Preference vs. Execution Uncertainty in Creative Loops

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Thesis: Brain reading (via decoder-only brain implants) might have value for professional creatives beyond initial calibration of low-level preferences (coarse affect and emotional valence).

I previously published why I’m skeptical brain readers alone, even with perfect hardware, would supersede the current interface Pareto frontier (keyboard, mouse, voice), even in the years before humans can make digital copies (“uploading”). Now I will try to widen the design space and lay out how brain readers might leverage the technically high-bandwidth, parallelized layers (~GPU) before they reach the global workspace of conscious control and attention (~CPU). Here are some open questions about the act of creation I’m currently reconsidering:

Is creative work dominated by preference or execution uncertainty?

  • Execution uncertainty: “Can I nail that single-stroke ink line without messing up?”
  • Preference uncertainty: “Will it look better than the dotted version I considered, or some other change I haven’t even imagined yet?”
  • Most real creative loops are epistemic: I don’t yet know what I’ll like, so I have to subject myself to the propose → evaluate → refine loop. Learned habits and heuristics are already paid up front.
  • The bottleneck seems to be the cost of sampling candidates (choices) and updating your (or the decoding system’s) preference model—more so than motor output might limit actuation.
  • A few days back I was more skeptical, but I realized that even when I “know” what I want to happen—like, say, “increase the BPM of that track by a little”—I still have to search for the exact value of “a little.” And exactly then the preference model can transform which candidates I should even attend to. This can reduce cognitive load and the “evaluate” part of the loop by multiples. This is the scale-space lens I mapped out in a previous piece: the whole process and work is the traversal of a Sierpinski pyramid.

Is Representational Mismatch Cost (or the Impedance Tax) still an issue for professionals who DO have an optimized low-impedance internal→domain mapping?

  • The pain is translating a high-dimensional, parallel, fuzzy internal code into a low-dimensional, serial vocabulary of actions.
  • Brain–computer interfaces may win by preserving richness (good pointers/gestalts), not by speeding known channels.

How "rich" is our internal imagery?

  • People overestimate internal detail; lots of “imagery” are pointers, not simulations. In that case the signal might not be there, and you have to externalize. Assuming lucidity or high-resolution imagery is a trap.

So how can we speed up—or shorten—the preference-learning loop?

  • Capacity might be fundamentally vocabulary-limited: how many reliably separable mental states K we can read? Not necessarily how fast we can read “any signal” no matter the accuracy.
  • If we believe that conscious attention has a fixed bandwidth limit, progress comes from raising robustly readable K and learning a personal proposal policy from them.

The reality might be less about sending ”artifact-sized” telepathy and instead about faster, better-calibrated navigating of the preference manifold.

Some concrete tests to run

  1. If the preference regime is the main factor: In tasks with high preference uncertainty (color grading, timbre design), implicit neural feedback (e.g., fast oddball/P300-like or affect signals) will reduce trials-to-target ε vs. pairwise picks at equal candidate budgets. Metric: trials-to-accept, regret, calibration of early “nope/closer” signals.

  2. Execution-regime neutrality: In tasks with low preference uncertainty but high control demands (pointing, selection), BCIs help throughput, not quality. Metric: time-to-completion, NASA-TLX, error rate.

  3. Richness beats speed: A semantic-pointer BCI (few, reliable “vibe vectors”) combined with a generator beats a higher-bit raw-cursor mouse interface on final quality per minute in open-ended creative search. Metric: blinded quality ratings, human-preference tests.

BibTeX Citation 
@misc{strasser2025,
  author = {Strasser, Markus},
  title = {Preference vs. Execution Uncertainty in Creative Loops},
  year = {2025},
  url = {https://markusstrasser.org/},
  note = {Accessed: 2025-11-13}
}