Born and raised in Wichita, Kansas, I majored in scenic design for theater at DePaul University’s Theatre School in Chicago before taking a class on comparative religion taught by a Catholic priest who could speak as if he was a believer in every faith he taught.
I was hooked. I wanted to know why and how people base their worldviews, their beliefs in the purpose and meaning of existence, on representations of a mysterious agent and agency they would never witness (in most cases). And I wanted to know why, in many cases, believers would kill and die in seeking the furtherance of those beliefs.
I moved to Texas and attended Texas Christian University after meeting Dr. Ronald Flowers, nationally recognized scholar on the separation of church and state. I became an activist for that cause while studying logic, philosophy of religion, anthropology, mysticism, and theology. Identity and individual freedom became my moral focus in that context.
After graduating I took the leap of continuing into grad school at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom where I studied political and continental philosophy. There I developed an enduring curiosity about the origins of thoughts and beliefs– all thoughts and beliefs. How do minds work? How do brains work?
A lecturer from Aarhus University in Denmark visited, mentioning their launch of an interdisciplinary program incorporating research from neuroscience, anthropology, experimental philosophy, and psychology. I jumped on a plane and received my PhD, for my dissertation entitled The cognitive origins of soul belief: Empathy, responsibility and purity three years later. It earned the following comments from my evaluation committee, which I will forever keep in my (metaphorical) back pocket:
We are impressed with Koch’s dissertation on many different grounds. It is ambitious, scholarly, and especially fluent. Indeed, the writing itself is virtually flawless and the voice is extremely readable. It is unusually well written: clear, direct, and elegant. It is an excellent dissertation that significantly advances a topic that is important. the issues this topic presents still are unresolved and as timely as ever. They are, in our view, central to religious studies and (as part of the study of concepts of agency) also important to cognitive science, as well as of interest to any discipline touching on these fields. A central sub-topic for the dissertation is also a current topic in the Cognitive Science of Religion: What is the place of counterintuition in soul beliefs, especially with regard to the immateriality of souls? The author’s position is clear, innovative, and supported by plausible evidence and arguments and she appears at the forefront of a movement regarding this issue.
Upon returning to America, however, the opportunities for post-doc work were thin to non-existent. I returned to Wichita and pivoted to creating technical content, explaining software to users whose ability to use it depended on my mastering the functionality enough to communicate it to them. That’s where I picked up an interest in the user experience that would carry me through working in healthcare analytics before ending in a layoff– ironically, partially due to the use of AI to create content.
The layoff sparked deep research into two vastly different contexts where AI is deployed: healthcare and immigration enforcement. As the development of AI technology continues, so does my commitment to dissecting its ethical implications.
Read my dissertation: The cognitive origins of soul belief: Empathy, responsibility, and purity
Explore my research: Origins of Invisible Agency
See current work: Ethics and AI
