Disclaimer: This article is only vageuly related to Magic: the Gathering™ (It’s my party I’ll write what I want to).
Secondary Disclaimer: I am not a brain doctor
Tertiary Disclaimer: I did build a Circu deck once and called it “How I Lost My Medical License”
The Introspective Illusion
The nature of consciousness is complicated. As I’ve written about before, consciousness may potentially extend to include things we don’t traditionally think as conscious - and further, how we form our own consciousness may, in itself, be something we misunderstand en masse. You are two. The Unsettling Truth of Human Consciousness. If we don’t even understand the nature of our consciousness, in then raises the question: how do we understand why we feel how we feel?
The introspection illusion is a cognitive illusion in which people wrongly think they have direct insight into the origins of their mental states. In certain situations, this illusion leads to people making confident but false explanations of their own behavior or predictions about their future mental states.
Psychology Fandom Wiki
To put it in more simple terms. The illusion is that:
People intuitively and naturally know why they feel the way they feel, where some assessment has come from, or why they’re in a certain mental state.
Whereas the reality hidden beneath that illusion is that:
People often have no idea why they feel the way they feel, where some assessment has come from, or why they’re in a certain mental state… and given that they feel like they should naturally and intuitively know, they will simply will make something up if asked about it.
Like the split brains in the videos linked above, where experiments seperated the hemispheres of the brain and found that they operated seperately and would employ guesswork when asked about what choices the other seperate hemisphere made. Trying to introspect about your mental state is like trying to explain the mental state of another person.
The part of your brain that does the introspecting uses inferences, context, and deduction to figure out why you feel how you do… the same way that it would try to infer how another person feels… and it can be just as reliable (or unreliable) in its assessment. This empathetic part of your brain, which can try to understand your own feelings as well as others, is responsible for a lot. For example, some report that this part of your brain is also responsible for self-control, by predicting how your future self will feel and empathizing with that future version of you.
The Perils of Misattribution
A licensed therapist once said to me:
The most common error in the human brain is that of misattribution: you’re angry at one thing or a combination of things, then something frustrating happens and all the sudden all of your negative feelings are funneled into that.
We’ve all been there, right? You have a bad day at work, a bad breakup, your car got totaled, or, gods forbid, something even worse. You sit down to enjoy a game of Magic™, League of Legends, Dota2, or whatever your poison is… something goes wrong, and all of a sudden you’ve rotated 90 degrees and are seeing red. It’s not the game’s fault you’re upset, not REALLY anyway, but you’re surely going to find something upsetting in that game to vent all your frustration on.
Of course, we all know this isn’t a healthy way to deal with negative things in our lives. Negative things do happen, and venting can be healthy (even when the target of said venting is misplaced), but it isn’t the most healthy to pin your work frustrations on your friend’s new storm deck and lash out at them when they happen to win in a way you weren’t ready for.
But that is only the most ready and obvious example of the assumption that you know why you’re having a certain feeling leading to you sticking to your guns over a certain situation (and once you become entrenched its hard not to just dig yourself deeper). However, this can happen in much smaller ways as well, over individual card evaluations or thought processes over a wide variety of cards. Sometimes when you play a card, you feel a thing… and sometimes you think you feel that thing for one reason when really it’s for another… and sometimes, because of that misattribution, you’re sticking to a bad evaluation of a card forever and ever.
Stoicism
Of course, the idea that we may not properly evaulate our feelings is not a new and novel one. For centuries, the ideas of misattirbution or misunderstanding our own feelings has been central to several teachings… one of which, of course, being “stoicism.”
In 2014, Commander 2014 was released and with it came a new commander named Stitcher Geralf who immediately commanded my attention (and my zombie armies). One of my friends played his sister, Ghoulcaller Gisa, and we (partially in character) argued to no end about The Five Laws of NecroWarfare. This is a deck that is clunky by todays standards, but still packs a punch, and that is so near and dear that I keep the latest version of it in my “retired decks” box instead of taking it apart. This is the deck for which I got a copy of Inspiration signed by The Professor, and after making a twitter post of a zombie zombie hoard I got the attention of author Æ Marling, from whom I got a signed copy of Fox’s Bride containing special notes about the Royal Embalmer’s stitching methods.
I’m an old soul who get’s distracted with recounting history. The point is that it was Æ Marling’s Coolstuffinc Article “Stoicism: The Anti-Tilt Technology of Warrior” that introduced me to the idea of applying this particular idea, that of emotions being misattributed, misplaced, and possibly deserving of looking at from a different angle. It’s a decent article (and it’s way more organized and cites way more sources than I do), and I recommend giving it a read.
Obviously, stoicism has some flaws, especially the taken to the extreme that some people in the modern movement take it to… but the core of their philosophy is that you can change your moods and mindsets, and sometimes the source of your suffering isn’t what you think it is… sometimes the source is you.
From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel. I aspired to the purity of the Blessed Machine. Your kind cling to your flesh, as though it will not decay and fail you. One day the crude biomass you call the temple will wither, and you will beg my kind to save you. But I am already saved, for the Machine is immortal… Even in death I serve the Omnissiah.
The Open End
Magic is a hobby, and just like any other hobby we can spend hours upon hours thinking about, toiling over, and building what we want from it. In Magic, this can take the shape of deck building as well as relationship building, but this can take shape in any hobby. This article is without distinct conclusion, other than to encourage you (my imagined facsimile of a reader) to keep an open mind about the cards, situations, and games you find yourself in… to stay humble and inquisitive… and sometimes to question even yourself.
As such, enjoy a daily Koan:
Two traveling monks reached a river where they met a young woman. Wary of the current, she asked if they could carry her across. One of the monks hesitated, but the other quickly picked her up onto his shoulders, transported her across the water, and put her down on the other bank. She thanked him and departed.
As the monks continued on their way, the one was brooding and preoccupied. Unable to hold his silence, he spoke out. "Brother, our spiritual training teaches us to avoid any contact with women, but you picked that one up on your shoulders and carried her!"
"Brother," the second monk replied, "I set her down on the other side, why are you still carrying her?"