Belief in beings without physical bodies is prevalent in present and past religions, from all-powerful gods to demonic spirits to guardian angels to immortal souls. Many scholars have explained this prevalence by a quirk in how we conceptualize persons, intuitively representing their minds as separable from their bodies. Infants have both a folk psychology (for representing the mental states of intentional agents) and a folk physics (for representing the properties of objects) but are said to apply only folk psychology to persons. The two modes of construal become integrated with development, but their functional specialization and initial independence purportedly make it natural for people of all ages to entertain beliefs in disembodied minds. We critically evaluate this thesis. We integrate studies of both children and adults on representations of intentional agents, both natural and supernatural, beliefs about the afterlife and souls, mind transfer, body duplication, and body transplantation. We show that representations of minds and bodies are integrated from the start, that conceptions of religious beings as disembodied are not evident in early ages but develop slowly, and that early-acquired conceptions of religious beings as embodied are not revised by theological conceptions of such beings as disembodied. We argue that belief in disembodied beings requires cultural learning—a learned dualism. We conclude by suggesting that disembodied beings may be prevalent not because we are developmentally predisposed to entertain them but because they are counterintuitive and thus have a social transmission advantage. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)

中文翻译：

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思想、身体、精神和神：对无实体存在的广泛信仰是否意味着我们是天生的二元论者？

相信没有肉体的存在在现在和过去的宗教中都很普遍，从全能的神到恶魔的灵魂，从守护天使到不朽的灵魂。许多学者通过我们如何概念化人的怪癖来解释这种普遍性，直观地将他们的思想表示为与他们的身体分离。婴儿既有民间心理学（用于表示有意代理人的心理状态），也有民间物理学（用于表示物体的属性），但据说仅将民间心理学应用于人。这两种解释模式与发展融为一体，但据称它们的功能专业化和最初的独立性使各个年龄段的人都可以很自然地在无实体的头脑中接受信仰。我们批判性地评估了这篇论文。我们整合了对儿童和成人的研究，包括自然和超自然的故意代理、关于来世和灵魂的信仰、思想转移、身体复制和身体移植。我们表明，思想和身体的表征从一开始就是整合的，关于无实体的宗教存在的概念在早期并不明显，而是发展缓慢，并且早期获得的关于有实体的宗教存在的概念并没有被这样的神学概念所修正。无形的众生。我们认为，对无实体存在的信仰需要文化学习——一种博学的二元论。最后，我们提出无实体存在的普遍性可能不是因为我们在发育上倾向于招待他们，而是因为它们违反直觉，因此具有社会传播优势。