Future Imperfect: X Lives and Mistakes of Moira
What the X-Men’s saga teaches us about the limits of predictions and our perceptions.
I. X Lives of Moira
The future is uncertain. The unknowns far outnumber what we think we know.
To navigate this uncertainty, we imagine the different possibilities of how the future will unfold. We make predictions, hoping that this can chart how things will turn out based on our decisions made today. This ability to envision the future gives us a sense of control.
A comforting illusion that we can plan for the unpredictable.
The X-men storyline House of X and Powers of X (“HPX”) illustrates this dilemma about the unknowable future. HPX spans 12 chapters of geopolitics and mutant survival. Central to the story is Moira MacTaggert, a mutant like the X-men, who can reset her life upon her death.
As Moira resets, she retains the accumulated knowledge of her past lives. This ability grants her foreknowledge of the future. In effect, this gives her the power to change her life and the fate of the world.
Yet each time, fate has other ideas.
II. Future Indicative
We navigate the future by using our past and present. This be done via:
Predictions: extrapolating patterns from the past to project likely outcomes in the future.
Counterfactuals: imagining “what-if” scenarios, alternate histories that might have changed the present.
A combination of both allows us to project scenarios – charting the different pathways into the future. We form expectations of the future to guide our present decisions.
The ten lives of Moira in HPX put these concepts into play. In her past lives, the mutants always go extinct. Often at the hands of sentient machines, far more advanced but fictional versions of the AI we see proliferating today. With each reset, she refines her approach, adjusting her plan to save the mutants.
Just as we update our expectations with new information, we revise our projections and recalculate the likelihood of outcomes. This helps us to mitigate risks we may face in the future.
This is crucial in high-stakes situations, where even a small miscalculation can be costly. Businesses, for example, apply forecasts to plan their budgets. Investors run multiple scenarios before committing vast amounts of money into risky projects.
In any case, the ability to predict and imagine counterfactuals can be a competitive edge–though it’s no guarantee of success.
III. Defective Perspective
Despite the sophistication of our predictive tools, we often miscalculate the future because our perceptions are biased.
Moira, even with her knowledge of nine alternate futures, fails to save mutantkind. Her foresight is limited to just her own personal experience — a limited view of the world.
This mirrors how our brain forms expectations about the future—not from an objective assessment of reality, but through our subjective lens.
Reality has too much information and often moves too fast for our brains, creating gaps in our perception. Neuroscience reveals that our brains fill these perceptual gaps with predictions that are shaped by past experiences, or "priors."
These priors, though, are not neutral. They come with biases, meaning that our perception of reality is shaped by the biases we carry with us. Made worse by the fact that our emotions too can taint our priors. Such as greed amplying an investor’s optimism at the prospect of profit to the point of delusion.
Like Moira, who is trapped by her experiences, we project our expectations onto reality, mistaking those projections for objective truth. When we misinterpret the world, our predictions become unreliable.
IV. Past Transgressive
Not only is our perception flawed, we struggle to learn the right lessons from our past—our history, if we learn from it at all.
Financial crises, for example, repeat themselves because we misinterpret past events and cherry-pick the data that aligns with our biases. Each crisis was partly caused by predictions premised on faulty priors and selective biases, reinforced by rampant greed.
Moira’s lives reflect this pattern. She is unable to foresee a future where mutants survive because she can’t imagine a world beyond her own lived experiences.
She becomes rigid, entrenched in the familiar comfort of her experience. Each time she tries to alter the course of history, her actions end up in disaster. Like her, we repeat past mistakes when we fail to challenge our flawed perception.
V. Be Humble
Despite the limitations, predictions are useful. They provide a rough map for the future. Otherwise, we would just be walking in blind and taking stabs in the dark. But still we are hampered by our personal blind spots.
Moira’s predictions, draws only from her personal experiences, and no one else’s. There’s a bit in HPX where Moira makes Charles Xavier, aka Prof. X, promise to never bring in other mutants with the power of foresight or clairvoyance — known as precogs. Her refusal to work with precogs hints at a deeper flaw—a lack of humility. In her hubris, she wilfully blinds herself to solutions outside her narrative.
It’s not just about getting more information or different perspectives, but staying open to the unexpected and questioning our convictions. It also demands a shift in perspective.
True foresight requires humility—a recognition that we don’t know everything and never will. It means having the courage to admit the limits of our knowledge, and rather than fearing the unknown, we should embrace it.
Inspirations
House of X and Powers of X is perhaps the best comic saga I’ve read in this decade. It’s got everything: geopolitics, time travel, bio-engineering, sentient machines, straight up comicbook madness and at the heart of it all, a compelling story. It launched the Krakoan age of the X-Men comics.
Blogs by Strange Loop Canon:
Becoming Perceptive on Escaping Flatland:
Perception is a controlled hallucination. When you perceive the world, you do not simply see what is in front of you. Instead, your brain predicts what you will see. You hallucinate reality. But the hallucination is controlled, because the prediction is measured against the input you receive from your eyes and your ears and if it is too far off, the prediction error is registered and the “hallucination” is updated to minimize the error.
Neuroscience of Perception