The Cognitive Science of Ritual: Identity and Transformation

Ritual fundamentally shapes identity by creating memorable episodes that anchor transformative experiences.

### The Cognitive Science of Ritual: Aspirations, Identity, and Transformation
* 🧠 Rationality is fundamentally **aspirational**, requiring **imagination and transformative experiences**, which are often facilitated through **ritual**.
* 🎓 John Veri is teaching a new course on the cognitive science of religion at the University of Toronto, emphasizing the **cognitive dimensions of religion** and the **importance of ritual in understanding identity and transformation**.
* 📚 The course will challenge the Enlightenment's dichotomies, highlighting how modern cognitive science is evolving to recognize **deeper functionalities of ritual** beyond mere superstition.
* 🔍 Rituals are essential for cognitive processes, allowing individuals to **engage in aspirational projects** and transforming their identities through **structured, meaningful practices**.
* 🌍 The erosion of traditional rituals in modern society has led to a rise in civic rituals that often **lack the depth and cognitive satisfaction** of their religious counterparts, resulting in a **search for more meaningful experiences**.
* 🌀 The course will explore how rituals facilitate identity formation by creating **episodic memories that serve as reference points** for personal and collective identity, reinforcing **commitments and shared meanings**.
* 🔗 John Veri argues that rituals are not just events but also involve the **organization of space and time**, which plays a **crucial role in shaping our cognitive processes and social interactions**.
* ✨ As participants engage with the course, they will discover how rituals function as **cognitive tools** that enhance **learning, memory, and identity**, ultimately **enriching their understanding of the human experience**.

a proper part of being rational is the imperative to be more rational, so rationality is an inherently aspirational entity. MH, which means at the heart of rationality is aspiration and transformative experience, which requires ritual because ritual is imaginal serious play. It's just funny because just with that, you completely undermine the entire project of rationalism. That's true. I've never thought about it that because you want to be reasonable. Yes, reason becomes aspirational and therefore has to be. You have to kind of imagine and project yourself into that space before you enter into it because why would you desire it if you couldn't imagine yourself in a future state where you have to move towards that future state through imagination. [Music] This is Jonathan Pedro. Welcome to the symbolic [Applause] World. Hello everyone. I am back with John Veri. You know, we just put out a video with himself and with Jordan Hall and myself having a discussion, but today we are going to talk about John's

upcoming uh class on ritual and cognitive science. I am extremely excited about this. You know, I can't wait to see, and it's actually fitting in some of the work that John is doing all around for the University, but then also other projects. So, John, uh, yeah, I mean, let's let's start and tell us a little bit how this connects to your work in general. Thanks, uh, Jonathan. It's great to be here. Uh, so, uh, in general, uh, I've been doing a lot of work um, on the cognitive science of religion. I'm teaching a new course at the University of Toronto, a fourth-year course, seminar course, you know, high level, on the cognitive science of religion. And uh, because I think the cognitive dimension of religion, how religion involves knowing, cultivating of uh, wisdom, the transformation uh, of the individual in ways that matter to it cognitively um, I think is not adequately well-developed. On the other hand, there's a bunch of books that have been coming out um, there was an initial wave of books that were

rather officially, so the Cog eye of religion is hot right now. Their first initial wave was somewhat hostile to religion, trying to explain it away, right? Um, as you may expect, very much in the Enlightenment framework in mold. Um, and then that has been superseded by a much more because a lot of the original proposals. I mean, to be fair to these individuals, they presented them as scientific hypotheses, you know, that for example, religion is about hyperactive agency detection, right? And that's where it all comes from. And this has been subject to some pretty good criticism and demolish with it. It's good science, right? They present a hypothesis, people have criticized it, the empirical evidence doesn't support it, and so we've moved into a second wave where people are stepping back and trying to say, you know, maybe there's some deeper functionality at here at work. Um, now what happens is, um, they're still largely not paying attention to all the decades of work in the anthropology of religion.

