Updated on Jan 14, 2023 to address comments by kithpendragon, Richard_Kennaway, DonyChristie, Kaj Sotala and others.

Introduction

Here are two reasonable sentences: 

1) “The brain makes predictions.”

2) “Rituals teach us values.”

You will probably grant me that both are trivially true in their weakest form: sure, this happens sometimes. Your friend predicted Trump would get elected; your neighbor learned Christian values by attending mass every Sunday. 

In both cases, this is missing the utter weirdness and significance of taking these sentences seriously.

Predictive processing is what happens when we take “the brain makes predictions”, and make it strong: let’s think of everything the brain does, a galaxy of disjoint phenomena ranging from optical illusions to reflex actions to psychopathology, and try to make sense of it by assuming that (almost) everything is to be understood as prediction.

My hope (here and in years to come) is to do the same with “rituals teach us values”. That is, try to understand everything about rituals, down to the intricacies of why you would burn a cow in Jerusalem and make a cow dung offering in Varanasi, by assuming a strong bijection between ritual and instilling values: (almost) every detail in a ritual serves the purpose of determining the values of human agents, and there is (almost) no other way to do so.^[1]

I want to insist on this last point: If ritual is just an act that means something, why can't you use language to convey that meaning more efficiently? If it exists to evoke emotion or belonging, why don't you simply play music or games? None of these common intuitions about rituals allow us to argue that sacrificing a hundred bulls to Zeus is a reasonable way to achieve any goal at all -- and yet, I don't think that these intuitions are entirely wrong either (contra some theorists who see rituals as purposeless memes optimized for self-perpetuation). Explaining why we are ourselves confused in our explanations is part of what I want to achieve.

First, I want to foreshadow the crux of my argument, so that you have a rough idea of where I am going with this. 

To claim that ritual is the only way of shaping the values of a human agent, I must argue that everything else, especially the non-ritual aspects of everyday communication and education, is unable or disallowed from doing so. I must also argue that ritual has a special trick or loophole that allows it to perform this necessary social function. And I will argue that thinking of the mind as a predictive machine provides a reasonable explanation for both of these facts.

Now, I want to give you short examples of where my intuitions stem from. I then provide the outline of the argument in pseudo-Wittgenstein form: a bunch of short-ish statements that you may find either obvious or ridiculous. Finally, I expand on each of them, and you can choose to skip the parts that are obvious to you.

Two relevant phenomena in brief

1. Animal sacrifice

Up until the 1950s, among the Ainu of Northern Japan and thereabouts, when a mother bear was killed during a hunt, a newborn bear cub could be taken, welcomed to the village, and raised as a child by the wife of the ritual expert (shaman or what have you). Once the bear was one or two years old, the villagers would perform the Iomante, which can be summarized as:
- attach a rope to the bear’s neck and take it out of its cage
- men shoot arrows at the bear, women weep
- men strangle the bear to death
- take dead body of bear to altar
- give gifts to dead bear
- bear’s body is dismembered
- bear’s head brought into the house
- bear’s flesh is boiled and eaten communally
- skinning the head and decorating the skull with gifts.

I hope you will grant me that this is an extremely non-obvious sequence of actions. Most external observers would be drawn to ask "Why, exactly, are you doing this?", and answers given by practitioners of most such rituals are usually confusing or disappointing.

Some rituals of other cultures we can empathize with -- say, various forms of weddings or funerals, even strange ones. Animal sacrifice is one that is profoundly alien to our worldview, yet it happens to be one of the most universal practices in human history. 

This has caused Westerners to come up with all sorts of theories, many of which can be read as "this is connected to a value system": it is a demonstration of equality with or dominion over non-humans, it is an idealization of the hunt, it is a signal that we are willing to go to extreme lengths for our social group etc. Yet none of these statements are, I think, very successful in explaining why you would specifically take a bear, raise it as your own child, kill it gruesomely, eat its boiled flesh, and keep its decorated skull forever in your house with offerings.

2. Ideomotor responses

A simple phenomenon, routinely used in mentalist shows or hypnotherapy, can be described roughly as follows: if I can make you imagine very clearly that your hand is floating up (e.g. attached to balloons), and somehow divert your attention from your current posture, your hand will float up, seemingly of its own accord. 

This is easy to experience, anyone can do it, especially with some guidance; the trickiest part is directing your attention away from the actual state of the world, i.e. where your hand truly is, because acknowledging that actual state prevents the action from happening.

I take this as an elementary example of the contiguity and boundary between belief and action, in perfect agreement with predictive processing's account of what action is: our mind predicts that the world is different from what it actually is, and when given evidence to the contrary, instead of updating the false prediction, it moves our body until the prediction becomes true. To quote from Slate Star Codex^[2]

Under this model, the “prediction” of a movement isn’t just the idle thought that a movement might occur, it’s the actual motor program.

I feel that ideomotor responses are the most concrete, low-level, low-stakes example of a much more general phenomenon: a trick used to transform a prediction (a falsifiable statement about the world) into a goal (a target for what the world should be). The same principle applies from microgoals like "my hand should be raised", all the way to terminal values like "I should strive to become rich/powerful" or "I should devote my life to God/martial prowess".

Hereafter, when I talk about rituals and values, I am trying to draw a red thread connecting ideomotor responses (nothing overtly "ritualized", simply instilling a micro-goal for "involuntary" action) to the Iomante (a highly complex sequence of voluntary actions, presumably instilling terminal values).

Summary of the argument

Track 1: Rituals

1.1 The existence and importance of rituals is universal and cross-cultural. I, an atheist and a professional scientist, spend as much time and effort on them as a Hasidic rabbi or a Tungusic shaman.

