Signature Practice as Informational Engineering: An Operator Model of Ritual, Meaning, and Active Inference

Abstract

Structured practices in ritual and contemplative settings often claim reliable change through formal protocols, disciplined attention, prior alignment, and staged calibration. Debate commonly polarizes between extraordinary causation and generic expectancy accounts. This paper offers a third option: a methodological framework that treats such practices as informational interventions acting on coupled agent–environment systems. A five-operator model represents protocols as ordered sequences of learning, framing, attentional stabilization, invariance constraints, and regulatory feedback. Drawing on convergent findings from ritual psychology, predictive processing and active inference, meaning response research, meditation neuroscience, and semiotic information theory, the model yields discriminative, preregisterable predictions. It predicts diagnostic moderation of effects, scaling with diagnostic certainty, and stage-specific early ordering in a composite divergence measure prior to coarse phenomenological change. It also predicts that symbolically congruent sequences outperform carrier-matched, diagnosis-incongruent sequences under controlled context. The paper does not claim empirical validation; it specifies tests with clear failure modes.