I would underline this as the key point in the discussion: If it's true, which I think it is, then it allows us to say that "birds gather twigs in order to build a nest" is explanatory. The role of natural selection arises at a different level of description, having to do with how such bird-intentions wind up being chosen and facilitated. — J

Indeed. We could also say that natural selection occurs at the level where various tendencies (and the material enabling conditions if those tendencies) progressively become interlocked in such a way as to promote the flourishing of the organism, as a means to enhance their fitness. But this fitness always is relative to the particular niche that they construct and that co-evolves with their endogenous behavioral tendencies. This is what makes the process of natural selection teleological. It's not just a passive "physical" environment that exerts a selective pressure. It's the already structured part of this environment—the constructed niche—that pushes back against, or facilitates, the organisms already active (and teleologically oriented) attempts to thrive (most often exercised unknowingly, as you noted).

Evolution by natural selection is a good example of a teleological explanation that is indeterministic at every scale. It is teleological because evolution is directed towards a future state of greater fitness. However, success is not guaranteed, and many do fail, at species, population, and individual level. — SophistiCat

I added a few things to that post, but what do you mean when you say that it is "indeterministic at every scale"? Is it just that it is defeasible or fallible?

I have two threads in favor of divinity, you can find here and here.

I would go further and say that natural selection is itself a teleological explanation. It is a teleological explanation that covers all species instead of just one (i.e. it is a generic final cause). I would even venture that if an ur-cause like natural selection were not teleological, then the subordinate causal accounts could not be teleological, [...] — Leontiskos

Yes, I agree. The dependency seems rather indirect since the telos being appealed to in the subordinate causal account (i.e. the organism's seeking to flourish/survive in this or that specific way) emerges from but isn't derived or determined by the ultimate one (i.e. the organism's aims at reproducing/perduring). But, as you seem suggest, if, indeed, the action of the sieve on the raw material provided by random mutations was a non-teleological process, then we would have to conclude that the emergence of the (apparently) functional organisation of the organisms was an accident, or a happy sequence of accidents. And, of course, it's not an accident. Ordinary evolutionary explanations of the emergence of complex traits, which supply sufficiently rich descriptions of the environmental/ecological context, make clear how those complex traits didn't arise accidentally.

The dependency seems rather indirect — Pierre-Normand

I'm not completely convinced it's a dependency relation, but something in the neighborhood for sure, and I could be persuaded. Other than that, both you and @Leontiskos are drawing the right conclusion from Darwinism, seems to me. Surely Darwin would agree?

I'm not completely convinced it's a dependency relation, but something in the neighborhood for sure, and I could be persuaded. Other than that, both you and Leontiskos are drawing the right conclusion from Darwinism, seems to me. Surely Darwin would agree? — J

Possibly! Asa Grey was an American botanist who wrote in an article in Nature: "[...] let us recognize Darwin's great service to Natural Science in bringing back to it Teleology; so that instead of Morphology versus Teleology, we shall have Morphology wedded to Teleology." In response to this, Darwin wrote to Gray: "What you say about Teleology pleases me especially and I do not think anyone else has ever noted that. I have always said you were the man to hit the nail on the head." (June 5, 1874)

Is there any evidence that the universe is probabilistic? — RussellA

Physics is based on the triad of Planck constants, c, G and h. So add h to cG to complete the picture here. What happens to the classical description of an object falling under gravity when the scale of the world becomes either extremely hot or extremely small? Any certainty dissolves into the vagueness of quantum foam.

Put simply: Teleological explanation requires a fixed end or final cause. But in a probabilistic system, the future is open at every step. To say that events are happening as a means to reaching some future state C, is nonsensical considering state C isn't even guaranteed. — tom111

Yes. Our world seems to be fundamentally stochastic ; at least on the quantum level. So the pre-set mechanistic A> B> C> type of evolution doesn't fit the evidence. But your Probabilistic process implies a positive direction without specifying the end state. This is how Evolutionary Programming*1 works : to reach, not a pre-specified goal, but an optimum set of properties.

