As far as Flow goes, I find myself in the flow when my mind begins visualizing an action before it’s taken. It’s the change in state from when my brain is consciously telling my fingers how to hit the piano keys to when I can hear the music before I play it and my fingers are mindlessly on the right keys at the right time. The same happens when I start programming at 3pm and look up and find it’s 4am and my energy level is so high that I can’t bear to stop and sleep. Most of the time I hit flow when my judgmental, time-aware left brain shuts up and the part of my brain that knows how to do the job takes over.

Here we are at context. The model endeavours to encapsulate experience as it moves away from the machine.
That which is closer to the machine is a simpler implementation of Cause, Effect, Form, and Function.
Simplicities implement higher frequencies, and higher frequencies implement simplicities.

God and the spiritual are just as valid to the machine as they are to abstractions arising within the machine.

I hear you and think vicarious experience. Vicarious experiences are akin to machine level déjà vu.

Interesting is how vicarious education has become.

Please forgive my use of idiom.

What is a hard sell to most of us “thinkers” is the notion that direct knowing is both possible and valid despite the fact that words and analytical thought can only approach these truths asymptotically.

Heuristics (as I use the word) are a form of analytical thought, just very condensed. Flow/blink is at another timescale and is sub-analytical. Furthermore it makes no sense to try to deconstruct decisions/actions that result, in the same way as it makes no sense to ask what part of a Hebbian network “caused” the output to be what it was. It’s the entire path-dependent history and total input that shapes the brain and produces the output. The only answer to “why” this decision/action was chosen over another would be to replay the history (or a large portion of it). The map and the terrain are very closely linked in these situations.

So my answer to “is there a better system than Bayesian” would be yes. One that also includes non-analytical, non-judgmental, direct experience, where the focus is on short-circuiting the rational mind. A balance of thought and no-thought, judgment and instinct. And use our emotional reactions as clues for when there is discord between the two modes.

My feeling is that Bayesianism is extremely useful if your goal is to evaluate the possible effects alternative courses of action will have on what you experience in the future, where the decision time horizon is greater than minutes. In fact, I don’t know of a better system than Bayesian for this purpose. But of course, being a Bayesian, I am happy to examine evidence that there is a superior system :-)

But it obviously falls short when you’re talking about choosing alternative courses of actions on minute or faster time horizons. Not enough time for explicit analysis. Of course, you can apply Bayesianism to the heuristics you use on these short time frames, but there are issues of scoping the heuristics and meta-cost-benefit limits to how much time you want to spend refining your reflexive heuristics.

Moreover, it tells you precisely nothing about what you _should_ want_ to_experience_ in the future. Now, to a certain extent, you can model your own future satisfaction using Bayesian methods. But there’s an endogeneity problem and you quickly run into Godel, Escher, Bach/Strange Loop limits. When you come down to it, I have never seen a satisfactory “rational” explanation of what you should want to experience.

Are we on the same page here?

Reminds me of the Eastern Orthodox approach to truth — called apophatic theology, or negative theology. Also found in Hinduism as “neti-neti” or in the fundamental premise of Buddhism.

Ken’s TEDTalk is among my favorites.

Second, I don’t take issue with Bayes, Popper and Occam, just those who forget there’s a limit to what their methods can apply to. My observation is that group is 99% of the population who invoke those names.