timelets

“Cognitive powers are necessarily limited. They do not simply overwhelm the world around them. Rather, intelligence consists in finding ways to operate immanently, within the world, and in concert with other entities in the world.
Intelligence works by enlisting and forming alliances with other intelligences – as Bruno Latour might put it.”

Steven Shaviro. “Discognition.”

Why cognitive powers are limited? What are the fundamental constraints?

“There are, after all, two kinds of growth. One proceeds gradually, allowing adjustments to environments as environments adjust to whatever’s new. Skillful growers can shape this process.

The other kind of growth defies environments. It’s inner-directed, and hence outwardly oblivious. It resists cultivation, setting its own direction, pace, and purpose. Anticipating no obstacles, it makes no compromises. Like an unchecked predator, an ineradicable weed, or a metastasizing cancer, it fails to see where it’s going until it’s too late. It sequentially consumes its surroundings, and ultimately itself.”
...
That’s the difference, fundamental in strategy, between respecting constraints and denying their existence.

--- John Lewis Gaddis. “On Grand Strategy.”

It's more about the relationship between external vs internal detection and control capabilities, rather than fundamental kinds of growth. The cancer example is particularly telling because during the early stages it can be dealt with relatively easily, while in a metastasizing phase it's almost impossible to contain, at least for now. The same applies to a chain reaction.