and the philosophy of religion. They're paying a little bit more attention now to the philosophy of religion, which is good. Um, so, but they're not paying attention to sort of broader philosophy. So, for example, in the course I'm teaching at the university, I don't start talking about religion until I think lecture four or five. I spend the first three lectures demolishing the Enlightenment set of presupposed dichotomies, like there's a clean distinction between fact, clean dichotomy between fact and value, is and ought, all this kind of stuff. So, all of this is happening, and I thought, I thought there's all these things, but they're not connecting, right? And they're not connecting, and what I like to do with my work is connect it, and the reason why I think connecting it is important is because I think what's happening right now, um, um, and this what's most calling me most deeply is I think there's an advent of the Sacred happening right now in response to the meaning crisis, and as

you know from a lot of my work. I don't think this is primarily carried by propositional knowing. I think it's carried by procedural, perspectival, and participatory, and the thing where the behavior, like that's a bad term, but the behavior where that um gets most educated and expressed is in ritual, and hence the move to really understanding, really, really trying to come up with a cognitive science of ritual. Because although there's lots of good work um here and there um uh about what might call the cognition in ritual, by and large that aspect, the cognitive dimension uh, how ritual might involve knowing or even give us a kind of metaphysics or a worldview, is not been very deeply discussed um. A lot of other important dimensions, which I readily and will repeatedly admit, are at work in ritual. There's socioeconomic, there's cultural transmission uh, right there, there, there, there's social role taking um, there's obviously symbolic and theological uh aspects of ritual. I am not trying to explain them away or reduce them. I'm

saying all of that's the case, but it seems like to me that what's missing and what even some of those other dimensions need is an account of, well, what's the cognition that's going on in ritual, and how does it, why should it matter to us more? Because part of the what of the course is that we're always ritualistic; we just don't realize that a lot of the rituals are implicit. And by that, I don't mean the Freudian sense that we have neurotic behaviors; I mean we do things that are properly understood as imaginal and inactive and as oriented aspirationally, etc. Yeah, and so one of the things that I've been doing in my work is, in some ways, trying to express or to help people see that there's a, let's say, there's a link, that there's a connection between ritual proper, the way we understand it, either Civic, you know, Civic rituals or Religious rituals, that there's a connection between that and ordered behavior in general, right.

that in order to do anything, you have to order behavior towards a purpose. Uh, and one of the things that distinguishes what we most usually properly call ritual in like in the sense of uh, like raising a flag or something like that, you know, that that now there, there's something that's being engaged in relationship to meaning, which you know, like when you're brushing your teeth, there is meaning there, but it's very, it's very small. It's not about self-understanding and about, and about how we participate with others. Whereas uh, the types of rituals that we usually call rituals, then those have to, that's why they're, they seem different to us, and they engage what you call talk about the kind of imaginal space as well, yeah, the imaginal, or there's overlapping ideas. Again, I'm trying to draw them together. There's the imaginal, uh, there's conceptual metaphor. We talk about, do you see my point? Do you get what I'm saying? There's fictive language. The fence went all the way up the

mountain what like offenses aren't moving uh and then you know the whole mind in motion that you know uh Robert tersi uh you know that I I you know I'm abstracting and I'm moving through I'm moving through my argument and these ideas are closely related to each other uh so the imaginal is and gesture itself is pregnant in our COG and it's not ornamentation. It's an indispensable vehicle by which we think um. There's a really good Anthology that I'm going to make use of in the course uh called thinking through ritual. Great play on words. The thinkers are thinking through ritual, but they're thinking, they're trying, they're arguing about how we think through ritual by means of it and beyond it. Oh, that's I mean that's really interesting. And one of the things that I've noticed, I think we've noticed in let's say in the 20th century uh, there has been I see it in Quebec specifically because this is where I

live. I've seen a desire to ritualize space. Yes, uh, and it's explicit, and there's a sense in which either consciously or unconsciously people seem to understand ritual as superstition, as um, also a kind of tyrannical uh, imposition on reality of identity. And so for that reason, the festivities that my ancestors used to engage with are always kind of being pushed to the side. And now even like, even though we had this nationalistic moment, you know, in the late 20th century, even those national rituals are eroding, you know, everything is kind of eroding um. And so, I mean, I'd like to get your take on that. Like, what do you think? Why do you think that that is a tendency in the modern world to work against ritual, let's say. So part of it, and we'll touch a bit on this in the course, I mean, obviously not as deeply as a fourth-year uh, 36-hour university course, but I mean, we're

caught up in, uh, you know, the dimensions of the Enlightenment dichotomies, um, that, um, really bias how we try and look at the phenomena of ritual or any religious phenomenon, uh, to put, to put it more broadly, um, and so we think, for example, really easy notice the idea that somehow we could peel ritual away and put it, and then leave this purely secular space, presupposes that we can sort of cleanly separate fact and value from each other, right, and the point is, and this isn't from Romanticism or weird spooky, you know, German idealism or something like this, is the guts of, you know, you know, seminal analytic philosophy, you know, wine and puam and Cas, that this distinction has been, to this dichotomy, the pragmatic distinction is useful, but the idea of it being a radical economy, a deep division in reality itself, right, has been completely undermined, and this goes right to the heart of my work, Jonathan, because relevance is, you can't, relevance is simultaneously how we get facts while

