CGSC 1001 Lecture Notes - Lecture 14: Pascal Boyer, Enculturation, Schizotypal Personality Disorder
14 Dec 2018
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Document Summary
We have subsystems for understanding di erent things in the world: contagion, persons, living things, tools, physical objects. We nd fascinating things that belong to one category but have 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. Many religious concepts tend to have minor violations of these ontologies. Our belief that people will still exist when we can no longer perceive them. When someone dies, your person permanence is not shuto right away, leading to beliefs that their minds still exist. Studies show that most people, even self-describes atheists, attribute mental states to the dead. The idea that there is an afterlife is extremely believable. If something is learned, we predict that it gets stronger during enculturation. The opposite happens with attribution mental states to the dead.
