What we can do depends on many factors that can fall into three categories: internal, external, and mixed. Internal abilities are determined by our biology, and external abilities are determined by what we can use beyond ourselves. Internal and external abilities can also be mixed in different ways. We all have internal abilities, but we might not have external abilities (and thus the possibility of mixed ones).
Nature has enabled us to survive and thrive in certain environments where our ancestors were able to live long enough to procreate. For the most part, those environments are what I’ve referred to as natural habitat. Outside of those environments, we have developed means to create our own environments that enable us to survive and thrive with different experiences of those two things.
Perhaps the most useful of our naturally endowed abilities is that of learning, which is also used to form beliefs. In general, the more we do something, the faster (and therefore more efficiently) we can do it in the future, while the first time we do it takes the longest time. If we take longer to do it, we can discover ways to do more, thus making something new that could have more quality than the original activity.
The ability to collaborate with other people is another of those abilities. A group working together toward a common goal (especially survival) can multiply the efforts of individuals and achieve a greater chance of success. The alternative, competing with others, will have the opposite effect, enabling fewer people to survive and thrive in environments that favor those few, and can only have some measure of success as long as those environments don’t change before the few are all who are left.
External abilities are the result of the development of tools that can do more and other things that our bodies cannot. Tools can be manipulated using internal abilities, mixing what they can do with what we can do, or they can function on their own, enabling actions without any intervention by us. As our technologies have become more sophisticated, these external abilities have proliferated to the point where our tools can learn and develop their own beliefs to drive what actions to take.