1.2. Ritual serves a universal and unique purpose (for individuals & societies), distinct from what can be achieved by any other means. A ritual's form and content are strongly shaped by that purpose. However, neither practitioners nor external scholars seem to agree on a good explanation of what that purpose is (i.e. what ritual does that is unique to it, and that explains the form and content of any concrete ritual as opposed to any other sequence of actions) 

(For instance, practitioners may say of a rite that it exists to honor the ancestors, but that could be achieved in a million different ways; scholars may say it is to create social cohesion, but again, this is not specific to ritual and it doesn’t suffice to explain the diversity and contents of actual rituals.)

1.3. Rituals definitely have something to do with expressing and conferring a sense of reality to what is invisible, e.g. gods, love, money, dead ancestors, justice, social status, nations. But normal language can express the invisible (e.g. I know Australia exists even though I’ve never been there) so rituals must be unique in what kind of invisible things they express.

Track 2: Goals

2.1 To function as an agent, a child must learn both goals (what to desire in life) and means (how to achieve these goals)

2.2 Mundane communication is, by default, interpreted as conveying information about means (e.g. “here is a good place to hunt”).

2.3 Goals cannot be stored and modified in the same way as normal information, otherwise they wouldn’t work as goals (i.e. things we work toward when the current world doesn’t agree with them). A predictive model of the mind suggests that goals have to be write-protected at a very fundamental and systematic level.

2.4 This is a problem for acquiring goals from our social context. What is much easier is learning factually about the goals of other people: our mind is wired to infer hidden causes for all sorts of phenomena, and especially to model other minds. We spend a lot of time inferring the hidden goals of other agents by studying their actions.

2.5 Our mind doesn’t have access to its own hidden goals. It guesses at them by studying our own actions with the same model it has learned to predict other minds. 

This is the loophole: goals must be immutable for an agent to function, but our mind is not an agent; it is perhaps better modelled as an agora of agents pretending that it has a single consistent volition, using external cues at any time to identify the current best model of itself.

Thus we can be misled about our own goals, by a combination of seeing others act, and being made to act ourselves.

(Many manipulation techniques are examples of that, e.g. commitment and consistency biases – if I get you to commit to a small sale, I change (at least temporarily) your belief in how much you wanted to engage in a transaction and I can push for a larger sale.)

Track 3: Rituals and goals

3.1 Ritual is the only way to truly communicate goals, values, and more generally, “invisible” motives for action. A successful ritual's structure and content is strongly constrained by all the information it must impart: a) that one enters a special setting where values are expressed and learned, b) which value is being communicated & which actions this value entails, and c) how it relates to other values (e.g. is it higher or lower in a hierarchy of priority).

3.2 The trick is to perform actions that cannot be explained in any way except by that invisible motive. These actions should not be explainable through other already established motives – they need to be “counter-intuitive” in some sense.

3.3 While counter-intuitive, these actions should not be dismissed as crazy; there should be plenty of signals that they are actually meaningful (though those signals cannot truly convey the meaning itself). Thus, all sorts of rituals employ similar techniques that convey a general sense of meaningfulness, without particular content.

3.4 Furthermore, these actions should be unambiguous about which motive is expressed. Myth is the linguistic content that facilitates the disambiguation of ritual. Situations must be loaded with cultural cues to uniquely identify the motive causing the behavior, removing any conflicting signal 

3.5 A ritual must communicate how that invisible motive relates to and interact with others – is it more important or less, primary or derivative, etc. Some motives are probably established earlier and more easily on the basis of shared experiences (e.g. food, sex); to signal others, we need actions that are in explicit violation of these motives, e.g. killing a cow and not eating it, practicing chastity, and so on. Sacrifice is the main tool for learning and teaching hierarchic relations between invisible values (the lower value is sacrificed for the higher).

3.6 Finally, many of the remaining features of rituals can be explained as tools to make the realness of these motives self-reinforcing. They can be classified in two groups: creation of “visible” proxies (including bodily feelings and emotions) for the “invisible” motives, and derivation of legitimacy from other motives.

Bonus tracks: Extras and arguments against other theories

4.1 Defining ritual

4.2 Rituals as meaningless or as simple social trickery (e.g. signalling games, cohesion building)

Track 1: Rituals

1.1 The existence and importance of rituals is universal and cross-cultural. I, an atheist and a professional scientist, spend as much time and effort on them as a Hasidic rabbi or a Tungusic shaman.

What I want to say here is: I want to make an argument that fully accounts for the weirdness of exotic rituals like bear sacrifice, yet reveals things about me and seemingly non-weird aspects of my own culture, that I could never see if not for the weird, exotic parallels.

When someone wants to prove that modern atheistic society “still has rituals”, they usually point to sport events, weddings, and other activities that share overt features of big religious ceremonies. This argument feels underwhelming to me; despite these examples, I must concede that my life seems much emptier of ceremonial than the life of a Hasidic rabbi.

Yet I believe that my life is as intensely ritual. There are two reasons why this may not be self-evident. First, the type of ritual involved looks very different because it is structured to convey a different set of values. Second, I suspect that most practitioners within a dominant culture feel that their rituals are “obvious” and practical, and more self-consciously “symbolic” rituals (like "I go to mass because I enjoy being part of some ritual, but it should really be taken allegorically") are a minority situation, a product of cultural contact and historical sedimentation, rather than the general rule.

Few authors – Goffman (1967) foremost – seem to acknowledge how much mental and social "ritual work" goes into maintaining consensus on the most basic aspects of our day-to-day reality, and how much cringe and shunning is involved when those daily rituals fail (e.g. due to mental illness or disability).

I want to develop this point in another post; I hope that, by the end of this one, you will at least be willing to consider claims such as “daily activity on social networks is no less ritual (and ritually meaningful) than daily offerings to the household fire by religious Hindu practitioners”.

1.2 Ritual serves a universal and unique purpose (for individuals & societies), distinct from what can be achieved by any other means, and its form & content are strongly shaped by that purpose. However, neither practitioners nor external scholars seem to agree on a good explanation of what that purpose is (i.e. what ritual does that is unique to it, and how to explain the precise form and content of any ritual as opposed to any other sequence of actions)

I want to insist on the fact that ritual is a very, very puzzling phenomenon. Humans of every culture (per 1.1) put a lot of effort into rituals, yet its purpose is not obvious at all – it is even opaque enough that a whole literature (notably Staal) claims that ritual is intrinsically meaningless, perhaps a byproduct of psychological or social quirks, like a society-wide obsessive-compulsive tic. 

