How are collective representations maintained in brains?
Is otherworldly language adaptive? Why ritual? Why sacrifice?
Can Psychedelic Science model cognitive restructuring?
Are there unintended ritual effects discernible in our own contemporary ethnographies? ...
Is ritual a form of communication or computation?
Will robots need or benefit from rituals?
How might we measure ritual effects? (e.g. frequency, durability of effect, impacted group-size)
Has the Pandemic introduced new rituals while marginalizing old ones? What are the measurable effects of these recent developments?
What are the physiological differences between individual and group prayer; guided and not guided? Do they differ among major religions? How long do physiological changes persist? Can they have therapeutic effects?
On depression and anxiety, we know they do, but we would need a systematic review? How do they differ from states induced by alcohol (anxiety reduction), ketamine (depression), and oxytocin (pro-social attitude). Do they have side effects?
Do social religious rituals differ from in person soccer games?
Do rituals promote abstract thinking? How exactly do they promote pro-social attitudes?
What are the similarities and differences in language use between various religions? On the level of a corpus (vocabulary, grammar, affect, level of abstraction, ...), but also interactivity and participation. How are they correlated with other aspects of rituals?
What would be a minimal viable ritual language that could be both simulated with artificial agents and tested on willing participants? and what exactly would we test for? (timeframe, feasibility, participant protection). How literal vs. poetic should it be for people to get something out of the experience?
How can Zen Buddhism or Quakers do rituals without language?
Are participant attitudes different in major religions? How do they differ between e.g. major holidays and Fri/Sat/Sun regular services. Do they differ based e.g. on class characteristics?
Given we know a lot about the positive effects of religion, what do people find off-putting about organized religion? E.g. if literal interpretations are bad, can there be short interpretative, personalized explanations overcoming the distaste. (Reform Judaism does a reasonably good job moving the Bible from literal to relevant, but it's neither short nor personalized; Zen is abstract by design but doesn't use language).
Is there an exclusion theorem saying that you can't have a prosocial, uplifting religion which is all three: concrete, language-based, and ritual-based? In other words, is this the message of the golden calf story in the Bible?
In modern societies, what is the dynamics of learning between religions? (In Baez's framework). If they learn, why are they getting extinct? If they don't learn, why? Can we model it? (We probably can get data, e.g. sermons, socioeconomic data on priests).
What are the social and physiological reasons for religions (or more generally socialized spirituality) losing to games, internet and tv in use of our time?
A factor in crime is the growing spiritual poverty. There are priests of different denominations working with prisoners or at risk communities. Sometimes they are successful (ie. able to change a person's attitudes, and practices). It could be informative to know when, and do a larger scale project understanding how this has worked? (Maybe we can learn from existing work in this area)
Starter Questions