Reality Bending Lab › News › Rolling the Bones: Divination as a Randomness-Harnessing Process
Rolling the Bones: Divination as a Randomness-Harnessing Process
Many divination practices - from shamans' reading of cracks in burnt bones and oracles casting yarrow stalks, to fortune tellers drawing cards - appear to share a common thread: they all seek to interpret patterns in seemingly random events. Scientifically, we tend to view them as attempts to impose order on chaos: to make nature's unpredictability legible, to assert meaning, and to gain a sense of control over an uncertain world.
But what if we had it completely backward?
What if divination wasn't an attempt to find order, but a technology designed to inject much-needed chaos into human decision-making? By framing divination as a randomness-harnessing process, we can view ancient seers not just as spiritual leaders, but as the first engineers of chaotic systems, and their rituals not as failures of reason, but as sophisticated compensations for reason's limits.
The Trap of Predictability
In physics, the second law of thermodynamics dictates that closed systems tend toward higher entropy, toward disorder. But living systems are not closed. They import energy, export waste, and use that throughput to maintain internal order. A society, like a cell, is an entropy-exporting machine: it survives by becoming more structured, more efficient, more organized than its surroundings. And therein lies the danger. The same drive toward internal order that makes a system viable in the short term can make it brittle over time. Systems naturally seek efficiency and calcify into rigid patterns - what complexity theorists call a collapse in behavioural entropy: the narrowing of a system's repertoire of actions until it does only what has worked before.
Imagine an early hunter-gatherer society. Through trial and error, they identify the most effective strategies for survival. They track migration patterns, hunt in the most resource-rich valleys, forage by the most reliable streams. The logic is sound. The results are good - at first.
The problem? Rationality is predictable. A tribe that applies the same logic to every hunt becomes entirely readable to its environment. The ecosystem reacts. Prey animals alter their routes, learn to avoid those valleys. The reliable stream gets fished out. By perfectly optimizing their behavior, the tribe depletes their resources and starves. To survive in a dynamic environment, you have to break your own patterns. You need a way to stop being predictable. And the only way to do that is to rely on mechanisms outside your own reasoning. For instance, by using randomness.
The Problem with “True” Randomness
Finding randomness is actually harder than it sounds. In fact, generating true randomness is one of the oldest unsolved problems in the science of computation.
Standard computers operate deterministically: they follow instructions. When a computer gives you a “random” number, it is typically a pseudo-random number, the output of a highly complex but ultimately predictable mathematical formula. To get genuine randomness, modern computers must measure unpredictable physical phenomena from the real world: atmospheric noise, the thermal fluctuations of a circuit, the radioactive decay of an isotope (the question of whether these are truly random is a question for another time).
Human brains face the same problem, but worse. When asked to generate a random sequence of numbers, people systematically avoid repeating digits and alternate too regularly, producing sequences that are statistically far too neat. Our choices are warped by unconscious bias, recent memory, and social pressure. If you ask a hunter to pick a random direction to search for prey, his answer will be shaped by where he went last time, where the elder suggests, and what his gut, trained on past experience, tells him feels promising.
In other words: the very cognitive machinery that makes humans intelligent also makes them incapable of true randomness. In a high-stakes game of survival against an adaptive ecosystem, this is a fatal flaw. If a hunting party's “spontaneous” change of route is actually governed by subconscious human biases - like a preference for keeping the sun at their backs or avoiding steep inclines - prey animals will eventually learn these patterns and exploit them. Furthermore, human-generated “randomness” lacks social authority. If a tribal elder simply guesses which way to migrate, the tribe might question their motives or suspect favouritism, leading to social fracturing. To truly break a pattern, the source of the disruption has to be entirely independent of human bias and beyond human reproach.
Escaping the Local Minimum
We can map this cognitive trap onto one of the central challenges in optimization theory.
Imagine a landscape of hills and valleys. An algorithm trying to find the lowest point moves “downhill” at each step, always choosing the direction that reduces error. This works, until the algorithm reaches a small valley. Every direction from there looks like it goes up, so the algorithm stops. It has found a local minimum: a solution that is better than its immediate neighbors, but far worse than the true best answer sitting in a deeper valley somewhere else on the map.
Hunter-gatherer tribes face the same trap. A tribe that always minimizes surprise - that always does what has worked before - will never leave a depleted valley, because exploration means uncertainty, and uncertainty feels like failure. Cognitive science confirms this: under stress, humans narrow their behavioural repertoire, defaulting to familiar strategies even as those strategies stop working. The very conditions that make change most necessary are the ones that make it hardest to choose.
The Computational Power of Chaos
To escape these traps, complex systems require deliberate injections of randomness.
