeah, I don’t know. I mean this [was] in Israel so presumably she was Jewish.

Egnor: All right [19:00], the Aristotelian way — and I think this is strongly supported by the neuroscience … is that there are five aspects of the soul that are clearly material and are intimately associated with the body and the body is necessary and sufficient for the exercise of these five things. The first thing is homeostasis — maintenance of the heart rate, the breathing, all that stuff. Clearly, that’s controlled by the brain. The second is locomotion. The brain lets me move my limbs. The third is sensation. The brain is obviously involved in my vision, my hearing, my tactile sense.

The fourth is emotion; the brain is obviously involved in emotional states like feelings of guilt and so on. That clearly is related to the brain. You can change your emotional states very easily by having a glass of wine so that obviously changes. And [20:10] the fifth is memory; the brain is clearly involved in memory … So those are material activities of the brain.

So this young girl was obviously having either subclinical seizures or some kind of problem in a region of her cingulate gyri that were causing her to [20:38] have this emotion of guilt. But Aristotle would say … emotion comes from the brain.

Absolutely, the Aristotelian [20:56] view of the intellect and will is different … the capacity to make arguments is an immaterial power of of the human soul It depends on the brain; that is, the brain is necessary ordinarily for the ordinary exercise of our intellect, the kind of thing we’re doing right now If I get hit on the head I’m not going to be as effective on this podcast as if I wasn’t hit on the head But the brain is not sufficient for that. That is, there’s an immaterial aspect of our soul that is responsible for our intellect And the same for will. Will is the appetite that follows on reason And that’s an immaterial aspect of our soul as well.

And there’s actually a ton of neuroscience that I think supports that viewpoint There’s also a ton of logic that supports that viewpoint.

But a Point of Connection Turned Out to Be… Dogs!

Koch: As I mentioned I grew up Catholic. What [1:40:20] always bothered me is, we had dogs. I grew up around dogs and I say, How can it be that these — they belong to our family, these gorgeous creatures — they’re not supposed to go to heaven, only we.

I mean, either we both go to heaven or none of us goes to heaven But the fact that only humans are special and different from all others never struck me as being very very plausible…

Egnor: I mean, I just [1:40:44] lost my little Bichon, whom I loved and…

Koch: Sorry.

Egnor: Yeah, that’s okay. Thank you. And yeah, I thought the same thing. I mean, my understanding of the Catholic view on that is not that they don’t go to heaven but that their souls are not naturally immortal because they don’t have intellect and will. They don’t have immaterial powers of the soul.

So that doesn’t mean that God doesn’t recreate them. So they may still go to heaven but they need to be made de novo. We go to heaven [1:41:13] with the souls we have. 

And interestingly, children who have near-death experiences very commonly will encounter deceased pets on the other side of the tunnel. They don’t encounter deceased people as much, A reason? Because they’re young and the people they know generally haven’t died yet. But they do encounter pets a lot. So I sure hope that the our pets are on the other side of the thing. I’d love to see my little dog again.

Shermer: Everything will be made whole again.

Cross-posted at Mind Matters News.