Publication details
Sensing spirits and other dangerous beings : Why are ghosts inherent to every human culture?
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2021 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | Special anthropomorphic agents – commonly described as “supernatural” beings or entities – are considered anthropologically universal traits of human cultures. But why are they so culturally resilient, existing even in secularized societies? Can be the special agents’ resiliency grounded in their inherited cognitive origin, which needs to interact with cultural learning to create an ecologically relevant agent-related experience? For a long time, the cognitive science of religion overlooked the importance of culture’s influence on personal experiences with special agents. Thanks to the neurocognitive predictive processing theory, we can now better understand how culture can interact with inherited cognitive structures. Therefore, I want to look closer at one specific example of a special agent’s encounter experience – the unpleasant feeling of sensed presence (UFoP). On the example of UFoP, I will closely describe specific cognitive and sociocultural processes whose interaction probably creates the “unseen others” experience. Even though such experiences are often related to ghosts and spirits and grounded in religious beliefs, I want to show that they can appear independently in various sociocultural contexts. Therefore, belief in ghosts and spirits is unlikely to disappear even in secular societies. |
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