As someone noted, the physical universe out there does not appear Teleological, except in one dark corner of a spiral galaxy. Where intentional creatures have emerged from the mud, and set about modifying their Natural environment to suit their species' needs for both physical (natural) and metaphysical (cultural) habitat.

I'm not sure what to call that process of artificial evolution, but "stochastic teleology"*2 sounds a bit too erratic & accidental. However, A.N. Whitehead labeled his Probabilistic Process as "Open-Ended Teleology"*3. Does that sound like a fit with your Probabilistic Teleology? :smile:

*1. Evolutionary Programming :
Special computer algorithms inspired by biological Natural Selection. It is similar to Genetic Programming in that it relies on internal competition between random alternative solutions to weed-out inferior results, and to pass-on superior answers to the next generation of algorithms. By means of such optimizing feedback loops, evolution is able to make progress toward the best possible solution – limited only by local restraints – to the original programmer’s goal or purpose. In Enformationism theory the Prime Programmer is portrayed as a creative principle (e.g. Logos), who uses bottom-up mechanisms, rather than top-down miracles, to produce a world with both freedom & determinism, order & meaning.
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page13.html
Note --- This may be what Leibniz meant by "best possible world" ; that sounded absurd to Voltaire.

*2. Stochastic teleology refers to the idea that goal-directedness (teleology) can arise from systems governed by randomness (stochasticity). It challenges the traditional view that teleology requires a predetermined plan or purpose by suggesting that complex, goal-oriented behavior can emerge from probabilistic processes.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=stochastic+teleology

*3. Open-ended teleology :
Whitehead's teleology is not about a single, predetermined goal. It's a dynamic process where new possibilities are constantly emerging and being realized. This means that while there's a direction towards something (e.g., beauty), it's not a fixed or predetermined path.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=whitehead+teleology

This is what makes the process of natural selection teleological. It's not just a passive "physical" environment that exerts a selective pressure. It's the already structured part of this environment—the constructed niche—that pushes back against, or facilitates, the organisms already active (and teleologically oriented) attempts to thrive (most often exercised unknowingly, as you noted). — Pierre-Normand

Yep. This is a hierarchy theory point that is almost universally overlooked.

A hierarchy – in the natural philosophy view – is a system of constraints that is producing or shaping up its own degrees of freedom. So it takes the messy world and simplifies it in ways that create the grain of action which then exhibits the unrelenting tendency of recreating the system of constraints which are forming that grain of action.

It is a self-organising feedback loop between the top-down formal cause and the bottom-up constructive cause. The fit between the two starts off loose and sloppy at first, but if it has any "competitive advantage", it will keep evolving towards a tighter and tighter connection.

A simple example is turning people into soldiers so that there can be an army. The army exists as some accumulated set of constraints on human behaviour. History has shown that the better organised the army – the more it has the "right stuff" in terms of its component parts – the better it serves its function. And so as an ecological niche, it is shaped to prune away all the rich free variety of each fresh intake of raw recruits so as to mould them into the kinds of folk that just can't help recreate a militaristic environment when they come together.

So hierarchies exist in nature by being able to shape their own simple parts. And in mass producing these functional units, they remove all the larger free variety that may have existed beforehand. They erase their own past when it comes to the question of what causes them to be the way that they are. A recruit may have a childhood, a past life, but Newtonianism can't just model that and show how all that determined the person's future path after they were put through the transforming machinery which wanted to turn them into something else – just a general purpose unit of a higher level of human social organisation.

In physics, we call this erasure of initial conditions a phase change, or topological transition, or spontaneous symmetry breaking.

Norton's dome is the classic illustration of where determinism breaks down in the usual Newtonian notion of causal determinism. The question of what fluctuation nudged the ball down the slope becomes flipped to the other question of what fluctuation could not have knocked the ball off its precarious perch. The future outcome was always definite and foretold, the initiating event always as mysterious and uncertain as it could get.

So in general, nature has a hierarchical causality. It is a confluence of bottom-up construction and top-down constraint. And the top-down really matters as it is what shapes up the parts making the whole. It is what makes the atoms that compose the system. Precisely as quantum field theory tells us as a story of topologically emergent order.

