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Bridging the Gap: How Goals Emerge from a Purposeless Universe
Paper Details
Published: 2025/10/31
Container Title: ALIFE 2025 Workshop Goal-Directed Behavior in Life and Non-Life, 2025
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HTMLThere is an enduring puzzle: fundamental physics describes dynamics without ends, yet biology and cognition teem with goal-directed talk. This paper surveys conceptual resources from nonequilibrium thermodynamics, autopoiesis, teleonomy, control theory, and evolutionary biology, and proposes a synthesis: goals are emergent, graded organisational phenomena arising when far-from-equilibrium systems acquire reliable, history-dependent information about their environment and couple that information to control architectures that maintain their own viability. I propose operational markers for goal-like organisation, sketch causal pathways from chemistry to agency, and discuss implications for origin-of-life research, cognitive science, and normative discourse.