we're making evaluations like there. There is no clean you and there, and there is no access to facts without relevance realization. And so, just the idea that somehow we could put aside our valuation projects and then just give this clean secular space where it's just the facts, ma'am, just the facts, as they used to say in Dragnet, is actually a ridiculous presupposition. And then when you, and then the more aggressive side of this is, well, everything outside of this isn't connected to the facts and therefore it must be superstition, things like that. But if you realize, wait, at the core of your cognitive agency is relevance realization, you realize, wait, that whole picture is radically, and it actually doesn't give you a home in which to do rationality or science itself. Yeah, it's funny that that just the facts Dragnet quote. I always fantasized about the person starting to list random facts of what's around that are to the case. It's like, you know, she was wearing pink shoelaces and, and it's

like her fingernails were one centimeter long. It's like, Oh no, no, no. Not just the facts, actually facts that are relevant to the case, ma'. Anyway, so I always thought, but I think that's hilarious. After the success and the great reception of our first fairy tale book, Snow White and the Widow Queen, I am excited to announce the second book in our Tales for Once and Ever series called Jack and the Fallen Giants. You know, as an artist, one of the things that I've always wanted to do as an icon carver, but in anything that I'm involved in, what I care about is making beautiful and amazing things. And I am so excited to see the beautiful book coming out, Jack and the Fallen Giants. It is illustrated by Eloise Sher, a young French artist that has really captured the boisterousness and the joyful tone that made me fall in love with the story of Jack and the Beanstalk when I was a child. And so I cannot wait for you to get your hands on this.

can see a preview on the website. You'll see what it looks like. And in order to do this, we are launching a new store for the symbolic world.com. You can go to store.the symbolic world.com, and there you will find a pre-order for Jack and the Fallen Giants. We decided not to do a Kickstarter this time. The book is printed, it is being sent to our warehouse, and so we're offering it on sale for people who want to get in early. And at the same time, there are also a very limited number of snow white copies still available on the website. And so you can go there, you can get snow white, you can go get copies of Jack, but you can also pre-order God's dog 2, the second book in the Epic story of St. Christopher. We are getting rave reviews coming in from the comic book industry, from the secular comic book industry, where people are really surprised and appreciating both the art and the Epic story that is taking place. We are working right now on the third fairy tale book, which is Rapunzel and the

third God's dog book, and so we're well on our way to continuing to give you the opportunity to participate in these Amazing Stories. So please go to the symbolic World store right now and help us reawaken powerful stories in our culture. One of the things we did see, it seems, in the 20th century, well actually since the Enlightenment, was a desire to replace religious ritual with civic ritual. And so you see that obviously reaching insane levels in the fascist and communist eras where we basically worship the state and everything, every all the spaces are organized. But what's fascinating about that is that that also seems to have eroded, and there's suspicion, right, about celebrating our nation. We see in Canada, we see it almost, I mean especially with the liberal government, this liberal particular liberal government, there's almost like a disdain of our nation and disdain of the ritual spaces and the flag and all these things. Um, and so it's interesting to notice how there this like kind of tumble of

ritual where and now ritual is UND. Some people might appreciate ritual, but they tend to see it as part personal thing, right? So, if you say something like, We do, I do meditation, then that's acceptable. But if you say something like, You know, like we celebrated Canada Day and sang the anthem and everything, then it's a little, then it's suspicious. And so, what do you think, why do you think ritual has been brought to this individual level? Well, I think that's part, uh, and another part of the Enlightenment dimensionality that was the space that was given to us, uh, which is hermetics of suspicion. I mean, and don't forget, uh, you get that radical, uh, totalitarian, vicious, uh, ritual in the French Revolution, the reign of terror, right? So, it's also there at the beginning, so it's there at the beginning, it's there throughout it, and it comes in culmination, um, and so, but what, you know, because of Freud, because of Marx, uh, uh, you know, because of n