Norton's dome is the classic illustration of where determinism breaks down in the usual Newtonian notion of causal determinism. The question of what fluctuation nudged the ball down the slope becomes flipped to the other question of what fluctuation could not have knocked the ball off its precarious perch. The future outcome was always definite and foretold, the initiating event always as mysterious and uncertain as it could get.

So in general, nature has a hierarchical causality. It is a confluence of bottom-up construction and top-down constraint. And the top-down really matters as it is what shapes up the parts making the whole. It is what makes the atoms that compose the system. Precisely as quantum field theory tells us as a story of topologically emergent order. — apokrisis

This is all very nicely put and I find it quite serendipitous that you would make to connection to the case of Norton's dome since, following our discussion in your stimulating OP of seven years ago, I had then raised the issue again (a few days ago) with GPT-4o. The AI on its own brought up the relevance of "the idea of dynamical bifurcations in phase space."

I also was thinking about this idea when a video about joseki patterns appeared in my YouTube feed. Josekis are common patterns of play, usually occurring in corners, in the Asian game of Go/Weiqi/Baduk. They're analogous to theoretically sound openings in the game of Chess: usual sequences of moves that are known, empirically and through analysis, not to confer a significant advantage to either players leading into the middle-game. This is of course relative to the state of play, and current theoretical knowledge and development of strategic and tactical skills, of the strongest players, at any specific time in chess history.

What struck me about josekis is how the patterns develop in a sort of fractal like manner obeying not just the global constraint that good moves should maximize the chances of winning the game (which now can be quantified fairly accurately by neural-networks like AlphaGo) but, at intermediate levels of analysis, by carefully, and in contextually sensitive ways, balancing the proximal goals of securing territory, creating thickness, gaining influence, maintaining access to the center, getting sente (that is, being the first player able to abandon the local fight and take a big point elsewhere on the board), etc.

The evolving practice of playing Go, exemplified in the opening phase by the players' knowledge of josekis, evolves similarly to living organisms. And the replacement of those patterns by new ones, when flaws are discovered and exploited, in addition to the initial development of those patterns, are quite analogous to thermodynamically driven phase transitions. The emergence of the contextual embeddings in neural networks like AlphaGo, that effectively rediscover those patterns through self-play (and reinforcement), also has been characterised by computer scientists as them undergoing phase transitions as the network learns how to play autonomously and latches on those stable patterns.

What struck me about josekis is how the patterns develop in a sort of fractal like manner obeying not just the global constraint that good moves should maximize the chances of winning the game (which now can be quantified fairly accurately by neural-networks like AlphaGo) but, at intermediate levels of analysis, by carefully, and in contextually sensitive ways, balancing the proximal goals of securing territory, creating thickness, gaining influence, maintaining access to the center, getting sente (that is, being the first player able to abandon the local fight and take a big point elsewhere on the board), etc. — Pierre-Normand

Isn't what you are describing all about evolving the board to a state of balanced criticality – critical opalescence or the edge of chaos?

So game starts in a neutral state where neither side can make big wins and just want to get their pieces out onto the board in a way that minimises the risk of big losses. The aim is to work everything towards a state of sweeping dynamism after it starts in a state of minimal strategic advantage.

You build up a position to the point that it is extremely tense and one right move can send your opponent's position crumbling.

Fractal statistics describes this state of affairs. One grain of sand can spark the landslide. The world has to be made tippable, and then you start trying to tip in. We are back to dynamical bifurcations in phase space.

In Nature, it is instability that is the resource that life seeks. Gasoline is great as it explodes. Or rather, it can explode in a really bad way if it goes up in your face, and a really good way as it is a cheap and concentrated energy to power your car.

So again, this highlights the contrast between the usual mechanical notion of natural cause and the physical reality of natural cause. The Newtonian view prizes stability – of atoms, of void, of law – while the Darwinian understands that scalefree criticality – randomness on all scales – is the secret sauce of existence.

A system is dead when it has gone to Gaussian equilibrium. It is just a passive and exhausted stuff that fluctuates around its mean. But any living or dynamically evolving process is balancing itself on the knife-edge of growth represented by the fractal or powerlaw attractor that is scalefree criticality.

