Extended Control Cycle in Ritual Behavior and Narrative Scenarios

The paper argues that rituals and symbolic cultural artifacts are external models of the world. The key idea is that human agents do not have direct or unmediated access to the external world. Humans can sense and act upon intermediary processes such as cultural artifacts and rituals and construct a model of the target external world. In biological terms a Markov blanket mediates sense-making exchanges between the agent organism and the environment. In the cultural niche, humans, via rituals, model themselves modeling the world. In this structure of several nested Markov blankets the individual is included in a larger blanket. Hence, cultural practice offers a model of the world and a model of the self in the world. The cultural practice allows the creation of a cultural body/self for the agent. Rituals mediate the relationship between the organism and the world. They also simulate the "incorporation" of the world and the self via the dynamic process of control. By action and sensory perception, the agent includes the external states in its area of control of the blanket. The agent and the cultural practice are coupled in a bi-directional control cycle. The agent controls the ritual and the ritual, once included in the field of control of a new encompassing blanket, changes the structure of the agent which becomes a new entity/self. Rituals targeting the individual designate the personal transformation (e.g. birth, transition from child to adult, marriage, and death) and rituals of collective transformation (spring festivals that mark the passage from one year to another) target the evolution of the world in time. Rituals formulate (in a descriptive manner) hidden realities and, at the same time (in a performative manner), bring them into existence as external realities that can be described and controlled via what is commonly labeled as magical thinking. Rituals, conceived as explanatory models, simultaneously provide evidence for a self nested in a cultural niche and for a conceptualized external environment.