you've heard me make this argument before. We've adopted our htics of Suspicion. Now, this goes to a point in the course, uh, but, and you know, and this, the, you know, work I've been doing on the Primacy of beauty. I did a course for the Peterson Academy on that, uh, based on D Schindler's work. You know, the hermetics of Suspicion is based on a reality illusion judgment. Yeah, you say, I'm suspicious that this isn't the reality. There's a hidden motive. There's a secret agenda, right? And that's, you know, and of course, that's sometimes the case. If it wasn't sometimes the case, we would just think the whole proposal was ridiculous, yeah. But from Plato through to maral ponti, people have pointed out, but wait, right? That can't be the, that can't be the pro, the PRI, the foregrounded or prioritized thing, because any Judgment of Illusion depends on a deeper Judgment of realness, and that Judgment of realness cannot itself be subject to the

hermetics of suspicion, or you fall away, and you can't make any judgments at all. And so, where that shows up is people that do this right. And I do think, by the way, when we say appearances disclose rather than deceive about reality, that's beauty in the philosophical sense, not what we currently mean by beauty. Beauty just means sensual gratification, but the philosophical sense of beauty is that. So, I call it the hermeneutics of beauty, and I think part of what ritual is is an enactment of the hermeneutics of beauty, by the way. But what happens is because they don't fall into the abyss. We get the removal of liberal government. We get the removal of the rituals, but we get replacement by other rituals. And we get, right, so we have all the rituals around identity politics, and they are rituals. We tear down statues. We wave flags. We make demonstrations. These are all symbolic acts that everybody knows aren't directly changing anything. What

are they designing to what are they designed to do. They're designed to reorient us. They're designed to point our attention. They're designed to try and give us a different origin, a stand. Where do we stand? What do we stand? Listen to the language. Where do we stand? What do we stand for, right? And what stands out for us? And so, uh, contrary, uh, to, I mean, I'm not disagreeing with you. I think these people think they're getting rid of all those superstitious rituals, but all they do is a ctitious right, uh, replacement, uh, with a whole other set of rituals, deeply, deeply, I would argue, religious rituals. Well, yeah, the flag is the most surprising of all. Think of it like that. It's a, that they keep changing the symbol, of course, because it's a, it's a symbol of, it's a t, it's trying to ritualize fluidity, which is, which is, is like a, it's a, it's a weird, it's like a tantric move or something.

it's like trying to ritualize fluidity. And so, because of it, it always has to change. But every time it changes, it also has to capture, right? So, because you know your identity, let's say, I don't know, the national anthem or your flag, it captures you like, you know, it commands your attention, it asks you to honor it, and to treat it with respect and everything. So now you have this thing which is constantly changing, but he also constantly asking to keep up with it and to give it honor. And so, although it's trying to be a celebration of change and diversity, it's like this weird tyranny of change. It's an odd thing to watch happen. And that goes towards two points. First is that these rituals are ultimately not satisfying, yeah, because they are not for good arguments from cognitive science. They're not deeply, you know, cognitively satisfying, cognitively transformative, um, and um, and

therefore, there's a hunger for more, and that's within a framework. The only way to get the more is to intensify the option. That's an interesting idea. Yeah, yeah. So, there's a constant intensification through the multiplication of the colors and the acceleration of the change, and also the increasing. Right. So, you can see it like we used to have Pride Day, then week, then month, then we were announced it was season, right? J said season. And you can see it's like this constant intensification kind of fills up the space of participation and a radicalization of membership. So, it becomes more and more stringent. So, this is typical ritual. So, this is an anthropological theory of costly marker. So, a lot of rituals are very costly, like they demand a lot from people. And it's like, why? Well, the point is the costly marker is a way of signaling to everybody, You can trust me because I wouldn't otherwise do this.

costly useless behavior other than unless I was deeply, deeply committed. Now we talk about virtue signaling, but right, but, and I get it, some of it is people just playing along because they want a quick ride. There's always a free rider problem, but the radicalization by the True Believers, if I can call them that, is part, again, of a function of ritual, which is costly signaling, which is you can really, really trust me. And the thing is, the costly signaling, it needs to be bound to deeper, deeper real transformations and educations, or else you're really sort of draining people. And so this form, this is, that's one argument. This form of ritualization has a real U possibility of burning out, like burnout. The other is it's propositional tyranny. It's all at the propositional level. There's procedural, but they don't recognize the procedural and the perspectival in the participatory. So

it's still all caught up in the level of beliefs and ideology, and that's ultimately not reaching the meaning. Machinery. That's really interesting because the, I mean, this idea of the costliness of the ritual, it can also help you understand initiation rituals in general. Totally, yeah, exactly. Like, why do, and part of what's happened, you know, and by the way, you know, these critiques I'm making are not, I can equally make critiques of the right and the Trump cult, okay? We, I just did that because you brought up the liberal government, right? This is so, this is in fact, I would argue that what's happening in the culture wars, but culture cultist, right, right, right, um, the culture wars in America are really ritualized religious civil warfare. Yeah, that's what, everything is done, is almost everything now is a ritual. There's actual, no, everybody notices it. There's no content. It's all costly display about your allegiance to a particular religious.