In a critical state, small things are always happening but really big things as well. And that leads to rational strategies in the kinds of games where we must steadily develop positions that tilt the odds in our direction. At first, mimimise the errors. Later, be ready to pounce with the big risks.

Kauffman spent a lot of time modeling this kind of connectivity story with his critical Boolean networks.

But the point here is about our metaphysics of causality.

Newtonians believe in stable foundations that are then – rather mystically – caused to move, change and evolve.

Darwinians take the opposite tack of believing that radical instability is what grounds the semiotic possibility of constraints being imposed on a system to give it a desired direction or tendency. Life and mind evolve to live on the scalefree knife-edge as that is where the maximum power to act is to be found.

An organism exists because it can put itself back together just slightly faster than it falls apart. The second law says the body must erode. But the larger view of thermodynamics taken by biosemiosis says that this just means the contrary purpose thus taken by Nature is to out-grow the erosion. To become, in a word, a dissipative structure operating as far away from equilbrium as it can get.

I don't know about the universe, as a whole, being teleological. I don't see any reason to believe it is. But teleology is certainly found in the universe.
— Patterner

Agreed, but I would say only where there is intention. I guess that means human or other outside intervention. — T Clark

Intention is a sure sign of teleology. But I have to wonder about intention. Consider DNA. These are Marcello Barbieri's words:

The physicalist thesis would be correct if genes and proteins were spontaneous molecules, because there is no doubt that all spontaneous reactions are completely accounted for by physical quantities. This, however, is precisely the point that molecular biology has proved wrong. Genes and proteins are not produced by spontaneous processes in living systems. They are produced by molecular machines that physically stick their subunits together and are therefore manufactured molecules, i.e. molecular artefacts. This in turn means that all biological structures are manufactured, and therefore that the whole of life is artefact-making . — Marcello Barbieri

Genes and proteins, in short, are assembled by molecular robots on the basis of outside instructions. They are manufactured molecules, as different from ordinary molecules as artificial objects are from natural ones. indeed, if we agree that molecules are natural when their structure is determined from within, and artificial when it is determined from without, then genes and proteins can truly be referred to as artificial molecules, as artifacts made by Nature. — Marcello Barbieri

DNA is two complimentary strands of nucleotides running along sugar phosphate backbones, and joined by hydrogen bonds. DNA means chains of amino acids and proteins. It is encoded information. In an extremely simplified description, helicase unzips DNA so that mRNA can make copies of that information, which it takes out of the nucleus to the ribosomes, where tRNA molecules each take one codon of information to the molecule aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase, which knows which amino acid the tRNA's codon represents, which it gives to the tRNA, so the ribosome can stick them together into proteins.

A lot of work is being done by a lot of different molecules to construct something that will not come to exist in any other way. Is there not intent.. Not thoughts of intent. But the system works toward something in the future. If there is intention here, then human or other outside intervention is not needed for intention.

If there is NOT intention, it is still a lot of organized work from different players using encoded information to bring about a specific future. So teleology.

Any certainty dissolves into the vagueness of quantum foam. — apokrisis

There is no certainty that there is a quantum foam. Quantum foam is only a theory (Wikipedia - quantum foam).

Quantum foam (or spacetime foam, or spacetime bubble) is a theoretical quantum fluctuation of spacetime on very small scales due to quantum mechanics.

Some interpret quantum mechanics as describing an indeterministic universe, but others believe there is an underlying deterministic process.

For example, "Quantum mechanics in an entirely deterministic universe" by László E. Szabó published 1995 in the International Journal of Theoretical Physics.

This paper explores the compatibility of quantum mechanics with a deterministic universe, challenging the widely held belief that the two are incompatible.

There is no current certainty that the theory of quantum mechanics implies an indeterminate universe.

There is no current certainty that the theory of quantum mechanics implies an indeterminate universe. — RussellA

Again, this is a bit off topic since the OP inquires about the validity of teleological explanations in the case where the laws of evolution of a system would be indeterministic.

