Create Publications “2025-10-31-bridging-the-gap-how-goals-emerge-from-a-purposeless-universe”

Author: cb580

_publications/2025-10-31-bridging-the-gap-how-goals-emerge-from-a-purposeless-universe.md

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+---
+layout: publication-single
+title: "Bridging the Gap: How Goals Emerge from a Purposeless Universe"
+abstract: "There 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."
+published: 2025-10-31
+authors:
+  internal_authors:
+    - Soumya Banerjee
+details:
+  container-title: ALIFE 2025 Workshop Goal-Directed Behavior in Life and Non-Life, 2025
+  html: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/396118904_Bridging_the_Gap_How_Goals_Emerge_from_a_Purposeless_Universe
+---