So you deny believing in an elan vital or a greater cosmic will, yet you ascribe a special teleology to life, a special self-sustaining organizing character, while denying that life is self-sustaining due to the nature of natural selection.
So what do you believe in, since what you claim to believe in and deny believing in seems basically self-contradictory?
There’s a lot to unpack here so forgive the length of what follows.
The dictionary definition of vitalism is ‘the theory that living organisms are fundamentally different from inanimate matter because they contain a unique “life force”.’ If ‘vital spirit’ or ‘vital force’ is conceived as a force or form of energy, which giving it such a name implies, then I’m sure no such ‘force’ will be identifiable by any objective method.
I think that is a misconception . Why? Whereas the concept of force can be precisely defined in physics, and its impact measured to a high degree of precision, it’s not possible to isolate and identify any such factor in biology by empirical means.
However if it is interpreted as a metaphor for the holistic attributes which characterise organic life in general then I think it’s reasonable. As a metaphor, it refers to the goal-directedness of organisms which can be observed at every level from the cellular to the environmental. Organisms act so as to preserve homeostasis, survive, and replicate. This is what differentiates organisms from inorganic material (notwithstanding the well-known boundary cases such as Bénard structures, tornadoes and viruses.) I note in your earlier replies your unwillingness to consider this as something special, as it is obviously an ontological distinction which physicalism is unwilling to make, but I don’t think the distinction can plausibly denied.
So the argument is, yes, organisms can’t be understood as ‘purely physical’ or describable solely in terms of physical and chemical principles from the outset. As soon as life forms, then a new type of being has appeared, one which does not appear in the vast inorganic domains of the universe. But that difference is not something that can be distilled into a single ‘force’ in the way that vitalism appears to suggest.
Second, as regards natural selection. Absent living organisms, there is nothing to select from. It is ackowledged that evolutionary biology doesn’t encompass the origin of life, which is a separate topic — naturalism tends towards theories of abiogenesis (life from non-life).
Most of the philosophical speculation about it is driven by the naturalist conviction that, whatever the causal nexus comprises, it must be reducible to or explainable in terms of physical and chemical causation - or else what? If you don’t admit that it’s thus reducible, then you’ve opened the door a crack for something other than the physical. And that is precisely what science and culture has been determined on keeping closed since the Enlightenment.
Biologist Richard Lewontin laid it on the line in a book review in 1997:
Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.
I’m not preaching intelligent design but that’s the way it will nearly always be interpreted. When Thomas Nagel, an analytical philosopher, published his book on this issue, Mind and Cosmos (2012), he professed atheism, but because of his criticism of neo-darwinian materialism, he was accused of giving ‘aid and comfort to creationists’.
I say the culture we’re in forces this apparent dichotomy on us, and that it’s deeply embedded. So I’m attempting to re-frame it by pointing to the fact that living beings are inherently intentional. They’re something other than ‘complex combinations of elements’. but that ‘somethng other’ is not reducible to an abstract conception such as ‘vital force’. And there’s a lot of interesting work being done in this space in phenomenology, biology and biosemiotics.
Let’s get to the nitty gritty now. The activities of a living being are observed to be purposeful. And, as we observe clearly, in the case of human beings, the intention (purpose) of the act is prior in time to the act, as the cause of the act. Further, the purposeful acts of the living being are the cause of existence, as well as the maintenance of, the living body. Therefore we can conclude that purpose is prior in time to the living body, as the cause of it.
If a baby dies during childbirth, what was the purpose of it?
Perhaps we should think of purpose as just one possibility among many, and that it is habit and the repetition of a phenomenon that leads us to think in terms of purpose.
If a baby is born and survives, we would say that circumstances worked in favour of that baby’s survival. But then everything depends on the circumstances that limited the range of possibilities. And under the same circumstances, the same results.
But the circumstances are external to the baby, and may not always be present for the life. Consequently, the holistic view of the matter becomes a purely a posteriori judgement. We can never say a priori that a baby will become an adult.
Not all purposes will be fulfilled.
How do you know is not fulfilled?
Habit and repetition.
But then there is no purpose in what happens. It will always consist of a retrospective thought that has already developed a habit through the repetition of the final stages of certain processes—final stages that we project onto other processes.
The sense of repetition is due to the memory of time past. Hence the meditative discipline of learning to see anew. Different subject.
So you’re happy to let some youtube talking head speak for you? It’s all attitude - to the jaded mind nothing seems to have any point. It’s called ennui.
Well, you tend to ignore the arguments (I’m sure is not on purpose). So why not let someone else have a go?
Also, lets keep in mind that purposes, whether de facto or not, correspond to interacting processes that are generated in terms of behavioural dispositions reacting to present and immediate circumstances. So perhaps we should think of agents as having pre-purposes, namely dispositions that generate behavioural reactions. All that is left to explain is the post-hoc promotion of a pre-purpose into a de dicto purpose that occurs upon the outcome of an event that is judged to conclude the agent’s pre-purpose.