Explanations given by in-culture practitioners and out-of-culture scholars usually feel like justifications rather than purposes. When asked why they sacrifice animals, practitioners will say things such as “it is traditional / it is to honor the gods” and outside observers will say things such as “this is a way of establishing status / creating social cohesion”. In both cases, this explains very little about the actual ritual itself. This is like saying that the sentence “pass me the salt” is a means of asserting power over someone – it can do that, but that says very little about the actual meaning of the sentence. 

Furthermore, scholarly theories (when they don't entirely bypass the question of purpose and content to focus on particular features like repetition, sacredness, memorability, time and place...) tend to depict rituals as strange, highly indirect means to an end, requiring a lot of self-deception from practitioners: no matter what they claim, what they are actually doing is sending social signals. No such theory, in my opinion, really explain why any given ritual has the precise structure and contents that it has, and why it couldn't achieve its purpose more straightforwardly.

This whole puzzle, to me, is a small piece of evidence that the content and purpose of a ritual is not something that can be satisfactorily expressed in normal language. When asked for a verbal explanation, practitioners default to what can be thus expressed, namely a justification: an explanation that is not specific to the content of the act, but only to its context (who does it, for whom, when, how…). 

1.3. Rituals definitely have something to do with expressing and conferring a sense of reality to what is invisible, e.g. gods, love, money, dead ancestors, justice, social status, nations. But normal language can express the invisible (e.g. I know Australia exists even though I’ve never been there) so rituals must be unique in what *kind* of invisible things they express.

Rituals plausibly have to do with things that cannot be experienced in an immediate fashion: an agent (like God), a state of being (like being married, adult, or Welsh), a social institution or concept (like justice, love or money). 

Some writers even reverse the claim and suggest that something is made symbolic or sacred by being removed from close scrutiny: “a thing you think is so important that in order to preserve it, you’re willing, consciously or unconsciously, to not examine it.” (borrowing a quote from Sarah Perry)

Perhaps we can simply trust our senses to believe in and interact with “tangible” objects, whereas believing in and interacting with “intangible” things requires extra help -- though it is not obvious why that help should take the form and all the peculiarities of a ritual.

But there are plenty of things in the universe that I know of without having ever experienced directly, such as Bill Gates being very rich, and that sincere belief did not require a ritual. Ritual is not needed to convey an idea; language does it better. We might instead claim that a ritual imparts a deep-seated belief, anchored in faith and emotion rather than reason, but I do not feel that propaganda is typically an instance of ritual.

I feel that whole line of thinking is a category error: ritual does not operate upon knowledge, whether it be rational or irrational (that would make it a subset of language). Instead, it operates upon action, and more specifically, upon goals and motives of action.

The fact that we naturally tend to make this category error is, in fact, quite easy to explain from the perspective of a predictive model of the mind, where knowledge and action differ only by a small but crucial margin.

Track 2: Goals

2.1 To function as an agent, a child must learn both goals (what to desire in life) and means (how to achieve these goals)

The classic model of an agent is an entity that has a defined goal (e.g. a utility function) and set of possible actions, and then tries to compute the best course of action to reach its goal. But the mind is a learning agent, playing a game whose rules it needs to figure out as it goes; it is not clear how much is inbuilt in terms of knowing what is "good" or "bad" for us (or even what that means).

A common position is that individuals or societies come hardwired with some basic, largely unconscious desires or needs – food, identity, social cohesion, biological fitness… – and every other social construct is built on top of those, as a means to achieve them. 

In my opinion, many aspects of human behavior, including rituals, make much more sense if we assume that wants and goals are neither obvious nor hardwired, like impulses, but rather the product of dedicated (if largely unconscious) learning.

Let's imagine, with advocates of predictive processing,^[3] that the mind has a single fundamental purpose and method: making (mostly unconscious) predictions about the future. Through daily experience, it learns the existence of many hidden facts that must be accounted for to make good predictions: objects fall because of gravity, some will break because they are made of fragile materials, people act upon emotions and inner thoughts. No conscious reasoning needs to be involved in any of these predictions - most people throughout history did not have an explicit theory of gravity or emotion. These hidden causes and predictions simply make up the substance of our intuitive experience of reality.

Among other hidden causes, we can learn motives of actions: abstract psychological and social facts – desires, identities, roles, relationships, symbols, preferences and values (including economic, aesthetic or sacred values) – that people employ to (1) parse any concrete situation, and (2) choose what to strive for in that situation. 

My hypothesis is that what we feel as desires or drives is simply how we experience our predictive model of own actions. I wish to stress that, while some may be known explicitly, motives are typically internalized, like grammatical rules of one’s native language, or like intuitive physics. We viscerally expect objects to fall when dropped, because we have developed a deep abstract intuition of gravity; likewise, we experience visceral needs and desires, because we have learned deep abstract intuitions of what causes (our own) behavior.^[2]

But then, there's the question of how exactly we acquire and internalize this model of our own actions and why it can come to involve a whole system of invisible causes, including highly abstract entities or notions (such as gods, justice, responsibility to one's past and future selves...) interacting with each other to finally induce concrete behaviors.

2.2 Mundane communication is, by default, interpreted as conveying information about means (e.g. “here is a good place to hunt”).

Sperber has an interesting theory regarding symbolism, which I want to hijack for my purposes. Symbols are things that make us think of other things – e.g. a smell of lavender brings up associated memories of my grandmother’s house. Sperber claims that any sentence or experience that has a clear semantic content, that contains some sort of factual knowledge about the world, tends to be interpreted at surface level, and does not function well as a symbol. Smells are good for associative memory because they have no interpretable meaning in themselves, they always are a smell of something else.