orientation um and so um I I I I want to make it clear that I'm not Landing. I'm I'm not. I'm not trying to make an anti-woke argument, trying to point out that ritual is across uh the political Spectrum, far from it being absent. It has become more pronounced, but I think in a way that is ultimately pathological because it's tied to the htics of Suspicion. It's tied to propositional tyranny. It's tied to the enlightened framework which is actually crumbling. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah um and so the I I imagine one of the things also going to talk about in the class is is related to if talking about cognition, the manner in which ritual participates in identity formation, right, as much at the individual level as at higher level levels or whatever um and so I mean maybe you can say just a little bit about that because obviously that interests interests me, you know, excellent. So one of the things I I can do there, I mean there's a lot that goes on in identity formation, right.

uh and and I'm again only talking about the cognitive dimension of it. I'm going to keep emphasizing that, right, 'cause John RI is not here saying your ritual doesn't have this theological meaning or it doesn't have this particular, you know, uh, existential meaning to you. I am not, not, not saying that, uh, but what I can talk about is, well, one of the things, one important cognitive process in identity formation is what Agnes Card C calls aspiration. Um, this is, uh, like, I want, I want to be other than I am. I want to be a person other than I am. That's a fundamental identity change, and it's based on La Paul's work on transformative experiences. We're going to talk about both of these women's important work in this book. And so, what do you have to do to go through aspiration, to go through transformative experiences? Well, you can't reason your way through it if what you mean by reason is making inferences, making using decision theory. You have to use imaginal

serious play. You have to internalize the sage. You have to internalize the role model. You have to do dialogical practices, right? And this I can all back. I can back this up with, you know, both good theory and good empirical evidence, right? Uh, even some recently done by, well, he was my RA. He's now got his PhD. He's now Dr. Uh, Jinsun Kim. I'll talk a bit about his work, uh, about people doing aspirational projects in the university. Uh, now here's the important point that I'm going to use card to make the desire, okay? So a proper part of being rational is the imperative to be more rational, mhm, right? So rationality is an inherently aspirational entity, MH, which means at the heart of rationality is aspiration and transformative experience, which requires ritual because ritual is imaginal serious play. And this goes to, that's really, it's just funny because just with that, you completely undermine the entire, the entire project of, of

rationalism. You know, because that's true. I never thought about it. That because you want to be reasonable. Yes, reason, reason, reason becomes aspirational and therefore has to be. You have to kind of imagine and project yourself into that space before you enter into it. Because why would you desire it if you couldn't imagine yourself in a future state where you have to move towards that future state through imagination and notice. And not, by the way, notice your gesturing. You're right and you're using perspectival and participatory knowing. Yeah, right. What's it like to be that person? And who will I be? How will what will the agent arena relationship be like when I am that person? And you know, this goes to very formal arguments from people at the core of computational psychology. Like you can't. I won't get into the details. But if I'm in a weaker logic like predicate calculus and I'm trying

to get to a stronger logic, modal logic, and what stronger means. I can grasp more of reality with the logic. I can represent more. There's nothing I can do, and I can run all the possible logical permutations, and I can't get from predicate logic to modal logic. I have to LEAP. Yeah, it's an imaginal leap, and I'm going to. So, those are the kinds of arguments I bring into to show again. John's not. I'm not going to offer flaky Romanticism. I'm going to say, No, no, really nuts and bolts arguments are saying that the imaginal is in the heart of the rational. And then I'll also do the reverse, say, Can we talk about a nonpropositional kind of rationality in ritual? And people like Jennings and Schre and others have been arguing, Yes, we can. One of the things that has always interested me about ritual is in some ways the manner in which ritual marks identity in time and

