Dad, what's the meaning of life?
Before I start on superpowers, humans like all animals sense the world and interpret it relying at times on their senses. They aren’t useful when we sleep, touch and balance help us to not fall if we missed a rock or unsteady footing. However, your brain fills in gaps the eyes cannot process rapidly and feed information to your brain fast enough that you can rely on them, to catch a ball thrown at you. You with training can predict where the ball will land and grasp it. Soccer players learn to do this with their feet. This practice of predictions and probabilities is based on the feel of the wind, adjustment to get under the ball where it appears to stop and then the decision to strike or trap a ball. We love to watch humans who have trained to do things we perceive as impossible, improbable or at least shockingly difficult but with practice, we can achieve amazing results. We can train our minds the same way to receive stimuli, facts, ideas, figures, models and theories and learn to wield them to weigh evidence and build ideas and working theories of the world. We can trick ourselves and make assumptions about what happened if we don’t see events or understand them. Behavioural economist Richard Thaler said, “We're not saying people are dumb but that the world is hard”. At times one may fall to their level of training. If they are untrained, they may only be able to respond but we can develop systems, and practice mental models to slowly consider our best options we develop the skills and ability to respond how we want.
All animals avoid pain and seek pleasure to understand pain and pleasure we can rely on our senses. However, they may quickly lead us astray without producing lasting pleasure. We may find lovely berries quickly eating our fill but knowing the growing season is short we may seek to eat a few more less we miss out and have to wait until next year or the birds eat them. The next day our stomach may be in some distress and our poo loose which even leads us to become ill and sick for days unable to eat. Our culture, society, and the language we use teach us things about the world and shape our perceptions so saying we understand our senses and what truly is pleasurable without the nuance of culture or the expectations of those around us should be questioned.
Epicurus lived around 2300 years ago and thought being without pain was the most pleasurable state. Just that spot when your stomach was relieved of the pain of severe hunger, that pleasure was thus easiest to be indulged in the absence of pain and the rich experiences of the mind. He thought food, water, shelter and relatedness were the basic needs without these fulfilled there would be pain. He knew babies needed their mothers but that for everyone else friends would be the most secure form of relatedness and friends who developed meaningful relationships of interdependence thriving, challenging ideas, theories of nature and how we treat each other could bring sustained joy. These simple needs he called the natural necessary desires. He felt the exploration of the natural world seeking to understand, nature, plants, animals, weather and the moon and stars would remove our anxieties when unfortunate events befell our friends or families. Thus he pushed for a theory of chance and the root idea around the locus of control. Viktor Frankl a psychiatrist and World War II prison camp survivor thought about how you respond to the horrible events that befall your life that moment when there is a stimulus, a pain, a slight, a misfortune, how we sense that moment is important, it will shape your ability to perceive threats, predict harm or injury. We have a moment where you can train your brain to allow you to have a predictable or even pleasurable response.
That is your response ability.