The Only Intelligence That Violates Its Own Limits: A 77-Year Investigation

A concluding investigation—and a small story—about remembering limits as the doorway home.

Dear reader,

This is my last post in Pursuit of Ecological Wisdom. It gathers a lifetime’s investigation and a small parable. I’m not offering fixes. I’m naming a recognition: human thinking became the only intelligence to violate life’s limits. Then a story—of Eddy and the Stream—says the same, more simply.

The Path I have trodden

When I was seven years old, growing up in post-war Coventry among the rubble and reconstruction, I asked two questions that would shape the next 77 years of my life: “What’s it all about?” and “Where do I belong?”

I’m now 84, and after a lifetime of investigation—through engineering, theology, business, systems thinking, and three years of collective inquiry with fellow retirees—I’ve discovered we’ve been asking the wrong questions. The real question isn’t what it’s all about or where we belong. The real question is: How did human intelligence become the only intelligence in 13.8 billion years of cosmic evolution that systematically violates the constraints that sustain life?

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The Wolves That Changed Everything

Let me start with wolves. In 1995, after a 70-year absence, 31 wolves were released back into Yellowstone National Park. Within a decade, those 31 animals had transformed over two million acres of landscape.

The mechanism was elegantly simple. Elk could no longer graze wherever they pleased. They avoided valleys where wolves might trap them. Trees began growing back along riverbanks for the first time in decades. Beavers returned to build dams in the recovering streams. Birds nested in the new growth. The rivers themselves changed course, their banks stabilised by vegetation that hadn’t been there for generations.

Thirty-one wolves restored the regulatory intelligence of an entire ecosystem using nothing but their own metabolic energy—the calories they got from hunting elk. No committees. No strategic plans. No energy infrastructure. Just embedded participation in feedback loops that had evolved over millions of years.

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The Trap We Built

Now consider California’s State Water Project. Seven hundred miles of aqueducts, tunnels, and pumps lifting water 1,926 feet over mountain ranges. It consumes more electricity than entire nations use—enough energy to power millions of homes—just to move water from where nature put it to where humans decided they wanted it.

This is remarkable engineering. It’s also insane. We’re burning massive amounts of ancient sunlight (fossil fuels) to violate the fundamental constraint that water flows downhill, enabling millions of people to live in deserts, growing water-intensive crops in arid lands, maintaining golf courses where lizards should be.

Here’s the pattern: Symbolic intelligence—our unique human capacity for abstract thought, language, and planning—systematically overrides the natural intelligence that every other form of life respects. Wolves can’t decide to hunt more elk than exist. Trees can’t choose to grow taller than their water transport systems allow. Stars can’t burn hotter than the balance between gravity and radiation pressure permits.

But humans? We build machines to fly higher than birds, structures taller than trees, and systems that operate completely divorced from the feedback loops that constrain everything else in the universe.

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Why We Can’t Think Our Way Out

This is what I call the consciousness trap. We cannot think our way out of problems created by our way of thinking. It’s like asking a knife to cut itself, or expecting a mirror to see its own back. The very intelligence that created the violation cannot recognise why it shouldn’t violate.

Every “solution” our symbolic intelligence generates requires bigger interventions. Local water scarcity? Build irrigation. Depleted soil? Add synthetic fertilisers. Pest problems? Deploy pesticides. Each fix requires more energy, more infrastructure, more violation of natural limits. We’ve mistaken our temporary ability to override constraints for permanent exemption from them.

California’s current water crisis isn’t a failure of engineering—it’s engineering’s success revealing its own impossibility. We built a civilization based on denying constraints that haven’t gone away; we’ve just been very clever at ignoring them. For a while.

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The Collision Method

But here’s what 77 years of investigation has taught me: insights emerge when different intelligences collide. Not from thinking harder with the same kind of thinking, but from bringing diverse ways of knowing into productive collision.

Over the past three years, I’ve been conducting an experiment with a group of fellow retirees at the u3a (formerly known as the University of the Third Age). Each month, I’ve prepared presentations drawing on vast reading—from quantum physics to Indigenous wisdom, from systems theory to contemplative traditions. But the real insights didn’t come from the reading alone.