space yes right. So, one, so what I imagine is a good example is like you study in university, you do your exams, and you have all these exams, and you do all these things, and so now what? Yeah, yeah, like you're done with your studies. What is that? What does that mean? What? What are you? You're a master's now. You're a doctor. And so, it's as if there's an absolute need to mark, yes, the moment in time and with some gesture of recognition to say that now this person is now this person is a police officer. I'm going to give him his badge. I'm going to give him his uniform. And like, and it's a moment of that transforms you from what you were before into what you are. And it seems like that is something that absolutely has to be ritualized, whether it's a signature or a handshake or whatever, like in order to mark. Here's here's why. Yeah, go ahead. Well, here's the cognitive part of why this goes to

recent work I'm doing on Consciousness. So, it's increasingly becoming a plausible proposal that the function of Consciousness evolved to give us episodic memory. So, episodic memory is when you remember episodes. So, you know, you have semantic memory, cats or mammals, or you have procedural memory, I know how to catch a ball, but do you remember what you had for breakfast this morning? And what you'll do is you'll create a little perspective, and you'll run, you'll relive it. You don't just recall it, you relive it. That's episodic memory, and it looks like Consciousness is for that. And then you go, Well, why? I won't get into details because episodic memory allows you to solve problems you can't solve with just your beliefs and your skills. And episodic memory is bound up with narrative, right? Narrative binds procedural to especially think about a story, right? Perspective and participatory knowing, character development, the viewpoint, right? And the

all of that stuff and it binds insight into all of that. There's transformation, so we need narrative and episodic memory, which are actually integral to us, right? Being conscious of the world, and so when we want to be conscious of something to ourselves and other people, we're trying to create an episodic memory for it and a narrative around it. What does ritual do? Ritual takes you out of normal time and says, This is a special episode. It carves it off for you and puts a narrative around it, so it goes deep into episodic memory and therefore becomes something super salient to your consciousness and therefore becomes something that you can take into your autobiography in a powerful way. Yeah, that makes so much sense because then you're like, you meet this girl, you start dating, you start, you know, and then it's like, it's just this flow of things that happen, and then you get married, right? For example, and then everything about the wedding.

takes your relationship and everything about it, symbolizes it, crushes it together, brings everybody you know in one place, makes a ritual where you make promises to each other, which you've already done, like obviously if you're there, you've already made those promises informally before, and you bring it together, and then it crunches things into an, like you said, a hyper episode, yes, that now becomes a marker for my identity going forward because it's something that I can go back to and refer to very easily in my mind. It's like a date, we promised, we did this, it's all together, whereas before it was like, oh, we met this, you know, we started hanging out, we went on a few dates, we, and then it's like, it's all these things that are maybe not as solid, right? And so that's part of a broader thing that conscious seems to be for, it's called chunking. Like when you're studying, if I give you like nine letters and they're just random, and I ask you what, what were

those letters 10 seconds later. I don't know, but if I rearrange them to and they form a word. Yeah, if I rearrange them into words. Cat, pig, dog. You can do it like that. That's right, right? And so that's called chunking, right? And it's a mnemonic strategy. And so doing the ritual is a form of chunking, like you said. You bring it all together, and you make this mnemonic thing that's super salient and stands out. And what you're trying to do is you're trying to create a way in which your relationship to your partner is now literally more memorable to you, yeah? And therefore has you have a greater chance to reinforce your commitment, things like that, yeah? And also, it's a common moment, right? Because let's say, say even with your partner, it's like I fall in love, she falls in love a little later. And each of us has these experiences. That conversation that maybe we had is not that impressive to me, but had Mar, but then we have this one

moment you know where it's like this is this is the moment right we both agree that this is an important moment that it's the moment of promise. It brings it all together that makes sense and so you can you can almost understand any type of identity-forming ritual as and that that would also explain um you know anything like a swearing in a judge for example like all of these things and because the swearing in of the judge also now functions not just for the judge but also for all of us. It's like is he a judge well yeah he's a judge because on this day you know he put his hand on the Bible or whatever and made a promise and got his wig out depending which which world you live in and then it was like you know and then from that on from that on we can all agree because we have an episode that we can refer to that's right and bind uh we all agree that that that's yeah that's a super super interes so think about how this starts it starts to make

sense of the overall proposal in a way. The ritual is like what you do when you're studying. You're trying to make things, you're trying to chunk things together and create episodic memories, right? That are like what are called mnemonic strategies, ways of making things more memorable so you can recall them in a way, right? That gives you much more access to them, perspectival and participatory access, not just propositional. And that, like when you're a good student, right? When you're studying for a test, you try th those are the kinds of strategies that you try and use when you're studying. And so, what this is, a way of knowing, this is a way of knowing, right? It's like if we think that studying is a way of learning and knowing, this is a way of learning and knowing. It's a kind of studying. Now, I don't want to push that analogy too far, but it's a good analogy for what I'm trying to propose is going on with