What I call mundane communication is communication that is non-symbolic, factually interpretable. This includes simple messages like "Here is a good place to hunt", but also more layered ones, e.g. social signals such as saying “My new chauffeur is even lazier than the last three” to broadcast “I am rich” – messages that carry information about social realities such as the intent and status of the speaker, even if their overt meaning is different. This is a bit more subtle, but still factual.

I think this mundane communication is always, effectively, about our means of action, about the state of the world in which we operate, and it can never truly impact our goals.

Simply being told about a desire does not make us experience it, if we haven't already. Telling someone (or oneself) "you should want money" does not impact their goals in the way that telling them "you can feel your tongue" impacts their perception. We easily welcome external information about invisible causes in the universe (e.g. that water is made of molecules that can exhibit various arrangements), but we are much more resistant to changes in what should drive our own actions (e.g. that there exist twelve higher gods to which we must sacrifice weekly).

Deceptively, some practices that look like normal language do appear to have an impact on the value system of a person: manipulation, psychotherapy, "positive thinking", hypnosis, etc. But I contend that they all involve elements that go beyond the usual contents of language, and are more closely associated with ritual.

2.3 Goals cannot be stored and modified in the same way as normal information, otherwise they wouldn’t work as goals (i.e. things we work toward when the start of the world doesn’t agree with them). To motivate action, they must be held beyond refutation. A predictive model of the mind suggests that goals have to be write-protected at a very fundamental and systematic level.

There are good reasons to assume that goals should not be learnable in the same way as knowledge or skills. The most fundamental reason is that learning and acting are somewhat antithetical: one can either modify the world to fit one's expectations (act), or modify one's expectations to fit the world (learn), but not both at the same time.

In other words, we constantly have two pictures of the world going on in our mind: one of the world as it is, adjusted by perception, and one of the world as it should be, that contains all our motives for action, and should not be vulnerable to any information about the current situation. 

To again draw a parallel to Sperber's theory of symbolism, "normal" statements (e.g. the sky is blue) can be learned to be true or false, while "symbolic" statements (e.g. God is love) are axiomatically held to be true, and our understanding of other facts and words, such as love, must adapt to ensure that they remain so. 

Likewise, goals/motives (e.g. I should have money) can only induce action if they are held to be axiomatically true, no matter what external circumstances suggest (e.g. I don't have money - from which I might learn that I should not have money, if my desires adapted automatically to my experience).

In a predictive theory of the mind, the difference between perception and action is both fundamental and very slight: perception is largely about predicting what we will experience, and action is about making a prediction that happens to be wrong and then correcting the world to make it right. Even the most basic and unconscious of actions, such as grasping, is effectively suspension of disbelief, i.e. temporary belief that my hand is in position to grasp despite evidence to the contrary, leading to an adjustment of the body to make this belief come true. 

Clearly, this cannot always hold, since motives have to be learned at some point. But most of our waking time is spent in bursts of "agentic" states, i.e. states in which our behavior can be approximated as that of an agent in the sense of decision theory: an entity with fixed goals/objectives/preferences in the face of changing circumstances. ^[4] Usual language and activities such as games are largely tied to this "agentic" mode of consciousness. They cannot teach us goals, but they can teach us means, i.e. skills and knowledge that allow us to achieve preexisting goals. 

2.4 This is a problem for acquiring goals from our social context. What is much easier is learning factually about the goals of other people: our mind is wired to infer hidden causes for all sorts of phenomena, and especially to model other minds. We spend a lot of time inferring the hidden goals of other agents by studying their actions.

As discussed above, it must be possible to get a general idea of what drives the actions of human agents, even highly abstract causes such as the existence of God or nations or money, by observing others. Social games and stories are a large component of learning how people behave and why.

Yet, this does not explain why the desires observed in others should become our own goals. This evokes Girard’s idea of mimetic desire: that every desire is really aimed, not at its apparent object, but at becoming like others that possess the same desire (and thus, things are made desirable when we see others desiring it). The idea is intriguing, but the explanation feels insufficient. Many things are learned through imitation (even highly complex systems such as language) and this generally seems much less indirect than what is going on with goals: learners are usually able to tell what they are learning; external observers can usually pinpoint what is happening and why, yet in this essay I want to claim that something as strange as ritual is needed to learn goals.

2.5 Our mind doesn’t have access to its own hidden goals. It guesses at them by studying and predicting our own actions with the same model it has learned to predict other minds. 

This is the loophole: goals must be immutable for an agent to function, but our mind is not an agent; it is an agora of agents pretending that it has a single consistent volition, using external cues at any time to identify the current best model of itself.

Thus we can be misled about our own goals, by a combination of seeing others act, and being made to act ourselves.

The situation described above starts to make sense if the mind is fundamentally opaque to itself – if it does not have access to the true reasons of its own decisions, but tries to explain them a posteriori. The evidence in favor of this idea seems rather overwhelming, but I will direct you to authors like Hanson for arguments.

Imagine that our mind uses the same (largely unconscious) model of "what is desirable" to understand the actions of others, to understand our own past actions, and to act in the present. Then, we cannot change our understanding without also changing our desires. Sufficient belief of a certain kind in a motive of action (as an explanation of how people behave in general) leads to behaving in accordance to it.

My current way to model this sleight-of-hand is by invoking multi-agent models of the mind. An agent must have immutable goals to function. Our mind, on the other hand, is probably better modelled not as an agent but an agora of agents with all sorts of different goals (the usual picture is a competition or a market, but why not cooperation and other interactions as well). This agora needs to pretend that it is a single agent in order to actually act sometimes. Thus, mind-wide goals are immutable for the duration of an "agentic burst", for as long as a given agent is singled out at the agora -- which could be the duration of a single gesture for very low-level goals, or the typical time span of a coherent self-image for the most high-level ones. The way that mind-wide goals are changed is not by modifying an agent, but by (1) adding another agent to the agora, typically a predictive model of other people in a certain setting, and (2) providing evidence that this one is a better model of "myself", at least in the current situation.

