Minds, bodies, spirits, and gods: Does widespread belief in disembodied beings imply that we are inherent dualists?

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 folkpsychology to persons. The two modes of construal become integrated with development, but their functional specialization and initial independence makes it easy for people of all ages to entertain the notion that minds can exist without bodies. We critically evaluate this position by scrutinizing the evidence that infants and young children view human minds as functionally independent of human bodies, as well as the evidence that supernatural beings are intuitively represented as minds without bodies. We review evidence from experimental psychology on the representation of intentional agents, both natural and supernatural, as well as the historical and ethnographic literatures on representations of disembodied beings in religion. We argue that representations of minds and bodies are differentiated but functionally integrated from the start, and that conceiving of minds without bodies requires cultural learning. Belief in disembodied beings may be prevalent not because we are developmentally predisposed to entertain such beliefs but because such beliefs are counterintuitive and thus preferentially remembered and socially transmitted.