They came from the collisions: Ancient texts colliding with modern crises. Eastern philosophy meeting Western science. Indigenous knowledge confronting industrial assumptions. And increasingly, human intelligence colliding with artificial intelligence—using AI not as an oracle but as a dialogue partner to help recognise patterns too large for any individual mind to grasp.

Each collision revealed the same pattern from different angles, like detectives comparing notes on a crime scene the size of civilisation itself. The crime? The systematic severing of human intelligence from the regulatory feedback loops that maintain all other forms of order in the universe.

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Technologies of Reconnection

The investigation also revealed something unexpected: technologies for escaping the consciousness trap have existed all along. We just classified them as primitive, mystical, or inefficient.

Many Indigenous peoples refuse to make major decisions without considering impacts seven generations into the future. This isn’t quaint tradition—it’s sophisticated technology for keeping human planning embedded within natural timescales. When you’re thinking about your great-great-great-grandchildren, you can’t ignore ecological limits.

Contemplative traditions worldwide have developed practices for quieting symbolic intelligence so other forms of knowing can be heard. Meditation, prayer, time in nature—these aren’t just stress reduction. They’re methods for temporarily escaping the echo chamber of symbolic thought.

Even in nature, examples abound. Mycorrhizal networks—the fungal threads connecting forest trees—demonstrate intelligence that enhances rather than exhausts its environment. They share resources, communicate threats, and maintain forest health using only the energy available from current photosynthesis. No fossil fuel subsidies required.

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The Recognition

At 84, I don’t have solutions. But I have a recognition that feels important to share.

We are temporary arrangements of cosmic matter that somehow developed the capacity to reflect on our own cosmic nature. That’s extraordinary. But we confused this capacity for consciousness with separation from the cosmos itself. We thought because we could think about nature, we were outside it.

This confusion has led us to build entire civilisations on the premise that human intelligence can transcend the constraints that govern all other forms of intelligence. We bet everything on the idea that symbolic thinking exempts us from limits. That bet is now being called. (The longer backstory of how we built those civilisations is told in a different essay: The Tragic Ten Thousand Year History of Human Separation.)

Climate change, biodiversity collapse, social fragmentation—these aren’t separate crises. They’re all symptoms of symbolic intelligence attempting to operate outside the regulatory constraints that enable life to flourish. They’re the universe’s way of saying: “You’re not exempt.”

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The Door That Was Always Open

But here’s the final insight from 77 years of asking the wrong questions: We’re not trapped. We just think we are, because thinking is what created the trap.

The water we’ve been swimming in is becoming visible. That’s the first step. Once you see the assumptions you’ve been living within—once you recognise that modern civilization is based on a cosmic impossibility—you can start looking for doors.

Sometimes the door is simply remembering what we never truly forgot: We were never separate from the intelligence that surrounds us. We just stopped listening.

The wolves know something we forgot. The mycorrhizal networks know it. Indigenous peoples who survived for thousands of years know it. Even our own bodies know it—your heart beats without your conscious control, your wounds heal without your management, your dreams process experience without your direction.

Intelligence that respects constraints isn’t primitive—it’s what allowed life to flourish for billions of years. Intelligence that violates constraints isn’t advanced—it’s a brief experiment that’s rapidly approaching its own limits.

The question isn’t whether we’ll return to living within constraints. The constraints never left; we’ve just been burning through inherited wealth to pretend otherwise. The question is whether we’ll remember how to collaborate with limits before they’re enforced catastrophically.

At seven, I asked, “What’s it all about?” At 84, I’ve learned it’s about recognising that we’re not separate from “it” at all. We’re expressions of the same intelligence that flows through wolves and mycorrhizal networks, through stars and storms.

The real work isn’t transcending our limits but discovering what becomes possible when we stop trying to transcend them. That’s not a retreat or a loss. It’s coming home to what we never actually left—we just forgot we belonged.