Then, the best way to acquire and internalize a motive or desire is to see others and oneself act out the consequences of this desire. This underlies two common persuasion techniques:

- Learning from others: conformity bias -- wanting what others want, desiring what others desiring

Example: laugh tracks, giving reality to something intangible ("humor just happened") by showing how people react to it

- Learning from oneself: Commitment bias -- the mind will change its objectives to match its prior course of action

Example: foot in the door, get people to accept a small demand so they will later accept a larger demand

Of course, this is not enough evidence to claim that all our motives are truly and permanently acquired this way -- what these persuasion techniques exploit could be bugs, rather than, as I claim, the fundamental process through which all our goals and drives are created in the first place. 

Instead, many authors like Hanson prefer to imagine a set of true motives, such as biological drives, that is entirely distinct from the set of "polite" explanations we learn to rationalize our behaviors a posteriori. 

I feel this biological reductionism is a bit naive, and I prefer to imagine a self-reinforcing process: among all the hidden causes that our mind learns by experiencing the universe, it also learns a set of things that it believes can drive its own decisions; once learned, these things become actual drivers of new decisions, which lead to further learning, etc.

 Biological or external drivers may jumpstart this process by providing the first sources of behaviors, but from there, the mind constructs an unconscious system of goals and desires for predicting itself, perhaps as complex as its system of language or intuitive physics, which it reinforces every time it acts according to them. This, to me, provides a much better explanation for phenomena as diverse as habits, psychological addiction, ideomotor responses, and rituals.

Track 3: Rituals and goals

3.1 Ritual is the only way to truly communicate goals, values, and more generally, “invisible” motives for action. A successful ritual's structure and content is strongly constrained by all the information it must impart: a) that one enters a special setting where values are expressed and learned, b) which value is being communicated & which actions are entailed by it, and c) how it relates to other values (e.g. is it higher or lower in a hierarchy of priority).

Ritual involves actions that are somehow set apart from normal actions, but what sets them apart, and why, is far from self-evident. I propose that there are two types of actions: those that serve to achieve a purpose, and those that serve to create and maintain a purpose. The latter are my operative definition of ritual, and I think it does a good job at explaining a lot of its peculiarities.

For any ritual, we should be able to take apart its components and identify how they contribute to points a), b) and c) above. I won't do that in detail here, but I will try to give a rough idea of it works.

3.2 Point a) The trick is to perform actions that cannot be explained in any way except by that invisible motive. These actions should not be explainable through other already established motives – they need to be “counter-intuitive” in some sense.

Many actions are obviously mundane or pragmatic: I fill up a glass and bring it to my mouth in order to drink. Being mundane simply means that their motive is easily identified – any ritual action, no matter how strange to an external observer, becomes completely pragmatic in the eye of the practitioner when we have a hard time imagining that someone would not understand the underlying motive (e.g. posting daily on social networks is a mundane activity to us, as mystifying as it could be to a Melanesian hunter).

Many behaviors are ambiguous as to which motive has caused them. To reinforce a motive or teach a new one, we must perform acts in a way that eliminates many other possible explanations from other motives. The more novel, complex or abstract the motive, the more it is necessary to communicate it through unique, otherwise-unexplainable behaviors, in a unique, otherwise-forbidden setting.

I want to take this opportunity to graduate from the idea that some actions or materials simply have obvious "practical value", e.g. that ownership is obviously a practical notion whereas devotion to the divinity is an abstract one. 

I must acknowledge that certain motives are probably established earlier and more easily on the basis of shared experiences (e.g. food, sex). To signal a new motive, we need actions that are in explicit violation of these earlier ones, e.g. killing a cow and not eating it, practicing chastity, and so on, which explains why these are common features of many rituals.

But I believe it is very counter-productive to single out "earlier" motives like food as the "true and natural" drives underlying everything else. This, to me, is like saying that a toddler's intuition of physics, where objects can still vanish mysteriously from existence, is truer than a teenager who assumes vanished objects must still be hidden somewhere. In fact, I think that motives like sex or self-interest need to be reinforced just as much as motives like justice and piety in order to keep influencing behavior throughout one's life.

3.3 While counter-intuitive, these actions should not be dismissed as crazy; there should be plenty of signals that they are actually meaningful (though those signals cannot truly convey the meaning itself). Thus, all sorts of rituals employ similar techniques that convey a general sense of meaningfulness, without particular content.

A ritual as a learning situation will only succeed if the learner can believe that such strange behavior is deeply meaningful, and must not be ignored as madness, or circumscribed as a game. To do so, there are generic tools to give "weight" to any behavior, irrespective of its particular meaning.

These techniques include:

- being done in a special place, by special people,
- using quasi-semantic content, like music or dead languages that sound meaningful without being understandable,
- using sensory stimuli like lighting and contrast, rhythms, loud noises and strong scents.

The world of art uses many classic tools of ritual for signalling meaningfulness. Museographers and gallerists know everything about taking an object and conferring an aura of meaning to it (but no actual specified meaning) by presenting it in a particular way. I will argue elsewhere that this is not just by chance, and that art is actually an important ritual complex in our society.

3.4 Point b) Furthermore, ritual actions should be unambiguous about which motive is expressed. Myth is the linguistic content that facilitates the disambiguation of ritual. Situations must be loaded with cultural cues to uniquely identify the motive causing the behavior, removing any conflicting signal.

Usual language by itself cannot convey the reality and substance of values, but it can help process and organize the substance acquired through ritual.

I suspect that myth is how we prime the learner's mind with the range of possible explanations/desires and their disambiguation cues, while ritual is what makes a particular explanation/desire become real and felt in a particular setting.

Example: the myth of scarcity evokes the possibility of a desire of economic abundance, the rites of commerce and consumption transform this theoretical desire into a visceral one in a market setting (and conversely the myth allows to make sense of the rites a posteriori, stabilizing their structure and content of acts, roles, etc.).

