Consider a system that maintains itself not by holding on to a fixed identity, and not by settling into equilibrium, but by preserving, for a while, its capacity to reconfigure in ways that keep it viable. Morteza Niami calls this finite continuance, and he anchors it in the autocell, a minimal molecular arrangement whose components mutually support one another's production. The striking claim is that such a system can display organization intelligible in terms of what its own continued existence requires, without anyone or anything having assigned it that requirement in advance.
The stakes are old and specific. Where does goal-directedness begin in the physical world? The usual options have been a classical teleology in which things aim at predetermined ends, or a strict anti-teleology in which talk of aims is only convenient shorthand for blind mechanism. Niami argues for a third position between them: teleology that is emergent and processual, where a system exhibits organization structured by the conditions of its persistence, without any predetermined final cause.
The autocell does the conceptual work. Its selective organization illustrates what Niami frames as a lower-level structural principle, that openness to an environment is at once a condition of persistence and a source of vulnerability. The same exchange that keeps the system supplied also exposes it to erosion. From this base he builds a layered account of normativity, moving from functional to agential to ethical, and argues that the transition between these levels is emergent rather than deductive, meaning higher levels are not logically derived from lower ones but arise from them.
The honest limits are stated plainly in the paper itself. This is non-empirical work: a philosophical analysis and a constructed conceptual framework, with no experiments reported and, on an abstract-only reading, no empirical support described. Niami is explicit that autocells do not prove metaphysical teleology, intentionality, consciousness, or ethical normativity. The autocell functions here as a structural reference point and analogy, not as a demonstrated instance of a mind.
What the argument does offer is a candidate substrate. If minimal agency and proto-intentionality have any physical starting point, the reasoning goes, it may lie in exactly this kind of organizational closure paired with adaptive reconfiguration, a system whose form is shaped by the demands of staying viable rather than by an imposed purpose. Whether that is enough to seed anything we would call experience is precisely what the framework leaves open.
So the question stays on the table rather than closing. If a chemical loop can be organized around its own continuance without being handed a goal, is there a threshold along the path from functional persistence to felt purpose, and if so, what marks it? Source: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22700373