ritual yeah yeah yeah. I mean, I think that that is super interesting. I cannot wait to take this class. And so, for those who don't know what we're going to do, and this is going to be a new experiment, is that John is going to give the class, and I'm going to follow the class. And at the end, the very last episode, then we'll have a discussion about everything that John talked about. And so, I can't wait. And one of the things we talked about is that this can get complicated, right? Like, this stuff can get very complicated. And John is going to take you through, like, at the beginning, kind of step by step, until by the end of the class, and you'll have all the concepts and all the language needed to be able to interact with this content. And so, I think it's going to be great. And how

let's say like because you're doing this Cog side religion and University and then and this is more specifically uh about ritual. Are you going to talk about ritualization both in the religious and the secular? Like, are you going to I'm going to I'm going to prioritize the religious just I'll make reference to secular examples just to give people a sense of continuity. I want to prioritize the religious precisely because what we were talking about at the beginning, which is this the the sort of the the attempt to marginalize the superstitious uh and and so um uh I'm going to foreground challenging in that right from the very beginning. And so another a question I have because we often think of ritual as event right uh but have you thought about a little bit about the notion of ritual space right also because there seems to be something in the way we organize space with is the same as how we organize it in terms of but that's a neonic strategy so again like okay so I give I give a bunch of

people uh a test no sorry. I give them some material to learn in room A. I bring half of them back two weeks later to remember the material in room A. Half of them back in room B. That's all I've done, nothing else. Which group does better on average? Yeah, it makes sense, right? Because your memory is not just propositional content, it's perspectival, it's participatory. It does what's called transfer appropriate processing. What was your perspective going into this? What kind of processing were you doing and encoding specificity? What state were you in? The brain binds those all together because your brain is actually intelligent, more intelligent than Enlightenment ideology. Your brain is trying to figure out how to make you an agent in the world. Wow, right? What a radical proposal. And so it's understanding what that, you know, I need to constantly try to fit this person to a situation. That's what the learning is for. So organizing space, organizing time are part of this deep mnemonic aspect, which is a cognitive aspect. It's a way of learning.

yeah, but it seems also that the organization of space is, I mean, it sounds can sound obvious when I say, but that it has to do with orientation. Oh, of course, I'm going to talk a lot about orientation. I'm going to talk a lot about orientation and the technical word for pointing extension, um, how we point at things, um, and we forget how unique and embodied this is for human beings. We use pointing in order to learn language, so pointing comes before um, and there's a really good book out on it. I'll make a bit of reference to it in the course um, and orientation um, all of these things come before and make our oppositional knowing possible for us. But as far as we can tell, the only other organisms that get pointing, and that's because we bred them to do this for 50,000 years, are dogs. You try to get any other, we don't see pointing anywhere else, and bgs. Dogs don't point for each other, they only point for us, right um, and so we forget.

how crucial pointing is, and the organizing of time and space, reorients us and gets us to repoint. That part of what it does, I'll get into this in the course, is it decenters us. It gets us to point away from the ego and towards—this is McLuhan's idea about ritual being an act of decentering. It turns the arrow of relevance from this way to that way. Okay, so that's interesting. So basically, let's say if I put up a pole, right? I put up something, and then all of a sudden, that reference point now brings me out of myself, right, into this pole. But what it also does is it makes it possible for others to do the same. That's right. Therefore, it makes it POS—it makes group particip—group action more plausible or easier. You got it, yeah, that makes sense. Then you can understand then from there, once you understand that, then you can understand totemiation. You can understand all kinds of more abstract processes, right.

and it's not silly superstition. Oh, though I mean I'm speaking in a racist fashion CU I consider it racist, so please don't misquote me on this. But you know, oh, the silly savages with their superstitious totem poles, right? Yeah, but alization, like even not just the pole, but in a more abstract way of having something, you know, like in the native culture, like they would have a spirit animal, right? Like spirit, a spirit animal that binds, and they have different tribes that have different animals that bind them. Okay, but I'm GNA talk about, I'm going to talk about that, I'm going to talk about that with work I did with Dan Chappy about the NASA scientist moving the rovers around on Mars. And this isn't my word, Vertesi, who did one of the best ethnographies, said this is her term. They turned the rover into a totem, yeah, and it acted that way. It had to kind of act that way. And I remember that when you