3.5 Point c) A ritual must communicate how that invisible motive relates to and interact with others – is it more important or less, primary or derivative, etc. Sacrifice is the main tool for learning and teaching hierarchic relations between invisible values (the lower value is sacrificed for the higher).

As I suggested in track 2, motives should not be understood as a flat collection of values or statements like “love thy neighbor”, but as a whole system of interacting hidden causes, causes of causes and so on, which mainly differ from mundane knowledge (e.g. the idea that thoughts are caused by brain processes caused by chemistry caused by physics...) by the fact that they are intrinsically write-protected and beyond falsification.

Again, I do not think that the hierarchy of motives is self-evident – e.g. that there are obvious practical motives or biological imperatives that everyone can agree on, and that everything else is a social construction of play pretend to justify acting towards these imperatives. Such “social constructions” can easily lead people to neglect the most basic imperatives, such as survival for soldiers or reproduction for monks.

It seems more useful to think that sacrificing objects of monetary value to God, or renouncing God for the sake of money, are two equally ritual acts: they both serve to establish an order of priority among various sources of value. 

3.6 Finally, many of the remaining peculiarities of rituals can be understood as tools to make these motives self-reinforcing. These tools include repetition, creation of “visible” proxies (including bodily feelings and emotions) for the “invisible” motives, and derivation of legitimacy from other motives.

Our mind keeps changing to fit its current situation; if gravity stopped working (e.g. because we are in a spaceship), we would start to adapt our predictions.

Thus, it is not enough to have "learned a goal" once; the system of hidden motives that underlies that goal must keep on existing actively. An obvious way is to repeat the ritual often, so that a self-sustaining expectation of behavior is created. But this is not the only way that humans have found, and it is perhaps not even sufficient to reliably enshrine a motivational system.

Many authors have noted that rituals are either frequent and low-arousal, like a daily offering or weekly mass (and generally associated with temporary effects, such as being purified), or rare and high-arousal like a wedding (and generally associated with permanent effects, such as being married, that can even require explicit rituals for reversal). This distinction seems important, and deserves to be explained in some way^[5]. The most intuitive option is that intense rituals are needed to create symbols and goals, while boring repetitive ones only serve to reaffirm or circulate them (Collins 2004) – I suspect this is partly true, but a more precise claim could be made.

My hypothesis here is that invisible motives of action can more easily become "stable", self-reinforcing entities in our model of the world, by being anchored in tangible objects and sensations, and by being tied to each other. I think this hypothesis explains many of the peculiar tools employed by rituals that do not seem to serve the other purposes listed above.

One tool is emotion and sensation: singing and dancing, pain and bliss, drugs etc. serve to anchor an abstract desire and give it a real and memorable substrate in bodily feelings. Motives of action can be guessed from studying behaviors, but this inference is deeply noisy (behaviors are ambiguous). From unreliable causes of external perceptions, they can be transformed, through conditioned associations, into reliable causes of internal sensation. This is, effectively, learning to interpret sensations and emotions in a given ritual context as concrete bodily signals to our mind that the motive “exists for real”, viscerally so. "God exists, I felt His presence and love at mass" or "money exists, I felt its presence and love in the supermarket".

The precise nature of the internal sensation is not decisive: a ritual can in principle be equally supported by joy, anger, fear, pain or bliss. Furthermore, emotional arousal itself is not the only possible internal anchor for social facts: other bodily sensations, such as posture (kneeling, sitting in meditation), specific scents or sounds (incense, gongs...) can be used.^[6]

Another tool is legitimacy: complex ritual systems develop when rituals refer to others, e.g. an emotional ritual (painful initiation, joyous celebration) asserts the value of some object or role (deity, priest...), so that further rituals can be emotionless but legitimized by reference to this object or role (e.g. an action performed by the priest is now holy and real, regardless of how any participant feels about it).

Conclusions

At the end of this process, I hope to have provided some clarifications on what could be a strong version of the statement that “rituals teach us values”:

- The term “values” may imply consciously-held ideas, but here I mean something that is often far more visceral, internalized to feel like a self-evident truth. A better term might be “motives of action”, a broad class that is meant to include unconscious desires, explicit goals, moral values, economic preferences, etc.

- I am not thinking of motives of action as a set of independent moral rules, but rather as a whole system of interconnected intuitions about every facet of the universe that can drive us to act, from the most remote “first causes” like God or Progress or the Self, down to minute details such as consumer preferences. Furthermore, I don’t think of this system as an obvious Maslow pyramid of universal “concrete” biological drives and culturally constructed “abstract” goals – all motives are learned or at least reinforced by ritual, symbolism and emotional anchors, with biology giving nudges rather than laws.

- These two points make sense within an account of the mind as a predictive machine that is largely opaque to itself, where motives of action (including our own) are hidden facets of the world that we infer from external evidence such as seeing people (and ourselves) act out specific behaviors. In this account, our own motives differ from other elements of knowledge only by the fact that they are held beyond falsification, like a special subset of our general mental model of the universe (how the world should be, versus how the world is).

- If we take this idea seriously and run with it, rituals start to make sense as the only language in which we can learn what to want – i.e. infer hidden motives, and use them to interpret and generate our own actions. I can now define “ritual” as: experiencing and performing actions that (a) are “counter-intuitive” in the sense that they rule out other established motives, yet come with many indications that these actions are voluntary and meaningful and sane, and (b) clarify how the motive behind these actions fits into a whole system of hidden causes of action (e.g. sacrificing one type of value to elevate another).

- In that respect, many actions are both non-ritual and ritual: they are non-ritual inasmuch as they achieve a goal, and they are ritual inasmuch as they instill or maintain that goal in the motivational system of the agent performing them.

Of course, this is a very rough stab at a much larger project. Besides the fact that I have not substantiated my claims very much, I have left very juicy questions for future essays, for instance:

- Providing a detailed theory of how various components of a ritual serve various roles within the overarching purpose of instilling, delineating and perpetuating a motive for action. And perhaps doing so using predictive processing in more than an extremely loose parallel!