Again, this is a bit off topic since the OP inquires about the validity of teleological explanations in the case where the laws of evolution of a system would be indeterministic. — Pierre-Normand

In classical mechanics, the evidence is that this universe is deterministic. In a deterministic world, it seems clear that teleology is not a valid theory.

In quantum mechanics, some believe it is compatible with a deterministic universe and some believe it is compatible with an indeterministic universe. In an indeterministic universe, I agree with @Tom111's conclusion that teleology does not seem to be a valid theory.

So yes, it seems that quantum mechanics does not affect the question as to whether teleology is a valid theory or not.

I added a few things to that post, but what do you mean when you say that it is "indeterministic at every scale"? Is it just that it is defeasible or fallible? — Leontiskos

Yes, I meant it in the way the OP problematized the issue: "no particular outcome is necessary." A species may experience selective pressures, but its successful adaptation is not guaranteed - it may just die out instead. Some individuals carry favorable variations, others don't, and even those who do will not necessarily leave more and more successful progeny.

Yes, I meant it in the way the OP problematized the issue: "no particular outcome is necessary." A species may experience selective pressures, but its successful adaptation is not guaranteed - it may just die out instead. Some individuals carry favorable variations, others don't, and even those who do will not necessarily leave more and more successful progeny. — SophistiCat

Fair enough. I would say that this is how all teleology works, namely that it is a final cause and not an efficient cause. The end-directedness produces no guarantee that the end will be reached.

In response to this, Darwin wrote to Gray: "What you say about Teleology pleases me especially and I do not think anyone else has ever noted that. I have always said you were the man to hit the nail on the head." (June 5, 1874) — Pierre-Normand

Very interesting.

- :up:

If there is NOT intention, it is still a lot of organized work from different players using encoded information*1 to bring about a specific future. So teleology. — Patterner

Sounds like a computer program, for which the intention*2 is in the mind of the Programmer. But signs of intention can be found in such directional instructions as "if-then". :smile:


*1. Information is :
Claude Shannon quantified Information not as useful ideas, but as a mathematical ratio between meaningful order (1) and meaningless disorder (0); between knowledge (1) and ignorance (0). So, that meaningful mind-stuff exists in the limbo-land of statistics, producing effects on reality while having no sensory physical properties. We know it exists ideally, only by detecting its effects in the real world.
For humans, Information has the semantic quality of aboutness , that we interpret as meaning. In computer science though, Information is treated as meaningless, which makes its mathematical value more certain. It becomes meaningful only when a sentient Self interprets it as such : revealing the intention of the programmer.
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page11.html

*2. Intentional Programming : This is a programming paradigm that aims to capture the programmer's true intentions directly in the code, making it more understandable and easier to modify.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=computer+program+intention

There’s no need — and no real basis — to speak of purpose or final causes. We cannot say things like "event B happened due to it being attracted towards state C", since state C isn't even guaranteed. — tom111

If I assemble architects, framers, plumbers, carpenters, landscapers, etc to build me a house, can we not say the teleos of the enterprise is to erect a house, even though the probability of the house coming to be is uncertain?

I would say that this is how all teleology works, namely that it is a final cause and not an efficient cause. The end-directedness produces no guarantee that the end will be reached. — Leontiskos

I don't think that the question of determinism vs indeterminism is relevant to teleology. Again, if you think of the most ordinary examples, although in theory, nothing is absolutely certain, when it comes to simple, immediate actions like reaching to grasp an object or striking a key, we treat them as certain to succeed. It is still a goal-directed behavior, though. There is both intension (outward-directedness) and intent (future-directedness) in these actions.

I don't think that the question of determinism vs indeterminism is relevant to teleology. — SophistiCat

I agree. :up:

A lot of work is being done by a lot of different molecules to construct something that will not come to exist in any other way. Is there not intent.. Not thoughts of intent. But the system works toward something in the future. If there is intention here, then human or other outside intervention is not needed for intention. — Patterner

I looked at a few definitions of “intention” on the web. They fell into two groupings 1) as a near synonym for goal or purpose 2) as a mental state. The first definition is no help, since the presence of a goal or purpose is the question on the table here. The second definition clearly does not include the actions of DNA.

