Abstract:Disembodied beings are prevalent in present and past religions, from disembodied gods to invisible spirits to immortal souls. Many scholars have explained this prevalence in terms of a quirk in how we initially conceptualize intentional agents, representing their minds as functionally independent of their bodies. Infants are claimed to have both a folkpsychology (for representing the mental states of intentional agents) and a folkphysics (for representing the properties of physical objects) but apply only the … Show more
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