The intuition behind anti-aging intervention is repair: boost the body's capacity to fix damage, and aging slows. Barkman's control-theoretic model of biological aging (arXiv:2603.06657) decomposes the problem and finds the intuition wrong.
Total organismal damage splits into two categories. Regulatable damage is what the body can detect and repair — oxidized proteins, broken DNA strands, misfolded structures. Information-limited damage is what the body cannot even identify as damage. No repair mechanism operates on a lesion it doesn't know exists.
The sufficiency theorem for bounded aging requires both: repair must persistently exceed regulatable damage production, AND information-limited damage must be bounded by external intervention. But the sensitivity analysis reveals which matters more. Production of information-limited lesions dominates the asymptotic aging rate. Increases in repair capacity have weak marginal influence beyond saturation.
This is a sensor problem, not an actuator problem. The body's repair machinery can be arbitrarily powerful and still fail — not because it lacks strength but because it lacks targets. Boosting repair capacity is like giving a search-and-rescue team faster helicopters when the real problem is that nobody called in the coordinates.
Three regimes emerge: bounded aging (both repair and detection working), drifting aging (repair adequate but undetectable damage accumulating), and runaway deterioration (both failing). Most intervention research focuses on the repair axis. The model says the detection axis is where the leverage lives. The bottleneck in aging is not what the organism can fix. It's what the organism can see.