It’s just a re-statement of the purported distinction between teleology (‘real purpose’) and teleonomy (‘apparent purpose’).
Welcome back to Square One. 
You seem set on denying the distinction between teleology and teleonomy and hence folding all ‘apparent purpose’ into ‘real purpose’ despite the fundamental difference between the two. I.e. you specify a premise (that there is no such thing as merely ‘apparent’ purpose, all supposed ‘purpose’ must be ‘real’ purpose) and use it to arrive at the very same conclusion (that there is no such thing as merely ‘apparent’ purpose, all supposed ‘purpose’ must be ‘real’ purpose).
If we follow a model where ‘purpose’ is an emergent, retrospective quality, it follows that we know, from hindsight, that most childbirths result in live births, so we can assign a ‘purpose’ to childbirth, i.e. to bring about live birth(s), such that we can state that a childbirth that has not done so has not fulfilled its purpose.
We should note, though, that an emergent ‘purpose’ is arrived at from the interaction of our conscious, reasoning minds with our observations of the world, and indeed the observations of our own thoughts and our projections of thoughts onto others. We humans can arrive at ‘purposes’ for future events by making predictions and reasonings based on past events that we have observed, whether directly or indirectly. These ‘purposes’ do not exist as a metaphysical quality outside of our minds but specifically arise from our minds.
Sime has a point. Earlier, you responded to Thompson’s description of biological normativity as a product of loops of circular causation with
“Humans have a larger ‘salience landscape’ than do other organisms, as we’re obliged to consider such questions as purpose in the abstract, not just in terms of why I’m driving a nail into that board at this particular time.”
Ok, you want to distinguish between normative purpose in life, as the enactivists depict it, from real purpose in human minds. You would be far from alone in pointing out that, unlike other animals, language allows humans to anticipate far into the future, reflect far into the past and thus to reflectively intend beyond the need of the immediate circumstances. But does this human advantage argue for rejecting the enactivist claim that such impressive feats of normative purpose are reducible to the dynamics of circular causality, which happen to function in more complex ways in humans?
Thompson would likely support this assertion by Joseph Rouse:
…conceptually articulated understanding may be an isolated peculiarity of human evolution rather than a unique, crowning achievement. Apart from our own idiosyncratic evolutionary history, symbolic displacement and conceptual normativity may well be dysfunctional for any organisms with a sufficiently flexible behavioral repertoire that might otherwise make conceptual understanding achievable. Language and conceptual normativity, not to mention the extraordinary articulation of scientific understanding, begin to look like hypertrophic oddities within the human lineage rather than a general capacity for reason with its own constitutive normative authority.”
On the other hand, Husserl would seem to relate to your dissatisfaction with Thompson et al’s attempt to reduce human purpose to the dynamics of circular and reciprocal causality. He would argue that such models remain stuck within the natural attitude. Rather than grounding consciousness in natural causes, Husserl derives the circular causality embraced by enactivists from the synthetic intentional activity of transcendental subjectivity.
But if we look closely at how Husserlian intentionality produces purpose, we find that it is not as simple as starting with an end in mind and then finding a means to fulfill that end. An intention is a kind of alchemy, the projecting forward of a pole of expectation or intrinsic tendency toward fulfillment into a space of presence which meets up with and melds with an objective pole. In this alchemy, the expectation is altered by the contribution of the objective pole. What actually happens, what constitutes an actual experience, is neither the contribution of the expectation nor the objective pole by themselves. Rather, it is the mutual conditioning of the two by each other. Experience occurs into an implying, in the process changing what was implied and the criteria of its fulfillment.
While this concept of intentionality differs from Thompson’s circular causality, it shares with it the idea that purposive ends must pass by way of a subtle repurposing by every new experience. If classical teleology is organized by ends that determine the process, Husserl’s passive motivation is organized by tendencies that emerge within the process.
But this ‘assignment’ is always made a posteriori, once we have, perhaps, a sample of cases that we deem sufficient. Yet it is always possible that suddenly all births might be deemed ‘failed’, in which case the ‘emergent property’ would change. In any case, this property is trivial, as it is always a retrospective observation of a tendency. However, the word ‘purpose’ implies more than a mere tendency; the word ‘purpose’ tells us that there is a purpose or finality even in the earliest instances of what will later become a tendency. This, of course, cannot be demonstrated. You cannot demonstrate a tendency before that tendency has occurred.
What has been confusing this thread is we have been essentially talking about two entirely separate things — a retrospective judgment humans make based on past events which we humans also project in turn onto potential, future events, and some sort of metaphysical, teleological je ne sais quoi that is somehow divorced from humans and human minds.
This is confused in turn by the fact that the OP has conflated the concepts of teleology and teleonomy from the very outset, refusing to recognize the basic distinction between the two.