Christof Koch on NDEs

https://www.scientificamerican.com/artic...the-brain/

I accept the reality of these intensely felt experiences. They are as authentic as any other subjective feeling or perception. As a scientist, however, I operate under the hypothesis that all our thoughts, memories, percepts and experiences are an ineluctable consequence of the natural causal powers of our brain rather than of any supernatural ones. That premise has served science and its handmaiden, technology, extremely well over the past few centuries. Unless there is extraordinary, compelling, objective evidence to the contrary, I see no reason to abandon this assumption.

If that hypothesis is materialism, then I do see evidence to the contrary. Isn't this guy a modern panpsychist anyways? This sounds like something a materialist would say. Perhaps I'm confused. 

He draws comparisons between partial seizures and NDEs, but I'm not sold on this as I don't see much new stuff he brings to the table, especially since these kinds of comparisons have been made before. I'm not fond of his attempt to imply that expectations play a part in NDEs; I'm fairly certain it's been established that they don't necessarily play a part at all in many cases. There are void NDEs after all! And like he said, religious affiliation makes no difference. He casually mentions 'similar experiences' having been reported by users of the usual attributed drugs, but doesn't go on to explain the flaws of these attempted explanations, of which there are several that have been discussed to death. 

Unsuprisingly, there are no mentions of veridical NDEs at all or any that featured particularly anomalous activity; even Pam Reynolds' case goes unmentioned. No mention of Parnia, Holden or the more recent work of the UVA either. It's a pity as I respect Koch, but this article was quite poor IMO. What do you guys think?

https://www.scientificamerican.com/artic...the-brain/




If that hypothesis is materialism, then I do see evidence to the contrary. Isn't this guy a modern panpsychist anyways? This sounds like something a materialist would say. Perhaps I'm confused. 

He draws comparisons between partial seizures and NDEs, but I'm not sold on this as I don't see much new stuff he brings to the table, especially since these kinds of comparisons have been made before. I'm not fond of his attempt to imply that expectations play a part in NDEs; I'm fairly certain it's been established that they don't necessarily play a part at all in many cases. There are void NDEs after all! And like he said, religious affiliation makes no difference. He casually mentions 'similar experiences' having been reported by users of the usual attributed drugs, but doesn't go on to explain the flaws of these attempted explanations, of which there are several that have been discussed to death. 

Unsuprisingly, there are no mentions of veridical NDEs at all or any that featured particularly anomalous activity; even Pam Reynolds' case goes unmentioned. No mention of Parnia, Holden or the more recent work of the UVA either. It's a pity as I respect Koch, but this article was quite poor IMO. What do you guys think?

Koch seems to be obstinately in the materialist camp when it comes to psychic phenomena. He presumably desperately wants to keep his credentials in academia, and a status that gives him a voice in that leading popular scientific magazine Scientific American. That of course requires him to complacently ignore and not even mention the large body of empirical veridical evidence in the areas of NDEs, past life memories of small children, deathbed visions, mediumistic communications, and much more. Presumably he really believes this, that an afterlife and a soul are a priori impossible, so true veridical empirical evidence for an afterlife and the soul are also impossible, mere unscientific anecdotes. 

So much for Koch. I think this qualifies him to be likewise ignored by proponents when it comes to his views on the nature of consciousness, panpsychism and other topics. They aren't interesting - after all, any theories of his must be fatally flawed since he deliberately leaves out a large body of relevant empirical evidence from consideration.

Koch seems to be obstinately in the materialist camp when it comes to psychic phenomena. He presumably desperately wants to keep his credentials in academia, and a status that gives him a voice in that leading popular scientific magazine Scientific American. That of course requires him to complacently ignore and not even mention the large body of empirical veridical evidence in the areas of NDEs, past life memories of small children, deathbed visions, mediumistic communications, and much more. Presumably he really believes this, that an afterlife and a soul are a priori impossible, so true veridical empirical evidence for an afterlife and the soul are also impossible, mere unscientific anecdotes. 

So much for Koch. I think this qualifies him to be likewise ignored by proponents when it comes to his views on the nature of consciousness, panpsychism and other topics. They aren't interesting - after all, any theories of his must be fatally flawed since he deliberately leaves out a large body of relevant empirical evidence from consideration.

Very well put. I actually (very politely) emailed him a few days ago about this subject. There's little chance of getting a reply, of course, even one line such as, ...please don't contact me again, being honest about this subject could actually cause me to lose my funding. That I could understand.

