Everything that exists takes intelligent advantage of accidents.

Few of you will understand this and the rest of you will call it nonsense, but none of the latter will be able to cogently explain either how or why it's not correct.

 12-21-2013: I just saw this comment on a site where a scientific article, “How People Drove an Evolution in Cliff Swallows,” showed that in a short period of time these birds must have changed their own wing spans to fit new nesting circumstances, etc.

“What this indicates is that selection can serve a purpose, and the long held theories that selection starts by accidents that happen to the organisms, and that are then occasionally found to be adaptive, have had it more or less backwards; and that if anything, accidental changes in environment are taken advantage of by the organisms for that organisms adaptive purposes.”



I hadn't seen it put in exactly that way before, and I like it.

Purposes of Kings Will Likely Have Preceded Them

Intelligent life forms that felt that nature's purposes were in some sense intentional looked for the reasons and purposes behind them to 'divine' those intents and in one way or another deal with them. And their learned instincts that felt that the forces were purposeful were correct, in that if life was purposeful at all (and it seemed to need us to select a purpose), so were the apparently selective natural circumstances that allowed life to exist.
But where the instincts were correct in the assumption that there were purposes to be found in the outer world or worlds, their conception as to the possible sources of those purposes was limited to what they had seen as more powerful and purposive on earth. And as we developed rulers and kings, we developed the conception of divine rulers and divine kings.
Where if we had (miraculously) developed scientific knowledge first, we could (and then should) have developed concepts that focused on the strategic natures of purposes as an element of all natural functions, and proceeded from there.  (They tell me Buddha almost did it anyway.)

Our Freedom to Will is We Determined.

If our choices have not (or had not) been predetermined, we are then free to be affected by random circumstances, i.e., by the randomness of probability as opposed to the determinedness (and thus pre-determinedness) of certainty. Freed from the fixed to the flexible; from reactive to proactive determining, perhaps.
So then, at least according to my logic, the choice at hand is not so much between determined or undetermined as it is between determined and predetermined. And the future limits of the predetermined lie somewhere between the certainties and uncertainties of oncoming time and the lines to be drawn there by its sequential changes.
As it would seem that, by well informed choices, we can willfully act to both determine and predetermine their effects for an uncertain period, but that the perfectly informed and active predetermination of anything, by anything, for all of time, should be seen as logically impossible.

The corollary to this is, of course, that what we choose to do today would seem to be for us, instead of for our past, to most willfully, successfully, and responsibly determine.

Sequential Dimension

I have decided (or discovered) that there's such a thing as a sequential dimension.  Some have referred to a similar concept as the dimension of time, but have seemed unaware that time is actually our measure of change, and change has no choice except to be sequential.  Otherwise there'd be no such thing as measurable "time."  And we then are led to see that time shows us nothing if not measurable sequence.
I'll leave it at that while I study this a bit to see what else has been written or discussed in this area, since as far as I've learned to date, it seems very little.
But wait: If the above is so, causation, as measured by the sequential dimensions of change, is by that measure endlessly multidimensional.  And universal strategies, for example, must be effectively sequentially dimensional!!  And they causatively go in all directions, so how does that fit into a dimensional paradigm?  (Considering of course that in theory, energetic nature never stops. And that sequence is not necessarily reversible.)
Lots of thought to ensue here!!

(Such as about sequential purposes.)
(Not about sequence space, however.)

11-16-1012 : Notes seen on another site, apparently a facetious play on sequences:
 "The point is in any case that it's not "time" that dilates, it's the nature and rate of change.  Special relativity theories didn't change that. Time is a dimension of measurement.  But unlike other measurements, it's also sequential.  The ramifications of sequence are yet to be completely thought out.  You can slow down change, but we don't know if we can slow sequential steps.  We know we can't reverse them non-sequentially."
"Let me explain that change is guided by the movements of electron spins, which we don't seem to be able to slow down, even though we can appear to slow down at times the rate of structural changes at the molecular level and above . But if sequences are at bottom consistent with the movements of electrons, we can neither slow them down or speed them up. Time at the molecular level can thus be inconsistent with time at the level of their electrons. But the rate of sequential changes anywhere seems to always stay the same."

Wow, it's almost like they're mocking me!
But this doesn't answer the question either, if the movement of electron spins can't be slowed down, because there's a clear inconsistency there with the rate of slowing down changes at the molecular level.  What can we now mock of that?