the examples we G they some of the examples almost went into the magical into Spears that are not at all like you could explain it you know the the basic reasonable idea of yeah we work together towards this thing so it kind of acts as a ER for our thoughts and our action but there were there were more there were stranger things going on well they were talking like sympathetic magic these hard-nose engineer yeah very much very much and they were very worried that they were talking that way but they didn't have any because of the Enlightenment economies they didn't have any other language of talking about it and they thought they were trying to be honest to their experience and I give them credit for that and so they were they were forced to use this language and then they were very nervous about using it because right well because of the Enlightenment toomies yeah yeah yeah oh this is going to be great I guys I cannot wait I am really excited about this and we said it is going to start on October 7th that's

right. October 7th at 2 pm. That is when it starts, and then it's going to go for six weeks. We're going to have one week in there that's going to be a break, but it'll go from then. Look down in the description. We'll have a link for you to be able to sign up for the class. And like if you show up live, there'll be a possibility of engaging. There'll be Q&A discussion. We'll have moderators that will be able to manage that. And then on the last day, we'll have our final discussion and engage in Q&A. So this is I'm excited about this. Can't wait to see. Me too. I'm really looking forward to it. I think this topic is pertinent and has the potential to be profound. And I welcome. I actually proposed to you, and you were very generous about it, making this more dialogical, which I really wanted. So thank you for that. All right. And so everybody, show up. I can't

wait to see you and John. Thanks again for all your insight. Well, thank you. I'm looking forward to this.

The Cognitive Science of Ritual - with John Vervaeke

Jonathan Pageau

The Aspirational Nature of Rationality and the Role of Ritual

Rationality is inherently aspirational, requiring imagination and projection into a future state.

John's upcoming class on ritual and cognitive science aims to connect the cognitive dimension of religion with broader philosophical perspectives.

The course will explore the cognition involved in ritual and its importance in addressing the meaning crisis and shaping ordered behavior.

Rituals are distinguished by their engagement with meaning and purpose, contrasting with everyday activities.

The modern world has seen a tendency to ritualize space, but this has led to a push against traditional rituals and national identities.

The separation of fact and value, as well as the idea of a purely secular space, has undermined the importance of rituals in cognitive agency and relevance realization.

Launching the Symbolic World Store and the Role of Rituals

The Symbolic World is launching a new store, offering pre-orders for "Jack and the Fallen Giants" and limited copies of "Snow White.

" The store also features pre-orders for "God's Dog 2" and is working on upcoming fairy tale and epic storybooks.

The discussion highlights the shift of rituals from religious to civic, the erosion of national celebrations, and the replacement of traditional rituals with new ones, particularly in the context of identity politics.

Rituals aimed at celebrating change and diversity often create a "tyranny of change," demanding constant attention and honor.

This leads to a cycle of intensification and radicalization of participation, as seen in the evolution of events like Pride.

The costly nature of these rituals serves as a signaling mechanism for trust and commitment, but can also result in burnout and a lack of deeper transformation.

The Cognitive Dimension of Identity Formation

Aspiration, the desire to be other than oneself, is a key cognitive process in identity formation.

Transformative experiences, which cannot be reasoned through, require imaginal serious play, internalizing role models, and dialogical practices.

Rationality is inherently aspirational, and ritual plays a crucial role in marking identity changes and facilitating the leap from one state to another.

The Role of Consciousness in Episodic Memory

Consciousness may have evolved to provide us with episodic memory, which involves reliving past experiences.

Episodic memory is crucial for problem-solving and is intertwined with narrative, character development, and perspective.

Rituals play a significant role in creating memorable episodes, reinforcing commitments, and shaping our identities through shared important moments.

The Role of Ritual in Learning and Memory

Rituals can be seen as a form of studying, using mnemonic strategies to create memorable episodic memories.

The upcoming class will explore the concepts of ritualization, prioritizing the religious while referencing secular examples.

The organization of space and time is crucial for learning, with unique human behaviors like pointing playing a significant role in language acquisition and knowledge transfer.

The Importance of Pointing and Group Action

Pointing and organizing time and space helps decenter the ego and encourages group participation.

The act of pointing away from oneself creates a shared reference point, making collective action more plausible.

This concept extends to totemization and the use of spirit animals in native cultures, as well as the NASA scientists' use of rovers as totems, highlighting the complex interplay between action, thought, and shared experiences.