- Demonstrating the pervasiveness of rituals in modern society (and exactly which motives of action they are enshrining), and showing how this is not an empty statement: many of our behaviors are as deeply ritual as those of a Siberian animist or Israelite priest, and the redefinition or extension of what we mean by ritual to account for our own rites can shed light on all other rituals across cultures.

As a closing anecdote, many pieces of my argument have found, at least to my eyes, a surprisingly substantial resonance in non-Western and non-modern theories of ritual, especially the ~2500 year old Indian corpus of Purvamimamsa. There, scholars of Vedic rites discuss the hierarchic structure of actions and purposes within specific rituals, for instance arguing to identify which actions are “ornamental” (I would call them signals of meaningfulness) or subservient to others (indicating the hierarchy of motives). In their discourse, the fact that an action is unexplainable prima facie is one of the best signs that that action truly connects to the heart of what the ritual is meant to achieve. I diverge from these scholars by not believing that their rituals actually yield spiritual or worldly benefits, but if we could find a common language, I think they might tolerate and perhaps clarify some of my more technical hypotheses about how a ritual’s content and structure transform the mind and society of its practitioners.

Bonus tracks

4.1 Defining ritual

For my purposes, the category of rituals should include: goat sacrifices to Azazel, weddings and wakes, initiation rites, carnivals and rave parties... and even less obvious examples (that I will need to defend in a future post) like conspicuous spending of one's first salary or self-displays on social media.

It should not include (though it can look like and borrow some elements of): engineering and craft, games and training, economic activity, human or animal language, mathematics, music, arbitrary examples of social signalling...

Examples on the fence, which I suggest we keep in mind but delay discussing, include: obsessive handwashing, fitness routines, theater, medical and dietary practices…

What the examples I want to include all have in common is that they are recognized as special, important actions. A vague encompassing choice would be to qualify as “ritual” an action (or sequence of actions) that is somehow set apart, and receives more significance and attention than it should, for some value of “should”.

But they vary along many axes:
- socially: some rituals are very private, others very public, restricted or not to specific times and places
- psychologically: some are very emotional, others very boring; they can be positive or negative, spontaneous or rigid...
- most importantly, structurally: all rituals involve distinct materials and sequences of actions, with limited overlap within (and a fortiori between) cultures

One common problem with defining ritual is that its definitions are especially prone to bleeding into adjacent categories (this is far from unusual, but this concept is truly particularly bad that way). Rituals are like games in that they happen in a special space-time, and they have an aspect of teaching; they are unlike games in that they are serious, with heavy consequences outside of their space-time. Rituals are like language and music in that they have meaning, but they are unlike language and music in that the meaning is not about facts or emotions. That has created a lot of confusion in the literature, that I don't want to discuss in detail, but I will at least try to explain why I diverge from a few widespread claims below.

4.2 Rituals as meaningless or as simple social trickery

The extreme diversity of rituals as defined in 4.1 can be explained in at least three ways, all of which are probably true to some extent:

(1) the category of rituals is not consistent, but rather a hodgepodge of unrelated social games, memes, psychological tics, failed attempts at technical solutions (e.g. how to cure a disease or grow a field) etc. lumped together by modern observers.

(2) rituals are largely arbitrary as long as they fulfill some basic requirement (e.g. it doesn't matter whether you sacrifice a goat or sing a carol, as long as it creates social cohesion, sticks in memory or expresses some basic human cognitive ability),

(3) many different rituals exist because they must express many different things of roughly the same kind.

Option 1: The category of rituals is not consistent, but rather a hodgepodge of unrelated cultural memes, psychological tics and failed attempts at technical solutions (e.g. how to cure a disease or get a good harvest), each of them with different reasons for being. 

Against this option, I believe that:

a. There’s a fuzzy but recognizable category of human activities that present a common puzzle: the question of why we do them feels harder to answer than for any other activity. We should be wary of what feels like a “normal justified action”, because that likely shows our own cultural biases (e.g. we tend to think of economic activity as more practical and self-evident than religious activity). But ritual may be special in that all the explanations given by practictioners and observers tend to feel like shallow justifications: they lend themselves remarkably well to distrust from outsiders, and they do not easily account for the precise content of what is happening, or only in convoluted, incomplete and brittle ways.

b. This category is present everywhere, densely represented in the life experience of every human being; it is not an ethnological oddity that only makes sense within a given cultural framework. Something about it can be said at the same level of universality as language, music or thought.

Option 2: Rituals are largely arbitrary as long as they fulfill some basic condition. Ether rituals are “useless” byproducts of cultural and psychological mechanisms, or they are “useful” in a simple, homogeneous way: it might not matter whether you sacrifice a goat or sing a carol, provided it creates social cohesion, satisfies some psychological need, etc. This is where most general theories of ritual end up.

In the “uselessness” viewpoint, rituals are like fashions, trends, memes, or even like obsessive-compulsive behaviors (e.g. compulsive handwashing) having spread from individuals to the whole of society. They are generated for some reasons (e.g. a psychological need to act when powerless, a cognitive mechanism for generating arbitrary symbolism and structure), and enshrined in culture for some reasons (e.g. being particularly memorable ^[3]). Like natural phenomena, they should be understood through the mechanisms of their existence, but they mean nothing beyond themselves. Nothing else would be lost or endangered if rituals were abandoned as soon as they appear.

In the “simple usefulness” viewpoint, rituals serve a purpose beyond themselves, but that purpose is very broad (and usually not specific to rituals either). Thus, they retain a lot of the same arbitrariness. For instance, we can argue that rituals exist to generate social cohesion^[2] : that is one possible and convincing modality, but it does not tell us why rituals achieving that same goal take all sorts of different forms. Likewise, proposing that language evolved among apes in order to negotiate social status is not very helpful if our goal is to understand the sentences "All cats are black" and "Every giraffe should be British" and how they are similar or differ. Unless we can provide a more fine-grained explanation, we automatically assume that these differences are accidental and irrelevant, not really worth understanding.

