1) The document discusses how people's intuitions and beliefs about life, death, and the mind can give rise to concepts like ghosts, gods, and zombies. It explores how combinations of thinking something has a body, is alive, has animacy, or has a mind can produce these concepts. 2) Studies show that people are more likely to attribute mental states to the dead as children than older children, suggesting an innate component. Religions also have prescriptions for dealing with corpses that may arise from contradictory intuitions about dead bodies. 3) Certain psychological conditions like OCD, schizophrenia, and temporal lobe epilepsy are correlated with increased religious beliefs and experiences, and people with these conditions may have been perceived

1. CGSC 1001
Mysteries of the Mind
by Jim Davies
jim@jimdavies.org
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2. Our belief that people still exist when we
can no longer perceive them.
It seems that this does not shut off
immediately when someone dies, leading
to beliefs that their minds still exist.
Studies show that most people, even self-
described atheists, attribute mental states
to the dead.
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3. If something is learned, we predict that it
gets stronger during enculturation.
The opposite happens with attributing
mental states to the dead. Kindergarteners
were more likely to do this than older
children.
This suggests that there is an innate
component. Are we natural dualists?
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4.  We have subsystems for understanding different
things in the world: contagion, persons, living
things, tools, physical objects. These form
“ontologies.”
 We find fascinating things that belong to one
category but have one (or close to one) thing from
another.
• A ghost or god is a person with no body.
• A zombie is a person with no mind.
• A crying statue is an object with one biological property.
 Studies show that people find these one-violation
concepts the most plausible (Barrett)
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5. Jim Davies’s theory of the living dead. How different combinations of intuitions give rise to different person-concepts.
Name body life animacy mind
Nothing 0 0 0 0
Corpses 1 0 0 0
Life forces; qi 0 1 0 0
Humans in vegetative state; sleeping 1 1 0 0
? 0 0 1 0
Zombies; sleepwalkers 1 0 1 0
Evil forces 0 1 1 0
People with severe mental illness 1 1 1 0
Gods; software AIs 0 0 0 1
Situated software AIs 1 0 0 1
Souls 0 1 0 1
People with locked-in syndrome,
tree that can hear conversations
1 1 0 1
Ghosts, spirits of the dead; gods 0 0 1 1
robots 1 0 1 1

6. The old brain is intuitive. We are conscious
of its outputs, not its processing.
People’s implicit reasoning about the
supernatural can be at odds with what they
say they believe. (Subbotsky 1997;2001)
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7.  We are fascinated with corpses because they bring
up intuitions from different systems that are
contradictory. Religion comes in to fill the gaps.
• Our contagion system makes us fear it.
• Our theory of mind make us think the person is still around,
and we might feel love.
• Our biological system tells us it is dead and can’t move.
 As a result, all religions have prescriptions with
what to do with corpses.
 Whereas things like gods or magical objects have
to be, in some sense, invented (either by persons
or by cultures), corpses are universally compelling.
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8.  According to anthropologist Pascal Boyer,
these are common: the body is buried, and
then some time later it is disinterred, and
something else is done.
 Boyer says this is to make sense of our
changing intuitions about the status of the
dead person.
 The first ritual is to remove the body, even
though we believe the person still exists,
 And the second is to mark the change of our
acceptance of the person being gone, and
only existing in our memories.
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9.  Imagine how a monkey’s reputation could be
hurt in a pack. Without language, your
reputation can only be hurt in the minds of
those who directly see you.
 With language, a reputation can spread, and
affect someone for years.
 One theory says that humans evolved to have
beliefs in supernatural agents (such as gods)
to keep us behaving even when nobody’s
watching.
 This requires group selection, which is very
controversial.
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10.  People are more prosocial when primed with
(shown, reminded of) supernatural concepts.
 People think gods have “strategic”
knowledge. Gossip is theorized to have a
similar function, and it also focuses on
strategic knowledge.
 A book that describes this theory in detail
(and is one of the best books I’ve ever read)
is Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind.
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11. In traditional societies, schizotypals and
epileptics are often perceived to be
blessed and set the society’s religious
tone.
• Mania
• Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
• Schizophrenia and schizotypal personality
disorder
• Temporal-lobe epilepsy
• All of the above correlate with religiosity.
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12. Characterized by compulsive rituals:
checking, cleaning, entering and leaving
spaces, hoarding, numbers. Affects about
2% of people.
Hyperreligiosity is a major feature of OCD.
Orthodox religions are replete with food
and body cleansing, repetition of mantras,
numerology, and portal rituals.
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13. Failing to engage in the ritual causes a
feeling of dread in OCD patients.
Participants of religious ritual and OCD
patients alike do not know the mechanism
that connects the ritual to future events.
People with OCD are attracted to religions,
particularly ritualistic ones such as
Catholicism.
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14. Schizotypalism affects 3% of people
Features hallucinations
People who experience delusions tend to
have more religious beliefs
Because schizotypals are likely to be
treated as having been blessed, their
hallucinations can become accepted as
divine truth.
Amped up pattern detection
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15. Experiment in which Skeptics are given l-
dopa
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16. As with most things psychological,
religiosity is about 50% genetic and 50%
environmental.
Specifically,
• Genetics: 47%
• Environment
 Family upbringing: 11%
 Non-family environment: 42%
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17. Unfortunately, human beings constantly
see patterns in truly random processes.
The termite collapse
Fishing people and the lagoon
Karma
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