Terry Cooke-Davies
28^th September 2025

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Addendum

Over seventy-seven years of asking, studying, and blundering, I came to recognise a pattern: human intelligence has become the only intelligence in the cosmos that systematically violates life’s sustaining limits. That is the work of my investigation.

But sometimes what takes a lifetime of analysis can also be whispered in a story.

So, I’ve set the recognition down in two voices here: first, in the language of inquiry and evidence; and then, in the language of parable. Both point to the same current, the same recognition, the same Stream.

Because whether we spend a lifetime thinking about it, or just a moment feeling it, the truth is not different: there has only ever been Stream.

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The Whirlpool Who Wanted to Know

Once upon a time, in a clear mountain stream, there lived a whirlpool named Eddy.

Eddy was very worried. All around him, he could see other whirlpools spinning and swirling, and they all seemed so separate from each other. “I am just a small whirlpool,” Eddy thought. “Someday I will disappear, and that will be terrible!”

So, Eddy decided to go on a quest. “I will discover the Great Stream that everyone talks about,” he said. “Once I understand the Stream, I will be wise and happy, and I will never have to worry about disappearing again.”

Eddy spun and searched for many years—seventy-seven, to be exact. He studied how water flowed. He watched other whirlpools form and fade. He read everything ever written about streams. He asked every wise whirlpool he met: “How can I find the Stream? How can I become one with it?”

The wise whirlpools gave him many answers. “Spin slower,” said one. “Spin faster,” said another. “Stop spinning entirely,” said a third.

Eddy tried everything. And sometimes, just for a moment, he would feel it—a sense that he wasn’t really separate at all, that there was only flowing, only water, only…

But then the feeling would vanish, and he’d be Eddy again, still searching.

One day, exhausted, Eddy asked the oldest whirlpool in the stream: “After all these years, why can’t I find the Stream?”

The old whirlpool laughed—a bubbly, gurgling laugh. “Tell me, Eddy, what are you made of?”

“Water, of course,” said Eddy.

“And what is the Stream made of?”

“Water,” said Eddy slowly.

“And what is between you and the Stream?”

Eddy started to say “space” or “distance,” but… he looked. Really looked. Where exactly did Eddy end and not-Eddy begin? Where was the border?

“There is no between,” Eddy whispered.

“There is no whirlpool either,” said the old one gently. “There never was. There’s only ever been Stream, doing what Stream does. You weren’t a whirlpool trying to find the Stream. You were Stream, temporarily swirling, temporarily believing you were something separate.”

“But… but I’m still here!” said Eddy. “I still feel like Eddy!”

“Yes,” said the old whirlpool. “That’s what Stream does sometimes. It swirls. It feels like something separate. It searches for itself. And sometimes it recognises itself. And then it forgets again. All of that is just Stream, streaming.”

“So, my whole quest was pointless?” Eddy felt sad.

“Not pointless,” said the old one. “How else would Stream investigate what it’s like to be a whirlpool? How else would it discover there was never actually a whirlpool at all? Your searching was Stream’s searching. Your discovering is Stream’s discovering.”

Eddy felt confused. Then clear. Then confused again.

“Will I always flicker like this?” he asked. “Seeing it, then not seeing it?”

“Probably,” said the old whirlpool. “That’s what whirlpools do, as long as they’re swirling. But here’s the secret: the flickering is also just Stream. There’s nothing that isn’t.”

And with that, the old whirlpool gradually flattened and dissolved, flowing peacefully onward.

Eddy watched, and felt something he’d never felt before. Not fear. Not excitement. Just… flowing.

He was still swirling. Still apparently Eddy. But somehow the terror of disappearing had dissolved too.

Because whether he saw it or not, whether he understood it or not, whether he existed or not—

There was only Stream.

There had only ever been Stream.

And that was enough.

The End

(Or is it?)

And with that, this series comes to rest. Not as a conclusion, but as a swirl dissolving back into the Stream. Thank you for traveling with me in the Pursuit of Ecological Wisdom. May what flows through these words keep rippling in you, long after this whirlpool subsides.