It seems overwhelming to think about modeling the vastness of reality and navigating your model, constantly updating it as you learn more. But if you think so, it’s only because you haven’t realized that you are already doing it, and have been since birth!
You are constantly making decisions based on predictions from your model—just not consciously. Most of the cause and effect pairings you follow in life are not conscious. You don’t think about them, and because you don’t think about them, you don’t search for or accept more accurate versions.
Your entire life is comprised of the habits you’ve learned through trial and error. If you get hungry, you will go eat because you predict that doing so will make your hunger go away. You will go to work tomorrow because you predict that doing so will result in a paycheck. Why do you expect these things? Because at some point you learned to associate the cause and effect pair.
Your urges, cravings, and so on are actually predictions. The problem is that many—if not most—of your predictions are wrong, or at least less accurate than they could be, because you have yet to develop or apply an explicit apparatus for measuring and improving them.
Learn to pay more attention to your habits and other subconscious actions. Write out what you do and why you do it. For each one, think about whether the expected effect actually occurs, and whether or not more effective causes exist for the desired effect.