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 par