Biology itself builds this in. In living organisms, injections of chaos happen organically from the inside out. Our internal physiological states - cardiac rhythms, respiratory fluctuations, gastric activity, and neural noise - operate with a natural, continuous variability. This background hum influences the brain entirely independent of the outside world. It ensures that even if an organism faces the exact same external environment twice, its internal baseline is slightly different, subtly altering its behavioural response and preventing total predictability.
Consider evolutionary algorithms, which solve optimization problems by mimicking natural selection. At each generation, random mutations are introduced into candidate solutions. Most mutations are useless, but without them, the algorithm converges prematurely on a mediocre answer and stops exploring. The randomness isn't noise contaminating the signal; it is the signal.
Or consider simulated annealing, a technique that solves complex routing and scheduling problems by occasionally accepting a worse solution on purpose - injecting controlled bursts of randomness to prevent the system from locking into a suboptimal answer. Without randomness, these systems stagnate. With it, they explore.
Ancient foragers had no algorithms. But they faced the identical problem, and they found an identical solution.
Scapulimancy: An Ancient RNG
This is where divination enters the picture. The idea that these rituals served a deeply practical mathematical function was first proposed in 1957 by sociologist Omar Khayyam Moore, who examined the practice of scapulimancy - the reading of burnt animal shoulder bones - among the Naskapi (Innu) people of the Labrador peninsula.
The Naskapi relied on hunting caribou in a harsh, unforgiving environment. Moore realized that if the hunters used pure logic to decide where to hunt, the caribou would quickly learn their patterns and avoid them. He proposed that divination acted as a “randomized mixed strategy” in a game against nature. The shaman would take a caribou shoulder bone, apply a heated implement to it, and watch it crack. The interaction of heat with the bone's micro-fissures, varying densities, and biological irregularities is a highly chaotic, non-linear physical process, exquisitely sensitive to initial conditions. No two burns produce the same pattern. In other words: burning a bone generates a random output.
When the shaman read these cracks to determine which direction the hunting party should travel, they were essentially using a hardware-based Random Number Generator. By outsourcing the decision to the fracture patterns of a scorched bone, the tribe bypassed their own cognitive biases entirely.
Where Moore viewed this through the lens of mid-century Game Theory, we can just as easily view it through the lens of modern computation. Divination was the simulated annealing of antiquity. The ritualized use of randomness forced the tribe to accept occasional high-surprise decisions - traveling north instead of the “logical” east - pushing them out of ecological dead ends that pure rationality would have made permanent.
Crucially, the ritual garb and sacred framing weren't superstition layered on top of a practical tool: they were the mechanism that made the tribe accept the output. Without genuine cultural authority, the “random” result would simply be overridden by whoever had the strongest opinion.
This early insight has been substantially expanded by recent work in cultural evolution. Researchers like Ze Hong and Joseph Henrich have formally modelled divination as an “epistemic technology”, reviving Moore's hypothesis to explain how these practices became culturally omnipresent. Their studies demonstrate that the persistence of divination relies on our own cognitive architecture: specifically, Bayesian rationalization. Because of strong prior beliefs, the underreporting of negative evidence, and the protective, unfalsifiable “design” of the rituals themselves, humans systematically excuse an oracle's occasional empirical failures. This isn't a glitch; it is a feature. By shielding the ritual from doubt, these cognitive dynamics ensure the randomness engine retains its cultural authority and keeps running, uncompromised by our tendency to abandon things that occasionally fail.
Escaping the Mind's Own Prison
This mechanism didn't disappear when humans stopped hunting caribou. When a modern person sits down for a tarot reading or consults a deck of cards, they are employing the exact same cognitive technology. A mind agonizing over a complex career choice or a failing relationship is often stuck in its own local minimum of rumination, paralyzed by a closed loop of predictable logic.
The random draw of a tarot spread injects semantic chaos into the problem-solving process. By forcing the brain to interpret a personal crisis through an unexpected, randomly generated archetype - the Tower, the Hermit, the Fool - the deck breaks the cognitive loop of our own attractor system. It prompts lateral insights that pushes one's trajectory in a new direction, and forces the seeker to view their landscape from a new angle that pure, uninterrupted rationality could never reach.
There is a growing body of anthropological thought - from David Wengrow and David Graeber's work on early institutional experimentation to studies of indigenous ecological knowledge as adaptive rather than merely symbolic - that resists the old condescension toward pre-modern decision-making. The evidence suggests that early human societies were not stumbling toward rationality. They were navigating constraints that rationality alone could not solve.
Whether it is a shaman reading the shattered lines of a scorched turtle shell, or a modern seeker turning over a card, the practitioner is not operating below reason. They are operating above it, at a meta-level that modern decision theory has only recently learned to articulate. They understand, intuitively, that a mind sophisticated enough to build reliable models of the world becomes, by that very sophistication, a prisoner of those models.
The oracle is not a workaround for ignorance. It is a necessary correction to knowledge.
Thanks to my friend and colleague Dr Ryu Uchiyama for introducing me to the idea of divination as a random output production technique.