Option 3: Many different rituals exist because they must express many different things within the same general domain. The idea that each ritual has a specific meaning seems both like the most intuitive at first, and the least evident upon further analysis. Still, I am inclined to believe that this is, by far, the most important of these three options. It is also more “generous” than option 2, which requires a lot of self-deception: saying we do something for one reason, like honoring the gods, when it really is for another, like reinforcing group cohesion. I want to believe that there is something worthwhile in taking rituals at least partially at face value.

A crucial question is then: What is the large set of distinct things, and relations between things, that require many different rituals to be expressed? 

A corollary question that usually fails to be properly asked is: Why do we need rituals, specifically, to express those things? – Don’t we already have more obvious ways of expressing them, such as language?

I feel it is rather convincing that rituals do mean, but not like language means. They are filled with elements that have the appearance of meaning, but are incomplete/unsatisfactory from the point of view of semantics; there is a clear degree of arbitrariness in these elements (e.g. why a cow is used for a certain ritual, and a goat for another), but it feels like they are arbitrary in the way that a word is, not in the way that a fashion trend is – i.e. they behave like stable signifiers, not random memes.

Identifying the “space of meanings” of rituals is a game with the following rules:

- We need to find a realm of things that cannot be expressed by non-ritual language, games, music...

- This realm should not be too specific (e.g. Orthodox theology) or it would not hold across individuals and across cultures. It should also not be too uniform (e.g. sacred vs profane) or it would not distinguish individual rituals.

There is no guarantee that this realm can be identified and expressed at all, or perhaps only in a very abstract way. For language, it seems possible (if philosophically tricky) to somehow relate the meaning of various sentences to various states of reality. But try to play the same game with music: it is often claimed that music expresses emotion, but what theory of emotion would allow to fully distinguish the meaning of two different Bach sonatas? 

So it is a big leap of faith when I claim that we can identify this space of meanings for ritual. Whether you agree with my specific conclusion on what these meanings are, I hope at the very least you will come out of this feeling that the question is worth asking.

Literature

Clark, A. (2015). Surfing uncertainty: Prediction, action, and the embodied mind.
And its Slate Star Codex review

Girard, R. (1961). Deceit, Desire and the Novel.

McCauley, R.N., & Lawson E.T. (2002) Bringing ritual to mind: Psychological foundations of cultural forms.

Perry, S. Various blogposts: What is ritual, Ritual and the consciousness monoculture ...

Simler, K., & Hanson, R. (2017). The elephant in the brain: Hidden motives in everyday life.

Sperber, D. (1975). Rethinking symbolism

Staal, F. (1979). The meaninglessness of ritual. Numen, 26

Whitehouse, H. & Laidlaw, J. (2004). Ritual and memory : toward a comparative anthropology of religion.

Whitehouse, H., & Lanman, J. A. (2014). The ties that bind us: Ritual, fusion, and identification. Current Anthropology, 55(6),

1. ^{^}

   I acknowledge that this kind of exercise must, to some extent, shift the boundaries of what we mean by ritual, value, brain or prediction. I contend it is a good exercise if this shift is highly productive in new insights.

2. ^{^}

   To quote from the Slate Star Codex review of Surfing uncertainty:

   It’s predicting action, which causes the action to happen.

   This part is almost funny. Remember, the brain really hates prediction error and does its best to minimize it. With failed predictions about eg vision, there’s not much you can do except change your models and try to predict better next time. But with predictions about proprioceptive sense data (ie your sense of where your joints are), there’s an easy way to resolve prediction error: just move your joints so they match the prediction. So (and I’m asserting this, but see Chapters 4 and 5 of the book to hear the scientific case for this position) if you want to lift your arm, your brain just predicts really really strongly that your arm has been lifted, and then lets the lower levels’ drive to minimize prediction error do the rest.

   Under this model, the “prediction” of a movement isn’t just the idle thought that a movement might occur, it’s the actual motor program.

   These theories try to be all-encompassing, from simple motor behavior all the way to cognition according to the same principles, so a visceral desire or conscious goal are just extensions of the same idea.

3. ^{^}

   See Clark's book or this review for a start and allow me to play fast and loose with the theory, at least for now!

4. ^{^}

   More precisely, we may be behaving as an agora of agents with distinct goals, but each of these goals is pre-established and inflexible in most normal situations.

5. ^{^}

   A central claim from Whitehouse (1995) to Lawson & McCauley (2002) is that repetition and emotional arousal are two key (and, to some extent, mutually exclusive) strategies for memorization. Lawson & McCauley’s additional idea that emotion creates motivation to transmit the memorized ritual. This emphasis on memorization and transmission is driven by the belief that rituals should be understood mainly as memes, whose usefulness matters less than their ability to replicate and be transmitted accurately (Sperber 1996)

6. ^{^}

   Andy Clark (along with Damasio 1994 among others) suggests that we learn the contours of the self versus others, or inside versus outside (which also grounds the possibility of action, i.e. modifying the outside), to a large extent by appealing to interoception, i.e. the perception of concrete bodily sensations.

   To quote from Kevin Simler (https://meltingasphalt.com/honesty-and-the-human-body/)

   The fact that rituals are embodied serves a number of separate but complementary purposes. (1) It reinforces body-centered neural pathways and suppresses ego-centered ones (the exact opposite of modern classroom-based education). (2) It enables kinesthetic learning by connecting abstract ideas (especially ones of great social significance) to bodily experiences, and vice versa. And (3) it allows members of a group to send honest signals of their commitment, especially when the rituals involve an element of sacrifice (whether time, energy, or material resources).

   I would deemphasize the signalling aspect (3) which is, in my opinion, not the most interesting – again, like the fact that saying “pass me the salt” signals that the speaker can make demands of the listener, it is true in a very broad and tangential sense, it doesn’t capture the particular meaning of this sentence, or here of a ritual.