directed action. But they have great difficulty in representing other
agents' beliefs or objects of attention. This may be caused by the fact
that one of the systems (of intuitive psychology) is not operating, is
not delivering inferences in a format that other systems can handle, or
does not have access to the representations created by the other sys-
tems. Again, it is difficult to judge, in the present state of neuropsy-
chological knowledge, which of these is the case. However, we do
know that the impairment is limited and that it affects only particular
types of inferences in social interaction. People who are mentally
retarded are not autistic: they may have difficulties computing com-
[222] plex social situations, but they are attuned to the social nature of such
situations, they know that other people see the world from different
perspectives, and so on.
To sum up, interaction with other people requires delicate inter-
connection and calibration between different systems that focus on
different aspects of a person. I have described various pathological
conditions in which this breaks down. But there are also objects com-
monly encountered in the world that can put us in such dissociative
states, that is, objects that can trigger incompatible intuitions and
inferences in the different systems.
CORPSES INDUCE DISSOCIATION
Dead bodies are to some extent like metamorphoses; they are coun-
terintuitive, yet real. The difference is that biological metamorphoses
are an amusing but not too consequential part of our natural environ-
ment. Dead bodies, in contrast, are a vastly more important part of
our social environment. They are represented in ways that both war-
rant some common inferences about social interaction and at the
same time contradict these inferences. So they create the kind of dis-
sociation that in other contexts we see in people with brain damage or
other forms of cognitive impairment.
Being faced with a dead person triggers a complex set of inferences
from various systems, and these do not seem to match. The sight of a
dead person certainly activates particular inferences from the animacy
system. When we see dead animals, we have similar intuitions. We
intuitively assume that there is a time at which the animal will cease to
move for good, and that it does not have goals or objects of attention
after that. For persons, the situation is a bit different because the ani-RELIGION EXPLAINED