supernatural agents. The latter are full-access strategic agents—agents
whom one construes as having access to any piece of information that
is strategic. That is, given a particular situation, and given some infor-
mation that activates one's inference systems, one assumes that the
full-access strategic agent has access to that information.
At this point we might think that we are reading all sorts of compli-
cated thoughts into people's rather simple representation of gods and
ancestors as powerful beings. But that is not the case. The complex
inferences about what is and what is not strategic, whether another
agent represents it or not, etc., are complex only if you try and follow
them explicitly, as steps in a conscious reasoning. But this is not the [159]
way such inferences are produced in human minds.
The distinction between strategic and other information may seem
alien: we never make this distinction explicitly. But that does not mean
we do not make it. On the contrary, social psychologists have gathered
a great deal of evidence to suggest that people in any given situation
are particularly attentive to cues that are relevant to social interaction
and treat these cues differently from other information. That this is
mostly beyond conscious access is not very surprising, because most of
our inference systems work like that. Consider, again, our intuitive
physics and goal-directed motion systems. When you see a dog chas-
ing prey both systems are activated and focus on specific cues. The
"physics system" predicts, for instance, that the dog will hit the fence
if he does not change trajectories; the "goal-directed motion" system
notices that the prey has suddenly changed direction and predicts that
the dog will do the same. Each system carries out its computations to
produce intuitive expectations. But we have no conscious rule that
tells us to separate what is purely mechanical from what is goal-
directed in the situation at hand. In the same way, we need no rule to
tell us to pay special attention to aspects of this situation that may be
relevant to our interaction with the other parties. We do not need this
because our inference systems just track that information and handle it
in a special way.
The assumption that gods and spirits are full-access agents, that they
have access to whatever information is strategic in a particular situation,
is not made explicit and need not be transmitted explicitly. As I said in
the previous chapter, many important aspects of supernatural concepts
are not, strictly speaking, transmitted at all. They are reconstructed by
each individual in the course of acquiring the concept. You are not told
that spirits can perceive what happens, or that they can differentiate
WHYGODS AND SPIRITS?