If I assemble architects, framers, plumbers, carpenters, landscapers, etc to build me a house, can we not say the teleos of the enterprise is to erect a house, even though the probability of the house coming to be is uncertain? — Hanover

It’s pretty clear that human actions often have goals and purposes. By my reading, the OP raises a broader question of teleology as it applies to the universe as a whole and even to logic.

It’s pretty clear that human actions often have goals and purposes. By my reading, the OP raises a broader question of teleology as it applies to the universe as a whole and even to logic. — T Clark

Positing a final goal isn't less logical than positing a first cause. All events follow the first cause, yet we can't have a first cause without a preceding one, so we're left with an infinite regress. Teleologically, we say every event is for a purpose, yet you can't have a final event that lacks purpose either.

Or you can make each finite and posit a first cause (big bang) and a last goal (the ultimate purpose). The former is chosen by those with scientific bias. The latter, religious bias.

My response to the OP only suggested that probability theory can be applied to make predictions based upon what we know of prior causes as well as the competence of the planner.

The OP references "attracted to" language to explain teleos, but that's scientific talk, denying a designer, comparing teleos to magnetic pull. The OP is just a restatement of scientific secularism.

Positing a final goal isn't less logical than positing a first cause. All events follow the first cause, yet we can't have a first cause without a preceding one, so we're left with an infinite regress. Teleologically, we say every event is for a purpose, yet you can't have a final event that lacks purpose either. — Hanover

My position throughout this discussion has been that teleology does not mean just that one event leads, through a chain of events, to another event. Here is the definition that matches my understanding of the meaning. It’s from Google‘s AI summary, so I’m not saying it’s definitive or correct necessarily, but it is my understanding.

“Teleology, in philosophy, is the study of purposiveness or goal-directedness. It examines how phenomena, whether natural or human-made, are explained by their ends, goals, or purposes rather than their causes. The concept suggests that things exist or occur for a specific reason, implying a design or intention behind their existence.”

I think intention is the right word to use here. Teleology implies that an event took place because it was intended. It’s my position that intention is a mental state. You need a mind for there to be a goal or purpose.

Many people here in this thread don’t see it that way and I’ve mostly given up trying to come to any common understanding with them.

Quantum foam is only a theory — RussellA

But then you have Don Lincoln saying...

The quantum foam isn’t just theoretical. It is quite real. One demonstration of this is when researchers measure the magnetic properties of subatomic particles like electrons. If the quantum foam isn’t real, electrons should be magnets with a certain strength. However, when measurements are made, it turns out that the magnetic strength of electrons is slightly higher (by about 0.1%). When the effect due to quantum foam is taken into account, theory and measurement agree perfectly — to twelve digits of accuracy.

There is no current certainty that the theory of quantum mechanics implies an indeterminate universe. — RussellA

One can always concoct conspiracy theories about how quantum theory is secretly deterministic, but you have to go to rather silly extremes these days. Like superdeterminism.

Much better to accept that it is the indeterminism that means there is something to then become the determined. Everythingness can be constrained to somethingness. Reality can be thermodynamically decohered to the point where it seems perfectly determinate to us in the classical limit.

So what is metaphyically fundamental about reality is not that it is either determinate or indeterminate. It is that it in fact can speak to these two extremes as its dichotomous limits of Being.

And science then frames that in usefully measurable ways. As it does with Heisenberg uncertainty and Planck's constant. We can be certain about where on the spectrum of certainty~uncertainty we might currently place some object or process. Such as even the start and end of the Cosmos itself.

I looked at a few definitions of “intention” on the web. They fell into two groupings 1) as a near synonym for goal or purpose 2) as a mental state. The first definition is no help, since the presence of a goal or purpose is the question on the table here. The second definition clearly does not include the actions of DNA. — T Clark

The etymology of the word "Intention" seems to imply teleology*1. But a mere "tendency" refers to an apparent direction, e.g. toward future fitness & survival, yet without specifying any motivating purpose or end goal. So, was the eventual emergence of Life & Mind, after 14B years of non-life & mindlessness, A> an accident, or B> an afterthought, or C> sudden change from physical tendency to metaphysical entities, or D> a developmental Purpose realized?

