242 mind
are attention-grabbing or enjoyable; they are certainly found in many aspects
of religious agency, as Stewart Guthrie has demonstrated.^6 Guthrie also ex-
plains such projections do not stem from an urge to make various situations
or occurrences more familiar or more reassuring (which is seldom the result
anyway), but to afford richer inferences about them. Projections of humanlike
features add complexity to the world, which is why they are easily created and
transmitted by human minds.^7
This constant search for relevant inferences may well be the reason why
the anthropomorphism of religious concepts is in fact rather selective. That is,
the domain of intuitions and inferences that is projected isintentional agency,
more frequently and more consistently than any other domain of human char-
acteristics. Besides, intuitions concerning intentional agency are activated not
just when interacting with humans, but also in our dealings with animals.^8
This is why one can postulate an intentional agent around, and run various
inferences about what it can perceive, what its next reactions might be, and so
on, without making it a human person in other respects.^9
This is consistent with developmental and other cognitive evidence con-
cerning the complex intentional psychology or “theory of mind” present in all
normal human minds. This “mind-reading” system is geared to interpreting
other agents’ (or one’s own) behavior, as well as figuring out what their goals,
beliefs, intentions, memories, and inferences are. Rudimentary forms of such
mind-reading capacities appear very early in development,^10 they develop in
fairly similar forms in normal children. Their working is out of reach for con-
scious inspection; only the outcome of their computations is conscious.
A widely accepted evolutionary scenario is that we (higher primates)
evolved more and more complex intentional psychology systems to deal with
social interaction. Having larger groups, more stable interaction, and more
efficient coordination with other agents brings out significant adaptive benefits
for the individual. But these conditions require finer and finer grained descrip-
tions of others’ mental states and behavior. This is why we find, early developed
in most humans, a hypertrophied “theory of mind” that tracks the objects of
other people’s attention, computes their states of minds, predicts their behav-
ior.^11 Another possible account is that at least some aspects of our “theory of
mind” capacities evolved in the context of predator-prey interaction.^12 A height-
ened capacity to remain undetected by either predator or prey, as well as a
better sense of how these other animals detect us, are of obvious adaptive
significance. In the archaeological record, changes toward more flexible hunt-
ing patterns in modern humans suggest a richer, more intentional represen-
tation of the hunted animal.^13
Different subsystems are involved in the representation of agency. A dis-
order like autism stems from an inability to represent other people’s thoughts,
but it does not seem to impair primitive animacy-detection (realizing that some