(24) Some people are dead but they keep walking around. They cannot
talk any more, and they are not aware of what they are doing.
(36) This mountain over there (thisone, not that one) eats food and
digests it. We give it food sacrifices every now and then, to make
sure it stays in good health.The zombies described in (24) are certainly counterintuitive in that
they are PERSONS but without control of their own actions. (Comatose
or paralyzed people are a different case because they do not engage in
complex series of actions. Zombies go around, carry things, even mur-
der people.) But this counterintuitive element still leaves many aspects [73]
of the PERSONcategory untouched. This is good, because there is a lot
in the person category that tells you what to expect a zombie to be
like. Persons are solid physical objects with a mass. Zombies are like
that too. Persons have a unique location in space and time. Zombies
too are at one place at a time. To turn to more gruesome conjectures,
if you chop off a zombie's arm, the zombie may carry on living but not
the arm! At least you are not given any information to the contrary, so
that is a plausible conjecture. The same goes for the mountain. A
mountain that eats food still has a unique location and a mass, it is still
a solid object. Many inferences that were given for free by the onto-
logical category still apply. This is the gist of a second condition: The
religious concept preserves all the relevant default inferences except the ones
that are explicitly barred by the counterintuitive element.
A good illustration is the familiar concept of ghost or spirit. This
is found more or less the world over, not just in Gothic novels and
Victorian seances. The concept is that of aPERSON who has counter-
intuitive physical properties. Unlike other persons, ghosts can go
through solid objects like walls. But notice that apart from this ability,
ghosts follow very strictly the ordinary intuitive concept of PERSON.
Imagine a ghost suddenly materializes in your home as you are hav-
ing dinner. Startled by this sudden appearance, you drop your spoon
in your plate of soup. In a situation like that, your mind creates a
whole lot of assumptions of which you are not necessarily conscious.
For instance, you assume that the ghost saw you were having dinner,
so she now knowsthat you were eating. Also, the ghost probably heard
the sound of your spoon landing in the soup and can now remember
that you dropped it. You assume that the ghost knows you are here,
since she can seeyou. It would be unsettling but not too surprising if
the ghost asked you whether you were enjoying your dinner. It would
WHATSUPERNATURALCONCEPTSARELIKE