Darwin's mechanism of Evolution (variation + adaptation) was intended to avoid any notion of divine purpose. But his model of Artificial Evolution*2, of plants & animals by human farmers, necessarily involved intentional Selection with a long-range Purpose --- long or short legs ; larger fruit, etc --- and the future goal was pre-imagined in the mind of the Selector.

Darwin's Natural Selection analogy, simply referred to the Selector (chooser ; specifier) as Nature. But any selection or choice is by definition non-random, so some directional intention or "force"*3 is logically necessary, even when not specified. So, the question remains : is Nature intentional & teleological? :smile:

*1. The word "intention" originates from the Latin word intentio, meaning "a stretching out, straining, exertion, effort" or "attention". It evolved from the verb intendere, which meant "to turn one's attention, to stretch out". This ultimately traces back to the Proto-Indo-European root *ten-, meaning "to stretch". In essence, the concept of intention, as we understand it today, involves a mental stretching or aiming of one's thoughts or actions toward a specific goal or purpose.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=intention+etym

*2. Darwin used artificial selection as a key analogy in developing his theory of natural selection. He observed how humans selectively breed plants and animals for desired traits, demonstrating that traits can be modified over generations. This process, where breeders choose which individuals reproduce, served as a model for how nature could also select for advantageous traits, leading to evolutionary change.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=darwin+artificial+selection

*3. Natural selection is not a random process. While the genetic variations that arise through mutation may be random, the process of natural selection itself favors certain traits that enhance survival and reproduction in a given environment, making it a non-random, directional force in evolution
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=natural+selction+not+random

COMICAL ACCIDENT OR INTENTIONAL DIFFERENCE ?

Teleology implies that an event took place because it was intended. — T Clark

I'd agree with that.

Isn't what you are describing all about evolving the board to a state of balanced criticality – critical opalescence or the edge of chaos?

So game starts in a neutral state where neither side can make big wins and just want to get their pieces out onto the board in a way that minimises the risk of big losses. The aim is to work everything towards a state of sweeping dynamism after it starts in a state of minimal strategic advantage.

You build up a position to the point that it is extremely tense and one right move can send your opponent's position crumbling. — apokrisis

Interestingly enough, while beginners are encouraged to play safe moves, ensuring the security of their groups, stronger players and professionals understand that they, indeed, can't win without walking closer to the edge, and without carefully balancing safety with ambition. Like chess, Go is a game of errors. When neither player makes any gross error, the final scores tend to be very close (and many draws are achieved in chess, which is not possible in Go due to half-point komi). When a player's position crumbles, because, for instance, a big group died with no foreseen compensation being realized, then the game ends with a resignation.

I think one lesson that can be drawn from such structural features of the game of Go is that the teleological organization of the sets of strategic principles being understood by strong players (and tacitly understood by AIs like AlphaGo) explain normal play until one player makes an error. The occurrence of those errors, and reflection on them in post-mortem analysis of the games, drives further progress and enables the players, as their skills improve, to indeed skirt ever closer to the edge of chaos. Maybe a sharp eye might caught glimpse of the stones becoming opalescent in some historical professional games ;-)

But then you have Don Lincoln saying " The quantum foam isn’t just theoretical. It is quite real." — apokrisis

And then you have Eddy Keming Chan saying...

The popular idea that quantum physics implies everything is random and nothing is certain might be as far from the truth as it could possibly be.

Dr. Don Lincoln is a Senior Scientist at Fermilab and Eddy Keming Chen is an Associate Professor at the University of California, San Diego.

What makes a Senior Scientist right and an Associate Professor wrong?
===============================================================================

One can always concoct conspiracy theories about how quantum theory is secretly deterministic — apokrisis

I don't think that the debate about whether the quantum theory implies determinism or not is a secret plot by powerful conspirators (Merriam Webster - Conspiracy Theory)

I don't think that is something Scientific American would engage in.

Does Quantum Mechanics Rule Out Free Will?

The article by John Horgan notes "Physics as a whole, not just quantum mechanics, is obviously incomplete."