| Let's try the following intuition pump. If we rephrase the scenario as: "The easiest way to detect if a person is asleep is to see if they're lying down with your eyes closed." This is clearly not always true. However when that's false, it either a) the person is trying to fall asleep
b) the person is pretending to sleep with no intent of actually sleeping It's often said that in order to fall asleep one has to pretend to fall asleep first. I think the programming flow is similar. You may not actually be in that state yet, but it doesn't just come to you unless you actually do some programming while not in the flow yet. |
c) the person is dead
d) the person is doing breathing exercises
e) the person is relaxed, not asleep, and not pretending to be either
f) the person is in a psychoanalyst's couch
Similarly, one can be typing about for a thousand reasons, none of them about flow. Or one is in a stare of flow drawing boxes or just thinking.