It's disappointing honestly. I'd contacted Ed Kelly several months ago about these kinds of articles, and I'm fairly certain he'd cited Koch as one of the neuroscientists who was more likely to be a proponent of NDEs. It's seems Dr Kelly was mistaken. 

Still, in the same issue, there was an interview with Leslie Kean, including on her book Surviving Death, offering an alternative perspective on NDEs and consciousness. The interviewer, based on his article history, seems to be much more open-minded than Koch-and by that, I mean I don't think he's some stubborn materialist.

[Ninshub]

I seem to remember it's not a new thing about Koch being disappointingly obtuse about NDE research, like his 2012 Skeptiko interview.

YO  - YO - YO......................

The ground is shifting our way!  Moody and Greyson et all deserve full professional and peer-reviewed credit.  I can't recall a peer-reviewed acknowledgement of Psi researchwith this clarity and from someone of stature.  In science - you don't convert anyone - you get cited as a considered source.

I consider Ray Moody a great source, personally.

 NDEs came to the attention of the general public in the last quarter of the 20th century from the work of physicians and psychologists—in particular Raymond Moody, who coined the term “near-death experience” in his 1975 best seller, Life after Life, and Bruce M. Greyson, one of the two researchers on the study mentioned earlier, who also published The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences in 2009. Noticing patterns in what people would share about their near-death stories, these researchers turned a phenomenon once derided as confabulation or dismissed as feverish hallucination (deathbed visions of yore) into a field of empirical study. - C. Koch

YO  - YO - YO......................

The ground is shifting our way!  Moody and Greyson et all deserve full professional and peer-reviewed credit.  I can't recall a peer-reviewed acknowledgement of Psi researchwith this clarity and from someone of stature.  In science - you don't convert anyone - you get cited as a considered source.

I consider Ray Moody a great source, personally.

I do find it ironic how he cites their work, and Jan Holden's, and yet evidently hasn't looked very much into it or anything they've said or done since then. It's remarkable how he claims he can't find sufficient ''extraordinary evidence' after using their works as references.

I do find it ironic how he cites their work, and Jan Holden's, and yet evidently hasn't looked very much into it or anything they've said or done since then. It's remarkable how he claims he can't find sufficient ''extraordinary evidence' after using their works as references.

He's probably gotten a lot of blowback from colleagues and other peers in academia, based on his earlier remarks. Making him fearful of status and funding sources. So the response is to back off from his earlier position without ever acknowledging that earlier position. It never existed.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/artic...the-brain/




If that hypothesis is materialism, then I do see evidence to the contrary. Isn't this guy a modern panpsychist anyways? This sounds like something a materialist would say. Perhaps I'm confused. 

He draws comparisons between partial seizures and NDEs, but I'm not sold on this as I don't see much new stuff he brings to the table, especially since these kinds of comparisons have been made before. I'm not fond of his attempt to imply that expectations play a part in NDEs; I'm fairly certain it's been established that they don't necessarily play a part at all in many cases. There are void NDEs after all! And like he said, religious affiliation makes no difference. He casually mentions 'similar experiences' having been reported by users of the usual attributed drugs, but doesn't go on to explain the flaws of these attempted explanations, of which there are several that have been discussed to death. 

Unsuprisingly, there are no mentions of veridical NDEs at all or any that featured particularly anomalous activity; even Pam Reynolds' case goes unmentioned. No mention of Parnia, Holden or the more recent work of the UVA either. It's a pity as I respect Koch, but this article was quite poor IMO. What do you guys think?

A little information on Christof Koch.
  

"Christof Koch, Ph.D., (is) currently the President and Chief Scientist of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, and is the leader of the MindScope Program as its Chief Scientist..... The MindScope Program seeks to understand how the brain's neural circuits produce the sense of vision.
.................
The Allen Institute Brain Observatory, established under Koch’s leadership, was built to understand how the brain stores, encodes and processes information, using the mouse visual system as a model for understanding. Koch will continue to lead Observatory projects and direct a team of researchers under the MindScope Program.
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The Allen Institute for Brain Science is a division of the Allen Institute (alleninstitute.org), an independent, 501(c)(3) nonprofit medical research organization, and is dedicated to accelerating the understanding of how the human brain works in health and disease."

It's clear that the basic charter for Koch's organization is to explain human consciousness as a function of the brain's processing of information (apparently using a mouse model to start, at least for vision). It certainly looks like it would be extremely unlikely that he would endanger his organization's funding sources (and his job and his academic reputation) by admitting to any doubts of the paradigm that the mind is the brain. It would be biting the hand that feeds him. I would suggest writing him and his ideas off as irrelevant to the search for an understanding of psychic phenomena like NDEs.