Natural purpose

If you enclose a quantum system with another quantum system that will only interact with the first under certain specific conditions, the first system will resonate until those conditions are reached.

To merely say what outcome you want and have it happen, isn’t that something we all want?

It may surprise you that that is the way quantum mechanics actually works. The recipe is simple, at least as a statement: enclose a quantum system with another quantum system that will only interact with the first under certain specific conditions, and the first system will resonate until those conditions are reached. No matter how unlikely those specific conditions are, if it is all possible that the first system could meet them, it someday will. Because the first system can be in incredibly many quantum states simultaneously, the chances are that it will be sooner rather than later. Conditional isolation is all that is required in order for a quantum system to arrange itself in order to meet those conditions, providing that there is at least one state of the system that meets them.

Note that this process may require many iterations,  because even a null measurement resets the system. If, in an iteration, no state represented by the system matches the selection conditions, the measurement will fix the system in a null state. It will take some time before the system decoheres to a new configuration with states in superposition, and it can be measured again. Even so, this process is incredibly computationally efficient, for exactly the same reasons that a quantum computer is many, many orders of magnitude more computationally efficient than conventional computers. Note that this efficiency advantage only applies to problems which have to be tackled by brute force, in other words by evaluating all the possibilities, none of which can be considered a priori to be better than the others. Another condition also applies: when a correct answer is evaluated, it is directly apparent that it is correct. Precisely these conditions apply in the situations in which we invoke natural purpose.   

To summarise, natural purpose is the process in which a quantum system acts as a quantum computer in order to select a state of  a quantum system so as to satisfy a particular purpose.

So it came to be that the universe which we inhabit is fine-tuned for life. There have been uncountably many universes, each with its own natural order, as super-imposed states of the single universe that is, until a universe that could sustain life emerged and gained permanence by means of a collapse of the wave function. Accordingly, we do not need to assume that there are really other universes than our own in order to account for the stupendous fluke that our universe allows us to exist. The universe can function according to the anthropic principle quite well on the basis of alternative universes that were only potentially present. 

So life came into existence on earth, it may be supposed. Chemicals in an isolated patch of clay resonated, until the most primitive form of life emerged.

Natural purpose stops when a state of the quantum system is reached which produces the required outcome, it offers no guarantees that this is the only state which could do so. In consequence, we must regard everything, every natural law and every physical constant, as being contingent, for as far as we can tell, they could have been otherwise.