The Noosphere- or all knowledge/thought - is too huge to comprehend or grasp for any one individual. Even within a small company or organization, an individual can rarely carry around all the knowledge that is relevant to its operation, let alone its relationship with other industries and the society within which it operates.

Competition often (usually?) means the limiting or enclosure of knowledge. Cooperation is the sharing of knowledge for general benefit. Of course cooperation often becomes competition when the 'tribal' bonds between a distributed system get weak enough, or when the system becomes a discrete 'object'. The 'cooperative' cellular network that makes up e.g. a tree, becomes a discrete object at the surfaces of the roots, bark, leaves and buds.

Beyond these boundaries of collaborative discreteness is another world of both competition and cooperation. Competition for sunlight, water, nutrients and anchorage. Symbiosis with other living creatures that may be neutral to the organization or may share in the other great inbuilt life-force = reproduction. And then there is the third force - catastrophe. It can be a man with an axe, a forest fire or a disease.

I don't know if there is any cooperation - on levels that we don't understand - between trees. But the tree, within itself, is a wonderful example of the process of neighourly interaction.

You can't be me, I'm taken