(therefore without physiology) with a physiology, PLANTS (therefore
inanimate) with animacy, and TOOLS (therefore without biology or
cognition) with biology or cognition. To sum up, religious concepts
invariably include information that is counterintuitive relative to the cat-
egory activated.
Counterintuitiveis a technical term here. It does not mean strange,
inexplicable, funny, exceptional or extraordinary. What is counterintu-
itive here is not even necessarily surprising. That is, if you have the con-
cept of cologne-drinking, invisible persons, and if everyone around you
talks about these visitors, you cannot really register puzzlement or [65]
astonishment every single time it is mentioned. It becomes part of your
familiar world that there are invisible persons around who drink
cologne. In the same way, Christians and Muslims are not surprised
every time someone mentions the possibility that an omnipotent agent
is watching them. This is completely familiar. But these concepts are
still counterintuitive in the precise sense used here, namely "including
information contradicting some information provided by ontological
categories." I will show in another chapter how we detect what informa-
tion is provided by these categories. For the time being, we must just
remember that the ordinary sense of the term counterintuitivemay be
misleading. (The neologism counterontologicalmight be a better choice.)
Counterintuitive biologyTo illustrate how these rather dry formulae correspond to actual con-
cepts, let me start with counterintuitive biological features. Our men-
tal encyclopedia specifies that objects in some ontological categories
(ANIMAL,PERSON,PLANT) have biological properties. So a simple viola-
tion of expectations occurs when we attribute physiological or other
biological processes to a category that does not intuitively include a
biology. The Aymara people, a community of the Andes, describe a
particular mountain as a live body, with a trunk, a head, legs and arms.
The mountain is also said to have physiological properties; it "bleeds"
for instance and also "feeds" on the meat of sacrificed animals that are
left in particular places. Sacrifices of llamas' hearts or fetuses are made
to the mountain and left in special shrines to feed its body in exchange
for the fertility of the fields. Diviners "pump [sacrificial] blood and fat,
principles of life and energy, to the rest of the mountain's ... body." A
whole domain of ritual acts and explanatory assumptions are based onWHATSUPERNATURALCONCEPTSARELIKE